WHOSE REALITY WINS?

 With 20,000 troops protecting the District of Columbia and Congress and all 50 states deploying whatever security they can muster to defend their capitols, those of us waiting eagerly for Trump to leave office and for Joe Biden to become President might be able to breathe at least a bit easier in the expectation that the transfer of power will actually take place, although, tragically, far from peacefully.

Whose reality wins?

However, even with Trump out and Biden in the Oval Office, we can by no means relax. Despite the horrendous attack on Congress and democracy--and five dead--followed by what is being characterized as a bi-partisan impeachment, many members of Congress, other influential Republicans throughout the country and right-wing religious leaders continue to inject the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election into the supercharged echo chamber of right wing media, where it continues to resonate and radicalize.

It's hard to know how many of those influencers and opinion makers truly believe The Lie and all the evil collusion it implies, nor how many of the 74,000,000 who voted for Trump are fully committed True Believers. One clue is that after all that's happened somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of Americans still approve of Trump as President. Another is that fewer than 10 percent of Republicans think he should be impeached.

What is crystal clear is that being on the Trump team demands total loyalty, certainly not to facts or reason, nor even to a conservative ideology, but to whatever Trump, the only source of Truth--says. It makes little difference what mix of his supporters are passively going along with the mob, play acting, or acting out his revealed Truth; the real-world results are much the same. As DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone said about those rioters who intervened to try to keep him from being shot with his own gun, "Thank you, but f___ you for being there."

Right now the Big Lie still demands believing that the election was stolen through vast fraud, that Trump won by a landslide, and that democrats, progressives, RINOs, Vice President Pence and anyone who is not willing to eagerly follow Trump through every twist and turn of his quest for ultimate victory is evil, devoted to the destruction of the United States, and as such, an enemy of the people. That lie is likely to persist and fester for years. But even if it fades, we can be sure a new one will appear.

It's crazy, right? How could anyone believe such nonsense, not even counting the even more bizarre black hole of Q-Anon, nor whatever twisted beliefs about race, religion and White nationhood drive Trump's most militant and violent followers?

Yet crazy or not, whether we choose to recognize it or not, we are now in a war between our reality and theirs. It's beyond the point where patience, logic, facts, science, reality-based media or prestigious influencers can be counted on to win the day. Shots have been fired and blood spilled. The advance guard of an alternate reality has stalked the Capitol hunting traitors and carrying flex cuffs. The Trump flag has flown over Congress. The first gallows has been erected. 

We don't need a Churchill or Roosevelt to tell us that war has been declared. A war not just between progressive and conservative policies, between the talking points of left and right, between the "standard hyperbole" of politicians charging up their bases, or between competing narratives, but between a world that makes sense to most of us and a world that makes sense only within the armed perimeter of what has become a 70-million-strong cult.

Within that cult is a world defined by doublethink, where a fair election must be undone to protect the integrity of elections, where Patriotism requires an attack on the nation's Capitol, where tyranny is defined as unity and resistance to mob rule is divisive. Like the most dangerous cults, it promises power, prestige and salvation for the Righteous and death to feared and hated non-believers and apostates. Be on Team Trump or be damned.

There is a time for patience, empathy and understanding, but not when someone is battering your head in with his flagpole. There are periods during which one can hope that the simple passage of time will soften divisions and heal differences, but not when a crazed mob is crashing through your door. Whether we asked to be or not, chose to be or not, we've all been drafted into a battle not between right and left, nor right and wrong, but between two realities that cannot co-exist. Either Biden won in a fair election or Trump was robbed of the presidency in a treasonous nationwide coup. Either Q is right and the deep-state elite are an international cabal of satanic pedophiles--"baby-killing socialists"--as Pastor Robert Henderson preaches, or not.

Clearly our political, corporate, religious and civic leaders need to make it absolutely clear in speech and action that Biden won and is the legitimate President, and that white nationalism, racism and bigotry are not acceptable. The legal system from the Supreme Court down to police on the street needs to recognize the clear and present danger of domestic terrorism from the right and use all the tools at their disposal to contain and reduce it. The media need to look this threat in the eye and implement ways to limit the ability of hate-driven individuals and groups to organize and radicalize.

Unfortunately, even if all our leaders and institutions step up to their responsibilities, that will not be enough. This battle involves us all. I don't know just where or when you or I will be called to the front, but it will happen. Will it be with a friend, a family member or a stranger trying to get you to drink his or her tainted Kool-Aid? Or with a religious leader, school-board member or local politician arrogantly advancing The Cause? The time to speak up and step up is now, before their reality infects yet more hearts and minds. If not, there will come a tipping point after which you and I will find ourselves living in--or perhaps dying from--their toxic reality.

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REA

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This article first appeared on OpEdNews, 1/19/21.

THE FIRE THIS TIME

January 6, 2021 now joins December 7, 1941 and 9/11/2001 in the dark and ignoble gallery of days of infamy in American history.

Not this time because of a surprise attack by an external enemy raining death from above, but even more dangerously as a foreseeable and virtually predictable uprising from fractures deep within the body politic itself, manipulated by a disturbed leader and tolerated and even encouraged by the political enablers in his own Party.

US Capitol under attack 1/6/21

Credit: Deusche Welle

Donald Trump's insurrection against his own government failed, but what he succeeded in doing in his final days in office was to drag the nation with him down the rabbit-hole of his own troubled psyche, leaving a country shaken to the core and even more deeply confused and divided.

“Madness in great ones must not go unwatched,” Shakespeare warns in Hamlet, knowing well the corrupting influence of power and the frailties of human nature. And despite repeated warnings and unmistakable signs of Trump’s instability, narcissism, sociopathic tendencies and increasingly authoritarian behavior over the past four years, and particularly during the past months, governmental guardians willfully denied the reality of what they were seeing. A reality culminating in the President’s unbalanced and increasingly anti-democratic rhetoric and actions; most recently his absolute refusal to accept or admit an electoral reality verified by governments and courts across the land.

Even now, there are Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, along with craven Congressmen such as Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes and more than 100 other Republicans who continue to parrot President Trump’s lies about election-rigging and fraud, defending the indefensible and feeding the miasma of untruth that carried thousands of true-believers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and misguided and blind followers to attack the National Capitol, bringing death and destruction, in an ultimately futile effort to stop the democratic process of ratifying the election.

Unlike “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed workers in 1894 protesting economic inequality or the “Bonus Marchers” of 1932 petitioning for cash payment for their World War I service during the depth of the Great Depression, “Trump’s Army” was no spontaneous movement of desperate citizens for equality or justice. Instead, it was the deliberate creation of a disturbed and amoral President obsessively focused on mobilizing his “base” to pressure Congress by any means necessary to force lawmakers to overturn a democratic election. In short, an undemocratic power-play sustained and enabled by multiple purveyors of his self-serving delusions and unremitting lies: essentially an attempted coup to keep Trump in power and assuage his deeply wounded ego.

“Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away,” the Conservative thinker Peter Viereck once wrote, a statement of particular significance today when denial of the reality of a pandemic has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, when denial of climate change threatens the future well-being of millions, and when the blindness, incompetence and furious denial of reality by a ‘mad’ king threatens to further undermine both the nation’s political and psychological stability.

Recovery from the trauma of this tragic descent into madness may be possible, but not before an effective truth serum has been developed capable of providing “herd immunity” against the highly-infectious virus of untruth and denial of reality that has characterized Trump and his Era.

Les Adler

January 9, 2021

Chimps kill their neighbors—now we know why

Since Jane Goodall first described it in 1979, scientists have known that chimpanzee bands make organized raids into neighboring territories where they attack and kill chimpanzees from other groups. What they didn’t know was why.

Some researchers speculated that the goal of these raids was to seize territory; others thought that it might be a way of recruiting females from a victimized group into the raiders’ band. Some anthropologists argued that such attacks only took place in chimp communities that had been disturbed by human interventions such as providing food.

Researchers Sylvia Amsler, a biological anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, David Watts, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and John Mitani at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, say that they’ve proved that the goal of this form of chimpanzee aggression is to take over territory.

They describe their findings in the June 21, 2010 edition of Current Biology.

Amsler and her colleagues studied a large band of chimpanzees—the Ngogo group—in Uganda’s Kibale National Park for more than ten years. They observed dozens of organized raids, usually by large numbers of adult and adolescent males, although occasionally with females as well. The Ngogo band’s raids were focused on a region to the northeast of their home range.  In ten years of what the researchers refer to as “patrols,” the Ngogo chimps killed 21 individuals from that neighboring band.

That represents a very high mortality rate—some 5 to 17 times higher than has been measured among human hunter-gatherer societies, and 23 to 75 times higher than what’s been seen in other chimpanzee studies.

The researchers identify two factors that may account for this unusual rate of violence and killing. The Ngogo habitat is unusually rich, so the band has grown to some 150 individuals, about three times larger than the average chimpanzee band. That means that there are a lot more adult and adolescent males available to form large and successful raiding parties.

Amsler and her colleagues believe that their findings rule out the theory that chimps only kill each other as a result of human interference. They point out that neither the Ngogo band nor its neighbors have ever been provisioned by humans, and that the raiding they’ve observed is clearly adaptive. The Ngogo band has increased its territory by some 22 percent at the expense of its neighbors. As a result, more of its members are likely to survive and reproduce.

Although the chimpanzee raids are eerily similar to human intergroup aggression and violence, the researchers are reluctant to discuss any linkage.

They do speculate, however, that the high level of within-group cooperation that lets chimpanzees form these patrols and carry out lethal raids on their neighbors may tell us something about the evolution of high levels of cooperative behavior within human groups.

It would be ironic if the researchers are right, and that it was our primate ancestors cooperating among themselves in order to compete aggressively with outsiders that made us as cooperative as we are today.

Journal reference: John C. Mitani, David P. Watts and Sylvia J. Amsler, “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees,” Current Biology Vol. 20 No. 12.

For a more in-depth read, click here to see my Suite101 story about this research.

accutane

Robert Adler

For the institute