a mystical möbius — curating facts, ideas, text, and media to create a contemplative space.

Grievance Grift [GG]

GG (part 1) || (part 2) ||  (part 3) ||  (part 4) || (part 5) || (part 6) || (part 7)

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“Political technologies”[PT]

Welcome to a paradise for the most brazen liars and guileful con artists, where the most staid and respectable political technology agency in Moscow calls itself Nikkolo-M, after Machiavelli, and uses his face on its business cards. 

—”Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World,” by Andrew Wilson

In this GG series I’m arguing political technologies [PT] (American style) are about far more than just rigging and stealing elections. They’re about creating and exploiting alternative-reality political space [e.g., Earth II].

Still, PT is not less than being about rigging/stealing elections and holding onto power. And, by any deceitful means necessary.

DJT’s strategy on PT exploited our frustration with a gridlocked legislature and was about keeping everything off-balance just enough to give the “strong man” approach popular political appeal and provide him nearly unlimited behavioral latitude. 

The beginning of the “moral failing” in engaging PT is the arrogance of believing one can manipulate and control the resulting forces of “cows” being unleashed by a no-truth, alt-fact political play against reality. 

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From the same folks who brought you ‘trickle-down’

• Recall the PT-conflation of ‘invading hordes of murdering rapists’ with legitimate ‘immigrants and refugees.’
• Saying every idea Democrats [“libtards“] advocate is radical.
• Claiming it’s racist to call-out White supremacist ideology and its systemic/institutional artifacts (e.g., claiming anti-racism is racist)
• Then there’s the claim that any spending on people who are not at the very top end of the economy is socialism.
• And DJT‘s PT-supercharged claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.
• “open borders“…
• “cancel culture“…
• “coming for your guns“…
• so forth, and so on ….

All these provide more examples of PT-enhanced fearmongering, demagoguing, divisive, cartoon-cutout terms that are disingenuously used to define hugely complex issues with reductionist mischaracterizations.

There is no good faith in the use of PT. The use of PT is a hand in front of the face of genuine discourse, and a middle finger to democracy. 

Breaking down “The Big Lie” of a “stolen election”

—note: In true IRYG-fashion (e.g., I’m rubber and you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you), DJT is now rebranding the 2020 election itself as “THE BIG LIE.” [the press release included the caps lock]

DJT had prepared the soil. “The only way we can lose is if the election is rigged,” he’d declared occasionally for months, and at nearly every campaign opportunity in September and October before the 2020 election. 

By late on November 3rd surely DJT knew there was a very real chance that he’d lost the election. So, in the wee hours of November 4, 2020, DJT foreshadowed the faint outlines of his ‘stolen election’ PT blitzkrieg to come:

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For the following nine weeks DJT produced as much chaos around the issue of election fraud as his PT machine could manage to muster up. Countless law suits that were devoid of any evidence whatsoever were filed in several states. This, along with a constant cacophony of chaos in the media. All this served to bend and shape reality for those who dwell primarily in the Earth II news bubble.

DJT‘s “lawyers” actually jumped the shark on the election fraud PT in the very early going (November 7, 2020) at the Four Seasons Landscaping news conference, but Earth II was nonplussed.

Fatefully, DJT picked-up on Roger Stone’s 2016 “Stop the Steal” grift so that he could raise money, ostensibly for lawyers to fight his “stolen election” campaign in court. ‘Stop the Steal’ became one of the major themes of the “wild” rally that DJT was calling together in Washington D.C. for January 6, 2021—the day that congress was legally bound to ratify the state’s certifications of the 2020 presidential election. 

Very basic timeline

Surely many books that will fully detail all the events that led up to the January 6, 2021, insurrectionist attack on our nation’s Capitol are being written now. My aim is merely to relate the outline of DJT‘s anti-democratic project, one that he very nearly pulled off. Basic bullet points:

• DJT set the table for an election fraud claim beginning in 2016 and built on that during the 2020 election campaign
• It will take several days after to determine the facts, however, on November 3rd, 2020, Joe Biden won the election by over 7 million votes [by over 74 electoral college votes, 306 -232]
• …OK, we’re already out of space. We’ll pick it up right here next week

tl;dr

Republicans have finally found something that actually does trickle down: B.S.

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PT-created disinformation-messaging from the cult-leader equips amateur political technologists with PT-enhanced talking points (rhetorical hand grenades). Because the talking points are PT-generated disinformation by design, truth and coherence are not a factor for cult-followers. Thus, no accountability. DJT‘s “stolen election” PT still enjoys wide acceptance and actually gets very good traction on Earth II.

Next week: GG (part 9) …. Come see. 

[this post 850 words (3 min. read)]

Your thoughts? 

I never know what I’ve said till I hear the response. What did you hear me say? 

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