Viruses; viral growth. We’re surrounded by them these days. And it’s not just Sars and Covid-19 and all its variants like Delta that are spreading more rapidly and lethally by the day. It’s the viral growth of ignorance in the body politic, the viral growth of belief in what Hitler himself referred to as the Big Lie, the viral degradation of any received standard of truth. In short, we in the foremost democracy in the world are in trouble because of viral growth on both the physical and socio-mental level.
Take the virus that has already killed more than 4 million humans worldwide, and has now mutated into its most transmissable form yet, the Delta variant. This mutation developed when India was in the midst of its recent surge (a surge being an increase in cases that allows any virus to multiply infections and thereby have many more opportunities to mutate). This, in turn, means that the Sars virus and its mutations have demonstrated to all who can read or listen that the world is now irrevocably interconnected: what infects the people of India must soon come to infect the human population of every other nation on the planet. In short, no one is truly safe from this virus until everyone is safe, because no matter what percentage of Americans or Europeans gets vaccinated, there will be many who are not vaccinated or protected—as is now being demonstrated by the surging numbers of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in states like Missouri, Nevada and Mississippi, and in nations like England. Nor is this all. The surge of cases in African nations, and in Latin American nations like Brazil, means that new variants will likely emerge from those hotspots as well. And with new variants come new and increasing danger for the wealthier nations, even those that have high vaccination rates. For again, viral growth means that the chance that mutations will develop to circumvent the vaccines now protecting so many is increased. That is what viruses do, why they have survived for so long: they change in direct response to the weapons that humans marshal to cut them off. Thus, the more of them that find a human to infect, the more they can evolve variants to skirt around our evolving defenses.
This physical threat from Covid-19 would be bad enough. But the socio-mental threat may be even more serious. For there are still people who simply deny the virus’s reality, like Linda Edwards from North Carolina:
"I thought I was healthy enough and that I could escape it. Really, it was the most frightening thing I've ever been through in my life…It was devastating. I had no dreams of ever staying that long. It's the longest I've ever been in the hospital (two weeks)…I was there hoping and praying my son was okay here because he had tested positive, too… It's changed my whole life. I'll never be the same.” (www.rawstory.com, 7/13).
Or this from the recent CPAC conference where idiots like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado vowed fierce resistance to alleged nefarious government efforts to vaccinate, and thereby infect the population:
“We’re here to tell government, we don’t want your benefits, we don’t want your welfare, don’t come knocking on my door with your Fauci ouchie,” Boebert said, referring to Biden’s top medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, her voice rising as she paced the stage and shook her finger. “You leave us the hell alone!” (Washington Post, “Vaccine hesitancy morphs into hostility,” 7/15/2021).
In response, veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz, ominously observed:
“Now decisions are being made not because of evidence or facts or statistics, but strictly on political lines. And now people are going to die.” (ibid).
Or consider what has happened in a U.S. court recently. In the District Court in Michigan on July 12, Judge Linda V. Parker expressed her astonishment at the dozens of affidavits submitted by Trump lawyers as putative evidence of the vast conspiracy to fraudulently steal the 2020 presidential election from the former President. Calling the claims “fantastical,” Judge Parker went so far as to allege that “The court is concerned the affidavits were submitted in bad faith” (msn.com). Judge Parker was referring in particular to one affidavit claiming fraudulent collusion between Democratic election workers and Postal employees, an affidavit signed by someone who claimed to have seen “a young couple deliver several large plastic bags to a postal worker.” This witness said only that it was “odd” and that the bag “could be” ballots. Judge Parker’s comment on this affidavit is worth quoting in full:
“I don’t think I’ve ever really seen an affidavit that has made so many leaps. This is really fantastical. My question to counsel here is -- how can any of you, as officers to the court, present this type of affidavit? Is there anything in here that is not speculative?” (msn.com).
It is important to emphasize Judge Parker’s words—that the Trump lawyers who presented the affidavit are “officers of the court,” that is, legal professionals, “having an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion about…the location of documents and other matters related to conduct of the courts” (thefreedictionary.com). She clearly meant that these lawyers, including the infamous Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, had been derelict in their duty as court officers obliged to investigate and fact-check the claims made in their affidavits. Detroit attorney David Fink, referring to the “lies spread in this courtroom…that helped trigger the deadly assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6,” suggested that all the lawyers involved should be punished. Judge Parker has suspended, to a later date, the question of punishment for this unethical behavior, but Attorney Fink made the important point that “these lies were put out into the world, and when they were put out into the world they were adopted and believed.” In other words, the lies submitted by lawyers, and of course by ex-President Trump, have had widespread and deadly consequences.
This brings us to the source of these socio-mental viruses: Donald Trump, of course, who has brayed his outrage over his election loss (he calls it a steal) ever since November 2. But new reports from a book by Carole Leonnig and Richard Rucker assert that it was former-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani who actually initiated the Big Lie. The book, I Alone Can Fix It, reports that Giuliani had set up a separate “command center” inside the White House on election night, and when Fox News declared that Joe Biden had won Arizona, driving Trump into a profane frenzy, Giuliani tried to get the then-President to go on national television to deliver a victory speech. “Just go declare victory right now,” Giuliani is said to have told Trump, “You’ve got to go declare victory now.” In fact, Giuliani is reported to have been pushing the “Big Lie” all night long. When questions arose earlier that evening about the key battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, Giuliani is reported to have said to Trump aides, Just say we won. And that is exactly what Donald Trump began to do, and what he has asserted with varying degrees of vehemence and pretend outrage over “unfairness,” ever since.
That Big Lie, in turn, has become a virus that has infected the entire Republican leadership, and virtually the entire Republican Party. From Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy, to the entire gaggle of spineless Senate Republicans, through Republicans in most State Houses, to the vast majority (74%) of Republican voters—all have echoed the Giuliani-Trump Lie: we was robbed. The election was stolen. Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. And some have even asserted (like pillow magnate Mike Lindell) that, despite the election results, Trump will be reinstated as President this August. The most rabid of Trump supporters, of course, took part in the invasion of the national Capitol on January 6, 2021. Driven by President Trump’s assertion in a speech earlier that day, they invaded the Congress in the attempt to “stop the steal”—that is, to prevent the U.S. Congress from doing its constitutional duty to confirm the results of the election, to wit, that Joe Biden had won and was the new President of the United States. Even to this day, after more than sixty lawsuits in several states have been dismissed by various courts as having no basis in fact, the majority of Republican voters believes, or seems to believe, that the 2020 election was marked by fraud, was somehow stolen, and that Biden is an illegitimate president. And they cheer wildly each time Donald Trump appears in public to re-assert his claim that the presidency was stolen from him. All with zero evidence.
The question then becomes: what induces all these millions to believe the Big Lie? Indeed, what has led so many to believe all of Trump’s lies from the very beginning? It is, to quote Winston Churchill, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Before the Trump era, one supposed that most Americans would base their ideas on facts—in this case, on the ruling of every court that fraud had nothing to do with Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, and, in the case of Covid-19, the reality that 4 million humans on the planet have already died, and that vaccines actually have been proven to help prevent infection and death. But none of these truths, also including the almost universally-accepted truth of climate change, all backed by evidence and statistics, seem to matter. People who are Trump zealots seem to believe that storming the Capitol to stop Congress from doing its duty was a reasonable action to take. That every indication that the election was fair and legitimate was “fake news,” or part of some monstrous plot by nefarious liberals/socialists. That widespread movements to stem the tide of virulent white supremacy have been fomented by some violent group called “antifa.” That their children are endangered by a secret cabal of Hollywood perverts who have secret orgies involving underage girls. That climate change is a hoax. And on and on. Nothing, it seems, is too outlandish to believe. And the only “proof” necessary is the loud and conspicuous outrage voiced by personalities on Fox News or some ridiculous Newsmax TV or radio program that pretends it is purveying not opinion (which it obviously is), but actual news (which it obviously is not). There is no longer a Walter Cronkite or a good housekeeping seal of approval” for real news as opposed to opinion, much less for “reality.” People seem to regard “alternate reality” as a perfectly legitimate category. And with the internet presenting every manner of twisted and fantastic “inside” scoop (opinion), the ability for the average person to sort through the information overload to focus on what has been vetted and more or less proven, has reached abysmally low levels. When added to the idiocy spouted by elected government officials—like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, or Laurn Boobert (mispelling intentional) of Colorado, or Matt Gaetz of Florida, or even Republican Congressional leaders like Kevin McCarthy of the House or Mitch McConnell of the Senate—the partisan mix of lies and innuendoes becomes more than partisan. It becomes toxic. Toxic to the very bedrock notions of Democracy upon which this nation was founded, and which constitute its very DNA. For without an agreed-upon notion of what the Constitution mandates that the Congress do (such as verify the results of an election), or some minimal concept of proof concerning allegations of fraud, or the facts about a virus’s lethality or a vaccine’s prophylactic efficacy, a democracy—the government that responds to the legitimate will of the people—simply cannot function. That’s because the will of the people, of millions of people, becomes distorted, corrupted, and hostile to the very notion of a common good, to the concept that the people in its collectivity can be reasonable, and responsive to agreed-upon facts. Aside from the disagreements that always occur, and should occur, a democracy, that is, depends on the idea that a majority of a population will agree on the facts that appear to work for the common good, if not immediately, then over the long run. Without that minimal level of agreement, a democracy cannot function, but must descend to the level of dictatorship—where facts are mandated from above, where the agreement of the many yields to the forced obligation to accept the “truths” handed down by one powerful leader or group of leaders.
That is the situation the United States now faces. Will we succumb, as the Republican Party seems to have succumbed, to the viral delusions of a single man insisting that only he is right, above the law, and the only one competent to make literal life-or-death decisions for millions? Or to the consensus of every reasonable court and opinion in the land that this imposter lost the election, that the Covid-19 virus is lethal, that vaccines to combat the virus do work, that climate change is real and human-caused and getting worse by the day?
It is astonishing to me, and to many many others I know, that the fate of this nation hangs on the answer.
Lawrence DiStasi
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