TRUTH

 

We know what the truth is when we see it, even “intuitively,” or so most of us believe; others, of course, don’t see what “we” see and try to give it a different “shade.” People deny the truth even when the context it occurs in makes it obvious to the unbiased observer. Take for example this screenshot from the 1945 film Leave Her to Heaven, which anyone familiar with the film knows that more than any other image it defines the character played by Gene Tierney (who was the subject of a recent documentary, A Forgotten Star), as it appears on the cover of both the Twilight Time and Criterion Blu-ray releases:

 

Even those who are unfamiliar with the film can sense what lies behind those shades, even not knowing that Tierney’s character is doing nothing to save the crippled kid brother of her husband as he sinks beneath the surface of the lake that she maliciously persuaded him to swim across. In his book The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning  Dan McAdams notes that despite what most of us intuitively can see, there are an unfortunate number of people in this country don’t want to see the evil that lies behind the shade they throw over their own eyes. They in fact become less human beings than caricatures of human beings:

For Trump, truth is effectively whatever it takes to win the moment, moment by moment, battle by battle—as the episodic man, shorn of any long-term story to make sense of his life, struggles to win the moment. Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that human persons are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person—he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.

In New Line Magazine, McAdams in discussing his book notes that there is an element of farce in this view of Trump and his “cause,” and this underscores the fact that the truth simply is not important, it can be as simple as the "feeling good about feeling bad" appeal:

It is well recognized that a key to Trump’s appeal, especially among working-class white Americans, is his ability to channel and give voice to inchoate rage, resentment and grievance. Last spring at a rally in Waco, Texas, Trump told his loyalists: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution!”

But what has often been missed about Trump rallies and about the emotional effect Trump exerts on many of his supporters more generally is the sense of enjoyment and thrill he evokes. The New York Times columnist David French is one of the few observers who has underscored the positive feelings — the folksy fun and silliness, the thrilling sense of belonging — that people often experience at Trump rallies. In French’s words, Trump functions as a “godlike, muscular superhero” who has the magical power to make good people feel good. In his essay “Brand(ish)ing the Name; or, Why Is Trump So Enjoyable?” the anthropologist William Mazzarella employs the French word “jouissance” to convey the same Trump effect, connoting a kind of delicious enjoyment that borders on farce and shamelessness, “the raw, jaded fun of knowingly cultivated outrage, the more cynical the better.”

Authoritarian leaders make their followers feel good by repeatedly and forcefully proclaiming that the latter are good people, and that their enemies are bad. The opening move of the authoritarian dynamic is the stark division between the good in group and the bad (evil, disgusting, poisonous) out group. Going back to Mussolini, authoritarian strongmen have presented themselves as liminal figures endowed with special powers to protect the in group from an evil world, often by restoring the in group’s lost greatness. In her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present” (2021), historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes that the common attributes of authoritarian leaders, as perceived by their adoring followers, include proof of masculine virility (Trump’s sexual exploits work in his favor), a primal ferocity focused on winning at all costs and the invocation of a providential mission (being an instrument of God) during a time of national crisis.

But beyond the characteristics of the leader himself, authoritarianism is also about the special dynamic that exists between a leader and his followers. What psychologists call “the authoritarian personality” is a set of beliefs and values that people who are attracted to authoritarian leaders readily endorse. They include strict adherence to the conventional norms of the (good) in group, submission to (and adoration of) authorities who personify or reinforce those norms and antipathy — to the point of hatred and aggression — for those who either challenge in group norms or exist outside of them (“bad” out groups, who are often demonized or dehumanized).

At the present time, Democrats have taken to calling Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance as "weird" rather than merely farcical; the question is whether that accusation  has more weight with on-the-fence voters than accusing him of being a "dictator" and a threat to democracy.

Ethan Poskanzer writes in American Journal of Sociology that for Trump supporters it is not important that “facts” as they are told at Trump rallies are not literally true, but simply that they reinforce the idea that something is “wrong” and must be “fixed”—even if the “fix” is for non-existent problems and actually makes what little problem there is "bigger." 

It doesn’t matter if practically everything Trump says about migrants as a group or as individuals is untrue. It’s the same with voting; we’ve seen in Republican states passing more restrictive voting laws to “fix” mostly non-existent or exaggerated issues in order to suppress the vote from Democratic-leaning constituencies. Trump supporters don’t even realize that they may be “suppressed” as well, but it doesn’t matter because they have been told there is a “real” problem and they of course never do anything “wrong,” they are the “good” people and it doesn't matter if "bad" people have their vote taken away.

Even from sources we expect to find the “truth” in, we don’t always find it. For example, NPR “fact-checked” Trump’s nomination acceptance speech, where we discovered (unsurprisingly) that he is deaf to any suggestion that he tone down his violent rhetoric and lies…

 

…and the only people he wishes to "unite" are those who already grovel before his “greatness”; he doesn’t waste his time trying to convince others that his lies are “true.” 

Well of course there is one thing that Trump thinks will “unite” people—the “border crisis” and hatred of brown-skinned people not from India. I mean really, in this day and age, most non-Hispanics seem to feel socially degraded if seen dealing with a Hispanic on anything like “equal” terms, usually assuming the worst qualities and feeling free to demean and dehumanize them with various rationalizations that they assume are true because they don't know any better.

Now, back to the NPR fact-check, it was noted that Trump falsely claimed that El Salvador is sending its criminals and murderers to the U.S.  What NPR did not mention is in fact the opposite is true: it is the U.S. that is sending its criminals to El Salvador and other Central American countries. The 1996 immigration “reform” law made it easier to deport legal resident immigrants in this country (meaning more American culturally) back to their countries of origin if convicted of  crimes in which the sentence  is at least one year.

As noted before, Hispanic gangs like MS-13 were born and bred in the streets of Los Angeles or in U.S. prisons, and if individuals were not U.S. citizens, the 1996 law made them automatically deportable. That meant that gangs who learned their “trade” on American city streets or prisons were a different “animal” than the mere amateurs in the countries they were sent to. It didn’t take long for these new arrivals to cause chaos and terror in places like El Salvador and Guatemala—and again, people in this country are in complete denial about the real reasons migrants are coming to this country in such droves as they are; their claims of asylum are not only legitimate, but a direct result of this country’s own ignorant actions.

But even media outlets like NPR considered by the right to be “liberal” because they don’t traffic in outright lies won’t tell you the whole truth, and because of that, they allow lies to go unanswered and proliferate even among “liberal” voters. We want some of the truth, but not all of it if it means questioning our own humanity, or lack thereof.

And of course there is the issue of fentanyl, which is itself the subject of much lies and hypocrisy. Unlike other drug abusers, this country treats fentanyl abusers as “victims” and excuses them of any responsibility for their own actions. Just throw in “Mexico,” “cartels” and “the border” and that is a sufficient source of blame. There is a story about border agents in El Centro, California building a “second wall” with the excuse that it will help control fentanyl. That is pure fiction and a mere publicity stunt to pretend that they can actually do something. The reality is that nearly all fentanyl that arrives from south of the border is “delivered” by U.S. citizens through legal checkpoints. As a 2019 Washington Post story noted

Thomas Overacker, executive director of cargo and conveyance security for Customs and Border Protection, told Congress in July that his agency is able to inspect only about 2 percent of cars and 16 percent of commercial vehicles that come across ports of entry at the southwest border.

Nobody wants to hear the truth; even the DEA’s most recent report on fentanyl traffic is being deliberately deceptive. Yes, the Chinese government has made “promises” to control the export of fentanyl and its precursors to countries where it is illegal, but the reality is that it has done very little to control the trade even directly to the U.S., in fact has been accused by a House subcommittee of activities that include “Directly subsidizing the manufacturing and export of illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics through tax rebates.”

Just last week journalists from Reuters went to Mexico to find out how “easy” it is to buy fentanyl and precursors from China. But again, Reuters was being dishonest and concealing the truth in order to put all the “blame” on Mexico for this country’s addictions; they could have just as well made the purchases right here in the U.S. The public health website STAT tells us that

When it comes to the illegal sale of fentanyl, most of the attention has focused on Mexican cartels that are adding the drug to heroin smuggled into the United States. But Chinese suppliers are providing both raw fentanyl and the machinery necessary for the assembly-line production of the drug powering a terrifying and rapid rise of fatal overdoses across the United States and Canada, according to drug investigators and court documents.

 “We have seen an influx of fentanyl directly from China,” said Carole Rendon, the acting US attorney for the northern district of Ohio in Cleveland. “It’s being shipped by carrier. It’s hugely concerning because fentanyl is so incredibly deadly.”

The China connection is allowing local drug dealers in North America to mass produce fentanyl in pill form, in some cases producing tablets that look identical to an oft-abused version of the prescription painkiller OxyContin. It also has been added to Xanax pills. And last week, fentanyl pills made to resemble the painkiller hydrocodone were blamed for a wave of overdoses in the Sacramento area, including nine deaths.

The previous Post story noted how easy it is for American citizens sitting right in their own homes to purchase fentanyl from China:

Chinese drug traffickers had some advice for American buyers of fentanyl: Let us ship it to you by regular mail. It might be slower than FedEx or UPS, but the opioid is much more likely to reach its destination through the U.S. Postal Service.

These cyber drug dealers wrote their U.S.-based customers — in emails later uncovered by federal investigators — that private delivery companies electronically tracked packages, allowing the easy identification of mail from suspect addresses and creating a bright trail connecting sellers and buyers of illegal fentanyl.

The Postal Service for years did not institute similar safeguards — and that gaping hole in the nation’s borders has not been fully closed despite legislation compelling its elimination. Fifteen percent of all packages from China are still not electronically tracked, and the figure rises to 40 percent for all packages from around the world entering the United States.

“What do we not know about these packages that are coming in?” Frank Russo, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection port director at John F. Kennedy International Airport, said in an interview.

“When you’re talking about a million packages a day,” he said, noting the amount of international mail arriving at JFK alone, “40 percent is a large number.”

That was in 2019, and nothing has changed. In a more recent story in NPR,

Under international pressure, China's government banned the production and sale of fentanyl and many of its variants in May 2019, resulting in a significant reduction in the country's illicit fentanyl trade.

But more than a year later, Chinese vendors have tapped into online networks to brazenly market fentanyl analogs and the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, and ship them directly to customers in the U.S. and Europe as well as to Mexican cartels, according to an NPR investigation and research from the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, or C4ADS, a nonprofit data analysis group. (The center receives some of its funds from the U.S. and U.K. governments.)

Chinese vendors are often camouflaged by a complex network of corporate entities registered in far-flung cities along China's interior, where they use sophisticated shipping methods to bypass screening measures and where law enforcement scrutiny is often laxer than in bigger cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. Thousands of doses can be shipped together in small, hidden packages.

"Many Chinese networks involved in the production and advertising of fentanyl quickly adapted to increased legal constraints by modifying their techniques to exploit loopholes in chemical restrictions and disguise their activities," said Michael Lohmuller, a C4ADS analyst and report co-author.

Again, the DEA claimed that a “victory” of sorts had been “won” by convincing the Chinese government to ban the export of most fentanyl, but as NPR noted, the “trade” merely changed its tactics:

Despite the drop in fentanyl shipments from China, nimble Chinese vendors have developed new distribution strategies by producing and selling the precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Benjamin Chen is among the many vendors in the country who adopted these new strategies. He and his colleagues built up a robust online synthetic drug operation over the last decade at Shanghai Huilitongda Biological Technology Co. Ltd., which is registered as a pharmaceutical company, according to Chinese corporate records.

On Facebook, where he did much of his advertising, Chen had a reputation as a fast and reliable vendor, according to social media reviews left by nearly a dozen customers. "Benjamin Chen is the real deal," someone identified as a customer wrote in a Facebook post in December 2018. "If he can't do it, nobody can."

Potential clients could inspect grainy snapshots of nondescript powders and pills on Facebook. Occasionally, Chen replied directly to loyal customers, even paying for a Lyft ride to the hospital as compensation when one customer complained he had overdosed on Chen's product.

Sometimes operating under the pseudonym "King Sun" or "Sun King," he also advertised his chemical wares openly on LinkedIn, Twitter and Vimeo before and after the class ban last year.

Chen adapted to the ban by selling fentanyl precursors, or what he called "hot products for research chemicals" — compounds that are only a few chemical steps away from a fentanyl analog and that are not always criminalized. Other substances on sale included a sometimes deadly synthetic opioid also known as "pink," and synthetic cannabinoids.

As we see here, if people in this country want fentanyl desperately enough, no one is going to stop them, and it is easier to get it directly in the mail from clever Chinese vendors than from the “streets”—kind of like how you can find obviously not “official” Blu-ray releases of films and cable television shows not yet available “officially” on video disc being sold on eBay by Chinese vendors.

But the DEA—just like the CBP—doesn’t want to admit it has failed to control the inflow of fentanyl into the country, and shifts the “blame” to “the border” and the “Mexicans” instead of the “consumers” and their efforts to evade the law to fulfill their “need” with willing suppliers to aid them in doing so. All are willing accomplices—even those who claim they are “fighting” the “scourge” that even the “victims” seem unwilling to end.

The truth can be tough to accept, but Thomas Edsall, in an op-ed in The New York Times, observed how hate and divisiveness can divert a person’s mind in ways where truth and facts have no meaning. He quotes Jeremy Yip of Georgetown and Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote 

Anger promotes the use of self-serving deception. The decision to engage in self-serving deception balances concern for oneself (i.e., self-interest) and concern for others (i.e., empathy). The greater concern individuals exhibit for themselves and the lower concern for others, the more deceitful they are likely to be. When individuals feel angry, they are more likely to deceive others. We find that angry individuals are less concerned about the welfare of others, and consequently more likely to exhibit self-interested unethical behavior. Across our studies, we link incidental anger to self-serving deception.

Such people easily fall for rhetorical traps and false or misleading imagery. In his recent show on the alleged crisis of "migrant crime"...

 

...John Oliver notes that several incidents involving migrants that received mass attention and "outrage" from the right-wing media and had been running on a loop for weeks were either taken out of context, the subject of false information, or used to create on-the-spot false narratives by parties with an anti-immigrant agenda.

The truth about Trump and what he represents is staring us in the face, that he is a convicted felon, has "trade" ideas with classified information that should be regarded as treasonous, and has always had authoritarian impulses that even at their most bizarre and criminal cannot be questioned without the threat of retribution; in short, the most morally and ethically corrupt person ever to hold the office of the presidency, with Nixon having less of a stain since he at least had the decency to resign from office.   

But many  think they can throw “shade” over all of this and pretend they “see” something else. But those more perceptive know that the truth can be perceived from both actions and character, no matter how much shade is thrown over it to conceal it; we don’t even have to remove the shades to know what is there: