Election 2024: At the Intersection of Three Crises, the Fact-Opinion Guessing Game, the Outrage Industrial Complex, and Trump’s Dementia

We are living through a time of clear and present danger to our democracy and way of life. Instead of striving towards a more perfect union, we are being pulled back into Jim Crow America circa 1880, only this time its on steroids mixed liberally single-party pseudo-democratic minority-rule authoritarianism instead of just the usual Southern cracker racism and thuggery.

Our Poor Decision-Making by Political Affiliation

There are three articles that I hope to pull from today in order to paint a fuller picture of the reasons we are in this danger. We’re here because as a group of people, we can no longer make political decisions well:

• THE GOOD LIBERAL and Democratic base is pulling for straight Democratic ticket voting to restore our democracy. The theory is that the Republicans need to go the way of the Whigs, and the only way that happens is if they lose bigly across the board.
• THE FAR LEFT is pissed because Joe Biden is “supporting” Israel over the Palestinians and he hasn’t done enough of the good stuff. The theory is that if we punish the Democrats by staying home or voting third party then they’ll LISTEN and stop putting up losers like Clinton and Biden.
• THE BLACK VOTE is splintered because every four years we all realize that Democrats only come round when they need a vote but forget the deliverables on every other year. As if the Black community were any more monolithic than the white community is, but diversity of thought, opinion, and behavior and freedom from stereotyping is a white privilege.
• THE EVANGELICALS literally believe that Trump has been anointed by gawd to be president and deliver us unto the kingdom forever and ever, amen.
• MAGA is all up in Trump’s trunk and there is no getting them out again.
• THE REPUBLICAN RUMP PARTY is so afraid of the physical and psychological violence that Trump supporters will visit upon them and their families that they daren’t do anything but quit or soldier on. As Timothy Snyder says If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny. I guess it’s clear where the Republican Party stands now.

The Three Factors Maintaining Our Political Jeopardy

While I do not think a majority of the vote or even a majority of the Electoral College will be cast for Trump, I do think that our political confusion will maintain our jeopardy and keep us walking this tightrope. Here’s why:

• POLITICAL OPINION vs FACT: A recent study suggests that many Americans — not necessarily voters, though — have trouble distinguishing political fact from political opinion. Judging from my non-approved comment list, I reckon that’s about right. Those folks seem to think if they say it with enough vitriol and frequency, then it is convincing.
• THE “FIREHOSE OF SPECULATIONS [SIC], CONJECTURE, AND HYPE: As Terri Kanefield recently wrote, the Russian propaganda technique isn’t to choke the truth out of public discourse, it is to drown it in disinformation so that people are just too confused to know what to believe. We now live with the bastard child of the Russian propaganda machine and social media and 24-7 cable news programming. Gotta keep the clicks, likes, shares, and viewers, folks. Those stocks aren’t going to buy themselves back, now are they?
• PHONEMIC PARAPHASIS: Unlike Handsome Joe Biden, the buffoonish corruption bot I2I4 is showing very real and nearly tangible signs of actual dementia. Dr John Gartner of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President has done a series of interviews in which he outlines the signs and symptoms of dementia that Trump is exhibiting in every speech he gives, one of which is phonemic paraphasis.

Trump’s Painfully Obvious Dementia

Let’s start with what many Americans, including many of those in the mainstream media, seem to take for granted: Joe Biden is exhibiting signs of mental decline related to age and Donald Trump is not. This is a scary narrative because (a) people cannot separate fact from fiction any more, (b) there are malactors out there (Russia & China) who are actively trying to harm our country using a sophisticated disinformation campaign, we have a media that is hellbent on bothsidesing everything, and social media echo chambers that amplifying BS, and (c) Donald Trump really is exhibiting alarming signs of dementia.

The symptoms and signs of dementia evident in trump’s speeches

Here’s the evidence of Trump’s dementia that has been exhibited during the months of February and March:

• MISPRONUNCIATION: It has become liberal sport to make fun of Trump’s eccentric speaking style, but we miss the evidence. Gartner sites these examples: Beneficiaries becomes “benefishes.” Renovations become “renoversh.” Pivotal became “pivobal.” Obama became “obamna.” Missiles became “mishiz.” Christmas became “Crissus.” Bipartisan became “bipars.” Those are examples of phonemic paraphasis, the switching of similar sounding nonsense syllables or words for real words. The wires aren’t connecting any more.
• TANGENTIALITY: Tangential thoughts are ideas and concepts whose relationship is known only to the speaker and a mystery to everyone else. When speaking extemporaneously, something he does often during his speeches, apparently, he toss that with word salad and adds the dressing of incomprehensibility. If his babble-speak were covered widely, we wouldn’t have a contest.
• MISUSED WORDS: Trump frequently uses the wrong word, words that don’t make sense in the context he’s using them in, like “the oranges of the investigation.“ Or he stops mid-sentence or even mid-word and goes completely blank. Stammers around to begin again and ends up with more word salad than meaning.
• LACKING AWARENESS: When you’ve misspoken, you often correct yourself. Trump never does because he doesn’t realize he’s erred. To his addled narcissistic mind, he’s perfect, there’s nothing to correct. He probably will never realize his condition.
• PERSONALITIES DISORDERS WORSEN: When dementia strikes someone who has enjoyed relatively good mental health, there “true” nature is revealed. I’ve known some very sweet people who had dementia. When a personality disorder declines, they are no longer able to hold their worst impulses in check. Trump is only going to become more vicious, more paranoid, more destructive, more narcissistic, meaning that he will be more easily wounded and lashing out more directly.

As you read through these articles, you’ll see links to supposed evidence of Trump’s mental decline, and yes there are moments in those edited together clips in which he has trouble pronouncing Venezuela, for example, and seems to think the fellow who recently won election in Argentina is named Argentina, and seems to stop mid-sentence, looks up at the ceiling, and says “oh god,” before looking blankly back at the camera. But, they are also filled with his usual prevaricating Big Lie self-aggrandizing crap.

I find them so disappointing that I won’t publish them here.

The Outrage Industrial Complex Shapes Our Political Perceptions

Those clips which claim to show Trump repeatedly slurring words, being confused, and getting lost are just so much clickbait. They are part of the outrage industry. These are the “influencers” who seek out clicks, likes, shares, and follows on social media by stoking outrage among like minded folks.

Like Freud said, all jokes are based on a bit of truth, all social media outrage and pwning your political opponents are based on a bit of truth, but there’s a whole lot more spin, hype, and outright lies involved. The pursuit of the viral meme and update pushes the boundaries of what we find acceptable in public discourse, which in turn, influences how we talk about politics.

Unfortunately, it isn’t an even playing field, even though the MSM treats it as such. The conservative “news” outlets are much nastier, much more hyperbolic, much less truthful, and much more aggressive in their production of outrage, and as a result, are much more profitable.

We are repeating the “news” without providing any of the context, substance, or nuance. And, that is what is happening to our “debate” about Biden and Trump’s mental fitness to hold office: we do not have any real understanding of what we’re saying or evidence to support it. We’re equating tripping over a media cable on stage with being unable to walk down a gently sloping ramp unaided, confusing the country a leader represents with confusing whether your father or grandfather was born in Germany, stuttering and stumbling over a word with gross aphasia. They aren’t the same thing.

Fact vs Opinion and the Role of Political Bias

This is all happening to a population in which 45.7% cannot distinguish fact from opinion. Compare these two statements:

• ISIS lost a significant portion of its territory in Iraq and Syria in 2017.
• Increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour is essential for the health of the U.S. economy.

Which one is fact, which one is opinion, are they both one or the other? Confounding the ability to distinguish is partisan bias with people claiming their opinions are fact and the other side’s facts are opinion. The only mitigating factors when it came to unbiased errors, meaning statements that were more neutral and didn’t support one side or the other, were civics knowledge, current events knowledge, cognitive ability, and education.

Partisan bias overcame any real nuanced understanding of a situation. It is an alarming finding. Well educated, civically minded, logical, rational, well-informed people could not set aside their political leanings to distinguish fact from opinion.

Now, we’re faced with choosing our next president. One of them probably has a marked cognitive impairment and will do great harm to our nation and the world and the other is an aged sincere benign institutionalist who will do what he sincerely thinks is right for the country and the world. We make this choice in a deluge of misinformation, disinformation, outrage, vitriol, vehemence, and violence unable to disambiguate fact from opinion.

What could possibly go wrong?

Image Attribution

This image was generated using Poe’s StableDiffusionXL bot using the prompt, Make an illustration of Howdy Doody the puppet with Rupert Murdoch’s hand inside, saying, “Let’s go viral, kids!”