The Empiricists Strike Back
While reality television is thriving, real reality is in retreat. We have already forgotten the inconvenient fact that United States intelligence agencies concluded that Trump’s election was facilitated by Russian intervention, so that is no longer true. We have forgotten the inconvenient fact that Trump lost the popular vote, so that is no longer true.
That is not enough for the advocates of Trumpocracy. If you want to eradicate American democracy it would be helpful to persuade people that less Social Security is more, that they are better off with less health insurance, or even none, that a free press is a danger to the state, that millions of aliens vote (Mexicans, maybe also Klingons). Trumpskyites have been practicing for years by believing that Obama was a Socialist Muslim born in Kenya, but now they are going after any standards of objective truth. While the mainstream media have many faults and failures, many outlets still strive to give accurate information. Not only are the media under attack, the loyalists are even going after Snopes. Snopes is the website that started out debunking the stories of alligators in the sewers. Because it also debunks other untruths, including some about Hillary Clinton that Trumpskyites prefer to believe, the site is under attack in an effort to destroy truth whenever it rears its ugly head. Believing six impossible things before breakfast is a job requirement in the Trump administration.
Democrats, independents, and the remaining rational Republicans are trying to fight this battle with evidence, reason and other tools that are unwelcome in the new order. This approach is a mistake. If the administration wants to redefine reality to suit its own ends, the best way to give them pause is to beat them at their own game.
Many sane people wonder whether the United States, and even the world, can survive a Trump presidency. Trump is so unstable and unpredictable that no one knows what he might do with the power of the presidency. There is one way that his term can be limited, reality can be changed, and the world can be saved,
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, the body that maintains global time standards, is always adding leap seconds to align the time more closely with the earth’s rotation. These add confusion and uncertainty to our clocks to fix something that no one really notices anyway. If they really want to do something useful and save civilization into the bargain, why don’t they just declare it 2020?
Sure the Democrats will have to hurry to find a candidate to run in the looming presidential election, but almost anyone would be an improvement, both for the United States and for civilization as a whole. While many Trump voters stubbornly believe him infallible, others have discovered that his allegiance to the rich is as determined as any Republican’s, that he is willing to divert the resources of health insurance, Social Security, and Medicare to the pockets of billionaires, leaving his hapless voters to die in poverty. For some this is enough to persuade them not to vote for him again. If the 2020 election were held tomorrow, these voters and the ones who didn’t bother to vote in 2016 because Trump couldn’t win would be enough to overcome the razor-thin landslide that elected Trump. Trump would not have the opportunity to loot the Treasury, destroy the planet and start World War III, and civilization would be saved. There would still be a lot of authoritarian fanatics out there, but they might develop a little more tolerance for reality and even reason once they learned that manipulation could work both ways.
