The Right Answers

On two occasions, I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”  I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

–  Charles Babbage (1791-1871), designer of mechanical calculators.

Last summer, I was asked by someone what I don’t like about President Donald Trump.  This was asked, as if it were a reasonable question about a normal, competent person of interest.  For a long moment, I could only silently stare back in pensive astonishment.

Dozens of answers flooded into my mind at once. I’d immediately related to what Mr. Babbage had once said when, I imagine, he found himself similarly astonished by the extraordinary confusion of ideas required to even provoke such an exceptionally benighted question in the first place.

Eventually, my astonishment faded enough for me to form a coherent response. I answered with another question:

“Where should I begin?”

Later that day, I wrote down dozens of topics one could cover in response to this question.  It occurred to me that I could write a blog with this list.  A blog would have the advantage of freeing me from the onerous chagrin I feel whenever the dreaded subject of politics comes up in conversation. I could instead explore my thoughts on this so-called presidency in written form, then simply refer others to it when asked my opinion.

Hence, welcome to my blog.

The Crisis We Face

The premise of this blog begins with the fact that Donald Trump is profoundly unfit for the office of President of the United States. It further asserts that, in order to protect their own power and wealth, most Republicans in Congress have joined with right-wing media propagandists to con Americans into believing a false narrative. They falsely portray Trump as a generally good president who happens to be the victim of false allegations. These traitors to the nation foster this collective lie, betraying even the very constitutional principles and institutions which protect America from devolving into tyranny.

This blog will satisfactorily demonstrate this premise with an evidence-based analysis in time. For now, let us begin with a summary of reasons why we must deem Mr. Trump so extraordinarily unfit for office:

• He has shown strong authoritarian tendencies. He has repeatedly defied the constitution. He has abused his presidential powers. He has chosen cabinet members on the basis of personal loyalty to himself, rather than a higher loyalty to the country and the execution of their lawful duties. He has also engaged in nepotism. These are features we usually find in dictatorships and organized crime.
• He has demonstrated extreme incompetence as President of the United States. He fails to understand even the basic facts of the issues he’s promised to solve, such as the fact that building his idiotic border wall neglects the fact that a bigger or wider wall would not obstruct undocumented immigrants from entering the country; the vast majority are either already here in the country (i.e. with expired visas), enter through ports of entry, or enter by airplane. Being so badly ill-informed, his solutions therefore tend to be absurd at best, if not outright dangerous. He furthermore has demonstrated a failure to comprehend how the job of president is supposed to work, or how the federal government works more broadly, such as by failing to understand that the attorney general is not his personal attorney (it is the chief law officer of the nation). He also lacks the maturity or temperament required to even adequately perform his duties.
• He has demonstrably stated thousands of lies, falsehoods, and exaggerations during his presidency. A con artist, he repeats his lies over and over again, knowing that many people do not fact check information and will believe lies to be true if repeated often enough and with confidence.
• He has threatened the constitutional rights of American citizens as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, including the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and citizenship status.
• He has infringed on humanitarian rights, such as by using the federal government’s agencies to commit child abuse, kidnapping, and child imprisonment at the Mexican border.
• He has infringed upon American Indian rights, such as ignoring legal treaties to push for the construction of oil pipelines through their territories against their will, thereby breaking the law, poisoning their water supplies, and disturbing their cemeteries and sacred practices.
• He has attempted to obstruct justice multiple times. He tried to halt multiple legitimate, independent federal investigations into the questionable activities of his own presidential campaign and administration. He has also repeatedly defamed those investigating him, in attempts to tarnish their reputations and cast undeserved doubt about their motives. The only reason why he was not criminally indicted for these or his other crimes (see next) is because a sitting president is constitutionally immune to being charged with crimes; constitutionally, he must first be impeached and removed from office before he can be indicted.
• He has also attempted to solicit criminal actions from at least ten individuals on his behalf for his personal gain, including members of his administration and his own lawyer.
• He has corrupted the office of presidency by unconstitutionally using it to benefit himself financially, including accepting bribes from foreign governments for special favors.
• He has also been found guilty of committing multiple counts of fraud in a court of law before his presidency, and has been indirectly implicated in two counts of breaching presidential campaign finance laws.
• He has repeatedly betrayed the United States, enthusiastically encouraging Russia, a hostile foreign power, to perpetrate cyber attacks against the United States and our electoral integrity for his own personal gain. He has repeatedly stated that he finds nothing wrong with breaking the law against accepting foreign influence into U.S. elections, and would do it again if it served him.
• He has alienated our allies by breaking important agreements and treaties, by taunting world leaders with personal attacks, by making dangerously foolish and haphazard threats against other nations, by showing a curious favoritism towards dictators like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, and thereby tarnishing our nation’s reputation around the world. He has destabilized international relations, has earned the world’s distrust towards our commitment to agreements and treaties, and has caused the rest of the world to regard the United States as dishonorable and unworthy of world leadership.
• He has vastly destabilized relations with Iran, directly precipitating the current crisis and the potential for war by canceling a crucial deal that had at least guaranteed Iran would not build nuclear weapons for ten years; he destroyed all credibility and trust, failed to replace the deal, and essentially enabled Iran to begin building nuclear weapons immediately.
• He has demonstrably shown an affinity for white supremacists and nationalists, including members of the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan. Leaders in the ANP and the KKK have repeatedly and publicly praised him for his support.
• He is a racist, a misogynist, and a bigot. He has made numerous efforts to undermine equality under the law for all, and has made many racist, misogynist, and bigoted statements. Though yet to be proven in court, he has been convincingly accused of rape by multiple victims as well.
• He has damaged environmental protections by negligently deregulating air pollution, water pollution, and other environmental and health hazards. His administration has buried studies on climate change and other environmental threats, even removing the language of climate change itself from the EPA’s discourse, and has drastically reduced its policing of violations.
• His administration has severely undermined personal privacy by negligently deregulating communications companies for the sake of corporate profits. Internet and phone companies were made free to browse and sell your personal communications and data to other companies and governments, including foreign governments, without your consent.
• Contrary to popular belief, he has shown a poor understanding of economics and business. In spite of falsely blaming President Obama for a bad economy and taking credit for the economic recovery, the evidence shows that it recovered in the final years of President Obama’s administration instead, though part of the credit goes to the global economy’s recovery more broadly. He also shows a failure to understand basic economic concepts, such as what a tariff is: in spite of his false statements which suggest the opposite, a tariff is actually a tax on Americans who buy products from other countries. His tariffs have actually had detrimental effects on the United States economy for the most part.

Dozens of additional points could be added for even more completeness. But, that all said, the crisis facing the nation right now is not really the president per se. The real crisis is the very unfortunate fact that around one in three Americans continue to approve of this reality TV celebrity’s horror show of an administration.  And that ratio of support, above all else in American life, should rightly give us great cause for concern for the nation’s future as a democracy.

The root cause is therefore, in a word, ignorance.

The Antidote to Ignorance

I am a student of history, with a formal university education in the field.  As such, I’ve learned the skills required to make me an information literate citizen. Information literacy is the antidote to ignorance. It’s the skill set required to conduct proper research, including critical thinking and the ability to locate and evaluate sources of information for their quality of content. Information literacy is required in order to arrive at the truth for yourself.

It’s a commonly believed fallacy that all news media sources are biased and lie. There are multiple faults with this falsehood that only a nuanced explanation can best break down. For now, simply understand that news media sources range from the reliable and trustworthy down to the highly untrustworthy. With a wide range of quality, the real question is how to know which are the information sources you can trust.

Yet I depend on my own independent research to inform my conclusions, which in turn inform my evaluation of the quality of news media sources.  I do not simply rely on others to tell me what is true and false. I actually know how to critically discern the quality of information through identifying and accounting for factors such as author bias, confirmation bias, lies by omission to support false conclusions, and various other causes of falsehoods. And so rather than simply tell you what I think is correct, I will also teach you how to figure it out for yourself.

Hope

While my hope in writing this blog is to convince as many Americans as possible to abandon their support for the autocratic clown and his circus side show of horrors, I also have another purpose. The root cause of the election of President Trump is the ignorance of the American people, which is to say the failure of too many to properly understand or utilize information literacy skills.

Hence, I aim to teach my readers to be information literate. To encourage the abandonment of fictional narratives, subjective speculations, and spurious surmises. To arm you instead with the tools required to properly understand and identify the facts from the fictions for yourself.  I endeavor to teach you how to properly evaluate the quality of sources of information for yourself, to arrive at the truth by yourself.

Ultimately, this blog’s true purpose then is to help to dispel the causes of American ignorance.  To improve our ability to critically think and evaluate information, thereby reducing our susceptibility to the unprecedented populism, demagoguery, and con artistry that has been happening under this presidency. To diminish the potential unraveling and destruction of our democratic institutions that are beginning to give rise to autocratic rule in the United States.

This blog is for every concerned citizen who cares about our future as a democratic nation.  It’s not only for those of you who agree with my premise. It’s for every registered voter and young potential voter who wants to become a better informed citizen, as the Founders intended. Facts are objectively true, and they’re true for everyone. I therefore assert that through learning the fact-finding tools of information literacy, you will inevitably and independently arrive at the same conclusions that I have. So regardless of your political ideology or party, I hope you will join me on this quest to restore sober-minded sanity to America.