I walk my dog by a house that has a "Trump Country" placard in the living room window. There is no signage allowed in the neighborhood, but this cat is special-- the rules apparently do not apply to him. He hangs with a cadre of similarly inclined fellows, I am sure and everyone in his little coffee klatch thinks he's just the ballsiest guy they know. And as far as I know, no one reports him to the management office. Frankly, if this grass clod of a person wants to advertise his ignorance, that's his business. And besides, right now I am a guest in this community, so I bite my tongue.
In the pool, a group of men chit chat of the great lengths the Democrats in power are going to in order to dash Donald Trump's chances of a 2024 presidential run. One of the men points out that the election was stolen, anyway. Trump clearly won. Everything, literally everything, that has been inconvenient, negative or just plain bad in society is a left-socialist conspiracy. Gas prices? The Dems. Subway violence? The Libtards. The Trump Search Warrant Execution? DOJ, FBI and Biden. Media Bias? Soros. All of it, no matter what, was carefully planned and orchestrated to perfection by the nefarious liberals.
Let's ignore the obvious point, that if there is such a well-organized, controlling hierarchy that has the uncanny ability to manipulate weather, unleash disease and steal votes, why would you fuck with them?
Instead, let's just talk about reality. Conspiracies do not work. They just don't. Yes, the organization might reap fast, shallow rewards, but in the long run, conspiracies fail and the participants get caught. We have entire networks devoted to telling countless true stories of conspiracies of every kind failing. And why do conspiracies fail? Two reasons, really. Evidence and human beings. You see, it is really that simple. And it does not matter which comes first, the evidence or the human condition, once one rises, the other follows close behind.
Conspiracies require communication. Some conspirators use code words and others are so brazen they speak to one another in plain language. But eventually, whatever has been said had to be heard by someone else. No one person can truly know what is going on in another person's head. They can't. You can swear allegiances. You can train. You can brainwash. You can gaslight. In the end, the other person is never fully in control of the first. Add more people, increase the size of the conspiracy and you weaken the bonds between conspirators. Exponentially, the number of people that can be turned or that turn on their own grows as the conspiracy grows. And, equally, as the number of conspirators grows, so does the amount of evidence of the conspiracy.
John Dean. Yeah, you remember him, right? Look, I was a couple of years old when Watergate broke, so I am not going to pretend like I remember Watergate. But history tells us that John Dean was the weak link. Woodward and Bernstein put the evidence on the table. As things started to squeeze Nixon, Dean was called to appear before Congress. And he gave them all he knew. He had seen enough and said enough to force Nixon to resign. Nixon, unlike Donald Trump, was humble enough (and he was anything but humble) to put his blind ambition aside and quit when the conspiracy fell apart. That is what happens. Nixon was a piece of shit, but even he knew intellectually that once the dam broke, there would be a deluge of evidence and conspirators coming forward. Gerald Ford knew this, too. That is probably why he pardoned Nixon so quickly after his resignation. Ford was able to cap the spigot and cut off the deluge.
Donald Trump lacks the intelligence of Richard M. Nixon.
Maybe it's the money. Trump has always been a conman. Anyone alive and aware of television in the 1980's knows what kind of steaming coil Donald J. Trump has been and still is. I actually worked for a guy a few years ago that was a contractor on one of Trump's Atlantic City casinos. He had a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He bought materials. He paid employees. And Trump declared bankruptcy and stiffed him. And dozens, maybe of hundreds of hard-working, small-business-owning people. And some of those people wound up declaring bankruptcy, too. They had to stiff their employees. Or their suppliers. The guy I worked for says he did not. He claims he paid his employees and his suppliers, as well, out of his own pocket. I believe him.
And yet, despite losing hundreds of thousands, the man I worked for still voted for Trump in 2016. He has an LGBTQ+ child. He still voted for Trump. I can't explain that.
Anyway, Trump has been scamming for money his whole life. If he admits things, if he backs off the conspiracy and stops fighting the truth, the money dries up. And it is substantial money. If he stops doing rallies, and sending out emails, the money dries up. And if, by some miracle, he can string the con along long enough to run for reelection, the money will flood into his coffers. He has to keep the money pumping in, because he is so bad at actually earning money. His entire empire is an elaborate pyramid scheme, but business-savvy followers will actually deny that this is the case despite the abundant evidence.
Money does a very good job of keeping certain collaborators quiet. But as soon as the money dries up, you can be sure the conspirators will line up to tell their story.
Then there is the evidence. What happened on Monday, was just the next natural shoe to drop. There were people in Trump's circle that were not in the conspiracy for the money. They were in the conspiracy, to be sure, but once things reached beyond their comfort zone, they wanted to bail out. Once evidence started to be put on public display, they could see it was time to jump ship. The January 6th Committee has been putting the evidence out for all to see. It isn't a set-up. It isn't a witch hunt. Donald Trump was not above aligning with the most vile, most onerous people-- racists, Evangelicals, hate mongers and the evidence laid out thus far is clear. Phone records. Written correspondence. Electronic correspondence. Actions on video. The evidence begat the witnesses and the witnesses begat the evidence.
Monday, the federal warrant executed at Mar-A-Lago was done so because the FBI has testimony, evidence, facts on their side. Not hollow promises of "truths" to be revealed. Choosing to basically end one's career if they're wrong, no federal judge or FBI agent would knowingly railroad a former president (especially one as vindictive as Trump). And if there was some grand conspiracy to throw Trump under the bus, you can be sure there would be former conspirators coming out of the woodwork. It is the nature of the animal. But there is no grand wave of right-thinking FBI agents coming out to tell us about the grand scheme. An outlier here and there, with no evidence to substantiate their claims, but nothing that could possibly derail such fiction.
So, it is time for people to take back their intelligence. Take back their objectivity. Take back their common sense. Stop letting co-conspirators convince them that there is no fire where there oh, so much smoke. Or admit that they are in on the conspiracy because it suits a need. A need to be racist, homophobic, make more money or otherwise hateful. A weakness that they need to hide.
Comments