Voting in an Empire of Lies
November 3, 2024
Dr. Roger L. Ray
I was awakened one day this past week by a text message from one of my very few conservative friends. He is my age, an educated professional, and a pretty fair racquetball player, who regrettably gets all of his environmental, financial, and political information from Fox News. He was sending me a video clip which he believed would justify his support for Donald Trump. It was an interview with representatives Wesley Hunt & Byron Donalds from the great states of Florida and Texas. They were passionately telling an entirely apocryphal story about how President Biden was so weak that adversaries had confidently attacked seven of our embassies which Biden was then forced to close.
Donalds and Hunt insisted that this had never before happened in American history. They then went on to relate a fictional story about how Donald Trump had stood up to the Taliban and had left them shaking in their boots. I watched the video and went to Google and found their stories to be entirely false and, what is more, while no embassies have been lost, there have been evacuations due to unrest at 29 embassies during Biden’s time in office, but this happened 37 times while Trump was in office.
So, I asked my friend, “based on your standard of strength, Trump was a much weaker president than Biden, so I am sure that you won’t be voting for Trump now?” To which he replied, “I’m not changing my vote,” he declared, “I already pay too much in taxes!”
He is a mostly retired CPA, so I pointed out to him what he already knows, that unless you make over $400,000 a year, your taxes will go down under Harris. I asked, “Do you make more than $400,000 per year?” I have not heard from him since I asked that question.
I am certain that if this was a two-way communication medium, that many of you could tell a similar story. Similar in that someone has told you something with great confidence which you demonstrated to be entirely false, and the person who shared the Russian propaganda with you, even when confronted with contrary facts, refused to change his or her views.
More than 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift, said in a letter to friend that you cannot use reason to change a person’s opinion if they did not use reason to arrive at that opinion. We are going to the polls on Tuesday, November 5, if you have not voted already, and we will wait up on Tuesday night to see if the election is conclusive enough to be decided on that day. Other than the Bush v Gore contest of 2000, we’re used to getting the conclusion pretty soon after the polls close on election day, but our nation is so evenly divided these days, that it is almost impossible to know who will win.
I know who should win. Most of the people who served in Trump’s first administration have said that he has neither the intellect nor the character to be president. Several members of his family have said the same thing. Prominent members of his party have announced their intentions to vote for Harris.
In short, no one who cares about our economy, about civil rights, who cares about democracy, foreign policy, or who loves America should vote for Donald Trump and yet, knowing all of this, about half of American voters will vote for Trump. . . and no amount of honest information can persuade them to do otherwise.
Republicans have spent decades gerrymandering voting districts to try to keep people of color and minority votes from counting for much and I hate that but I’m about ready to also propose that we restrict voting but I would like to restrict voting to people whose IQ is over 140. It would make election day pretty simple since that would be less than half of 1% of the population and it would mean that candidates like Trump would never be in danger of being elected. However, our system allows virtually everyone to vote, no matter how little they know about our government or how much they have been influenced by propaganda, lies, and misinformation.
I knew that my racquetball partner was entirely mistaken about what he says about Trump, but I also knew that he was going to vote for Trump, no matter how much factual information I shared with him. I wish that people reasoned their way into their convictions, but I have been a pastor long enough to know that even smart people believe completely ridiculous things because it pleases them to believe obvious lies, even when they know they are lies.
I don’t want to discourage you from trying to talk your crazy uncle off the cliff but, sadly, in all but very rare cases, you cannot use reason to persuade someone to change a conviction they did not come to by way of reason.
I have always heard that politicians lie.
I have tended to believe that they generally are not lying but that they are either exaggerating or simply engaging in wishful thinking but in this year’s campaign, there have been a lot of lies. They were not all lies told by Republicans, but I think that it is safe to say that more than 90% of them were Republican lies.
Writing about 50 years ago, the German-American historian and philosopher, Hannah Arendt wrote: If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
She wrote that as a German Jew who had escaped the holocaust and made it to America, obviously, she was reflecting on how the Nazis had managed to take control of Germany, not by convincing people to believe their propaganda and their lies, but by leaving them bereft of a willingness to believe anything. And that was a long time ago.
We had reason to hope that with the advent of the internet and then smart phones, such that we all carry the information superhighway in our pockets, we have constant access to any published information that could be found in all of the libraries in the world, right in the palm of our hands, but rather than make us more informed, it appears to have shortened our attention span and made it seems like finding out what is true is just too hard, too time consuming, requiring too much energy, so that people brag about not reading newspapers, not watching reliable news sources, and instead our minds are filled with propaganda, pornography, and videos of talking cats and dogs. It doesn’t mean that most people are stupid, but it does mean that they are stupid adjacent.
They could be more informed, but they hear that Biden has closed seven embassies and they like believing that Biden is a confused, and weak man, so they will believe that he closed seven embassies and not allow themselves to be bothered by better information. And learning that Trump actually evacuated embassies more often than Biden is equally meaningless because they never cared about embassy evacuations in the first place. Such issues are useless except for what my mother called, “mindless beauty shop gossip.”
Nazis also used a great deal of fear in their propaganda. It doesn’t have to be true if the threat you mention presses a hot button of a familiar fear. Governments often try to unite and control their populations by stoking fear of a common enemy, anyone that they can portray as being “other.” Of course, the Nazis were the ultimate racists and homophobes. I don’t know if Trump is imitating Nazis or if his natural prejudices just make him a terrible racist and homophobe such that he just looks and sounds like a Nazi.
It is no great mystery why he has continued to beat the drum about the entirely legal immigrants from Hati who have settled in Ohio. Hattians are black, they speak with an accent, and their cuisine, while delicious and wonderful, also smells different from hamburgers and fries. Republican politicians in Springfield, Ohio have refuted all of Trump and Vance’s lies about these Hattians but, again, facts don’t matter when you are just using racism to stoke fear.
As Harris has risen in the polls, in these past few weeks, Trump’s lies and name calling have just gone off the rails. He started months ago accusing her of only recently identified as being black when, in fact, she went to a historically black college and joined a famous black sorority when she was a teenager. But it has gotten ugly. He says that she is mentally impaired. He calls her “Comrade” Harris. He says that she is a communist and that, if elected, she will turn America into a 3rd world country. He claims that she has promoted open borders and stopped prosecution of violent crime. He has even said that if she is elected that an illegal immigrant will come into your kitchen and cut your throat.
If facts mattered, voters would know that violent crime is down, illegal immigration is down, and our economy is the envy of the world. He throws out this libel only to hit fear buttons in a gullible public. There is no information here. Trump is the one who bows to the will of communist dictators. Trump is the one who played golf more often than any other president and who didn’t even attend briefings, nor does he read classified reports, not even the ones that he steals and leaves unguarded in his hotel bathrooms.
Pollsters never want to infer why but they always note that Trump gets more support from people who do not have a college degree and Harris gets more support from educated people. They poll the demographic, but they never just say that education makes a person less inclined to fall for the lies and largely Russian and Chinese propaganda that Trump and Vance so often repeat.
But, there is very little time left before the polls close on Tuesday and I can only implore you, my listeners, friends, supporters, and peers, to make sure that you vote before the polls close on Tuesday if you have not already. There are virtually no undecided voters left to persuade in this highly divisive election year. Now it is a matter of voter turnout and, please, you just can’t sit this one out.
