whadidya expect? The storming of the Bastille, uh Capitol, was the destined culmination of those myriad lies and The Big Lie (a la the Holocaust) that the election was stolen and that Trump actually won it.
As Timothy Snyder (his instructive, seminal book On Tyranny) said today on the Fareed Zakaria show, “post-truth is pre-fascism” and that we live in a post-truth era where lies easily lead to Trumpian fascism.
Trump started very early in his term on his attacks on truth and facts, notably with his undermining of the U.S. science council and its documents, suggesting there was only opinion and no empirical truth as we have long known, understood, and appreciated it. We now, supposedly, just had “different views”.
Under Trump, the wanna-be dictator, the lies became violent, giving permission to white supremacists. Snyder also sees the cutbacks on local news and newspapers, as reducing the fact and truth fields, leading to people just falling back on beliefs, opening the doors to non-mainstream political agendas. Trump, simultaneously, substituted false narratives and his personality cult into the resultant vacuum.
Snyder points out the lies have led to action, especially amalgamated violence, with the ensuing result of commitment to whatever crazy conspiracy theory or cause. He says that the lies, Big Lie, and the violent offenders must assume responsibility and be held accountable (as in Trump’s impeachment trial and the accountability of GOP senators who aided and abetted the Big Lie).
He adds this is not a time for public passivity and people need to act to support responsibility and accountability and to support institutions and democracy through commitment to truth and engagement. (Already there are signs of this with the incoming Biden administration with the new president creating a science advisor position for his cabinet, signifying there will be a return to facts, truth, and empirical evidence and reasoning, something likewise needed in the Dept. of Justice.)
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I think the disheartening thing for America is how many millions (like many Germans in WWII) have come to believe in Trump’s Big Lie. Massly and massively delusional to say the least. Those Republicans, who do not support the Big Lie, will have to vote for impeachment in the Senate, and have to splinter off and create a new, separate party more based on truth and facts. All to separate themselves from the mutant crazies in their party.
There is also a forgotten educational side to all of this, as revealed by Trump’s efforts to sabotage the 1619 revisionist initiative of The New York Times; the one to tell the truth about black history and the long history of injustice toward American blacks as well as the notable contributions of blacks to American history. Something that was intended to end up in schools across the nation, but which Trump tried to thwart.
On both sides of the border, for that matter, we have seen education shift into free-fall technology and the unquestioning acceptance and adoration of machinery at the expense of individuality, individualism, and the development and fostering of independent minds and autonomous citizens.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the abandonment of the teaching of critical thinking and its methods in different subject areas. Our time has become more Orwellian in that it is not safe to reason, rationally argue and dispute, or question things, for individuals; when government expects complacent, mindless adherence to the mini-Trumps of Canada and Alberta as well.
As Snyder correctly points out: it all comes down to facts/truths vs. lies/illusions/delusions. That is the most basic problem of our time from which everything else stems.