This essay is one of the shortest on the website, but it might be the most timely during this moment of impeachment inquiries. Questions like the following are being asked on forums around the internet and the world:
Would you rather have Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren run against President Trump? September 2019 on Quora.com
The problems that President Trump creates are the most serious to face Americans in my lifetime. Three exceptions might be the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and 911.
As a people, we are at this moment completely dependent on our elected representatives. Nothing any civilian does can make any difference; we are helpless in the face of an alleged sociopath who holds the most power of any human on Earth.
Tony Schwarz wrote Trump’s Art of the Deal and split the profits 50-50. He has said that Trump is a sociopath capable of initiating a nuclear conflagration.
The following is an answer to the Quora question, which I hope people who matter carefully consider. And yes, the answer is somewhat oblique. I don’t think whoever runs against Trump will make much difference in the events that will come after.
Does anyone believe that Trump is the kind of man who relinquishes power?
The surest way to remove Trump is through impeachment, but it’s not clear that he will step down if he is convicted by the Senate. Waiting for clarity is not a valid reason for caution. Inaction will bring catastrophe. Too much is at stake.
I know it’s difficult for many Americans to remember, but Trump insisted that the 2016 election was rigged by Hillary Clinton; many believed he planned not only to challenge the election in the courts but to lead an insurrection or even a revolution if the result turned against him.
Trump is allied with the NRA—an armed, insurrectionary group of lunatics dedicated to revolution should they fail to get their way. The NRA has been swarmed by Russian intelligence. The Russian objective is to destabilize the United States by fanning the flames of paranoia in a politically influential organization known to be susceptible to manipulation by conspiracy theorists.
Southern evangelical Christians are the backbone of the new Confederacy, which Trump leads; he is their modern day Jefferson Davis who plans first to reestablish legalized segregation under the guise of, I don’t know, “right to choose”, maybe.
Other atrocities will follow. The suppression of non-whites (like immigrants) is in full-swing, which white-supremacists, among others, support.
White evangelicals don’t preach against the ethnic-cleansing of America; they endorse it. Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University has encouraged his students for years to train in the use of firearms so that they will be able to kill Muslims if given the opportunity. For years he has advocated for violence against those he hates by inciting unaccountable, non-state actors — like the students who attend his so-called “university”.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
I think most reasonable folks are at a point where they can figure-out that the coming election might amount to no more than a simple diversion — a shiny object to pull people’s attention away from what might turn out to be the only course of action with any chance at all to remove the president — an impeachment in the House of Representatives followed by conviction in the Senate.
Many people are in denial; people withdraw their attention from events that disturb them. Seizure of American institutions has already taken place by people working for the other side. Some people seem to have unrealistic expectations that a media owned by oligarchs like Trump will warn them.
Very few are able to face head-on a reality that includes loss-of-country. People sleep better at night if they pull their heads inside their shells and pretend everything is OK when it isn’t.
Some resort to a version of the Stockholm Syndrome to help them cope with the sickness that tears at their stomachs when they remember that Trump grabbed them by their electoral colleges; they embrace the tormentor to maintain their sanity.
Stockholm Syndrome is at the core of Trump’s power. Trump is right that he can kill, and his supporters will stand with him. He has nothing to fear from so-called “church-goers” who love him because he is bad.
Trump has put into place policies that seem designed to terrorize sick children; ICE puts them in cages where they risk death from neglect and illness; the president’s policies strike fear in families who are running from gangs to search for safety north of the southern-border.
Everyone wants to believe that a shining-city-on-a-hill exists somewhere in the world that they can crawl to during hard times. It’s a myth, unfortunately. Trump has shredded people’s dreams for a better future. Impoverished freedom-seekers are neither welcome nor safe in Trump’s America.
A bad election result is the easiest thing for a thug who already holds power to cast aside. An election can be rigged; it can be ignored; it can be challenged in stacked courts; it can be won in the electoral college.
Trump ought to know; he lost the popular count in 2016 by a record 11 million votes; 3M from Hillary; 8M from third-parties. No president has lost the popular vote by a larger margin. The president knows he will lose the popular vote in 2020; it didn’t stop him in 2016; it won’t stop him next year, either.
Losing the popular vote by a wide margin is not going to be a problem for President Trump. Who doesn’t agree that it’s true?
If Americans wait for the 2020 election to make the change that everyone with sense knows we must make, then our country could be lost for a long time, perhaps forever, at least for us, the little people who depend on it to breathe free.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editorial Board: We recommend that readers view each video in Billy Lee’s essay. The short videos are historical in nature. Current confirming videos can be found on YouTube and other websites. Billy Lee included the older videos to remind people about where they’ve been. He wants to encourage folks to reflect about what they imagined was going on when first they saw them.
Only once in modern times has an American election drawn fewer than half of eligible voters to the polls: Bill Clinton verses Robert Dole in 1996. Turnout was 49%.
Way back in the olden days it happened twice.
In 1920 Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox with 49.2% participating.
In 1924 Calvin Coolidge defeated John W. Davis and Robert M. La Follette in a three-way race with a 48.9% turnout.
The largest voter turnout occurred during the Rutherford B. Hayes verses Samuel J. Tilden contest in 1876. It was America’s 100th birthday year. Hayes won the election in the electoral college by one vote. He lost the popular count by a quarter-million.
81.8% of qualified men turned out to vote — women wouldn’t be permitted to vote for another 45 years. Most historians say the presidential election of 1876 was the biggest vote-mess in US history.
From Wikipedia: On November 11, three days after election day … results … were rendered uncertain because of fraud by both parties.
To make a long story short, Southern Democrats agreed to award all disputed electoral votes to Republican Hayes if he promised to put an end to Reconstruction.
The verbal (non-written) Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction in the South. Freed slaves were left at the mercy of whites who did not intend to preserve their rights.
Whites forced the overwhelming majority of blacks (who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line) to wait until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before permitting them to grasp the gold ring of enfranchisement.
The election of 1876 became an inflection point in the history of the United States. Termination of Reconstruction enabled the now united country to inject its military might into the Indian Wars. There was a genocide to wage; besides, a decade or more of help from the Ku Klux Klan had neatly terrorized the genie of racial equality back into its bottle.
The military was no longer needed to defend desperate Negroes. The Klan was more than eager to take over the job. As this essay is written, many historians continue to argue that segregation and inequality remain endemic in vast swaths of America.
From 1877 onward, KKK castrations and hangings convinced most Negroes that pursuing voting rights wasn’t worth the price: it would be 90 years before whites let blacks get anything close to an even break in the contest for survival in capitalist, racist America.
Whites once suppressed the black vote by killing black voters. Later, they charged blacks with felonies and convicted them before all-white juries. Felons lost their right to vote for life. Today, 26% of the black population in Kentucky are felons who can’t vote. In Florida, nearly two million black citizens are felons.
After 1877, whites decided to move past their ugly divide over slavery to neutralize instead the native Americans whose lands the Europeans had seized. If whites felt compelled to kill hundreds-of-thousands of “redskins” (and break dozens of treaties) to make the wilderness safe for whites, so what? Universal suffrage could wait, right? Voting hardly seemed relevant when so much killing needed done.
Decades of injustice and indifference marched forward into the 21st century before at long last the election of Barack Obama garnered anything close to a large majority turnout. 66.2% showed-up in 2008 to flip history on its head, according to the Washington Post.
The first black president — a valid Hawaiian birth-certificate enabled him to run — gathered the largest popular vote ever – 69.5 million. It’s a record not likely to be broken anytime soon. Donald Trump, eight years later in a country more densely populated, acquired a paltry 63 million.
Obama served two terms for eight years despite strong and persistent protestations by Donald Trump and his lily-white supporters that Barry was a Kenyan Muslim — a hater of all things American — a wannabe wrecker of white privilege.
The attacks have never really ended. Donald is threatening to charge Obama with treason for ordering spooks to “spy” on his campaign; for orchestrating an attempted “coup”. Perhaps a death sentence by hanging is the appropriate punishment.
In 2016 Trump with help from Russian, Israeli, and evangelical elites seized control of the United States despite one of the most lopsided popular defeats of any candidate in the history of USA elections. DT lost the popular vote by 8%, which in that low-turnout environment amounted to almost eleven-million votes. Hillary beat the Donald by nearly three-million. Third-party candidates took close to eight-million more.
Think about it.
Trump is president? Does anyone believe an injustice was done that ought to be set right?
Well, I do, for one.
According to some folks who once counted themselves among his closest friends (Michael Cohen and Tony Schwarz), Donald Trump will never relinquish power.
Are we going to believe them?
What if they’re right?
The slow-train-coming election of 2020 is an excuse that both Democrats and Republicans are using for inaction and delay. Isn’t it obvious?
No one wants to take on the bosses. Oligarchs can get to anyone; they can get to families. It’s amazing what doors can close on people who choose not to cooperate with those who have shown that they are capable of anything at all.
Legislators and judges, prosecutors and bureaucrats are dragging their feet refusing to make the decisions that will save the republic. They want to ride out the clock hoping that DT will die of old-age; by some miracle, citizens will be set free perhaps to — someday, somehow — stand-up for their wonderful country.
Pipe dream?
As this essay is written, the Trump family makes their plans to rule America into perpetuity. Jerry Falwell Junior of Liberty University floated the absurd idea on Twitter that Trump be given an extra two years to make up for time lost during the “Witch Hunt.”
The pictures that Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, seized from Falwell’s “pool-boy” had nothing whatever to do with Junior’s overly-supportive tweet anyhow. Everyone knows at least that part of the salacious story is true, right?
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
Seriously.
Jerry and Donald are soul-mates. Falwell admonishes his acolytes to conceal, carry, and train to kill Muslim attackers. What right-minded follower of Christ Jesus wouldn’t? Donald bears false witness by proving daily that slander, name-calling, and hitting back hardest is the way to win. With Jesus standing behind to egg them both, how can they not get their way in this world? On the way to the future they envision, they don’t lose.
The German Trump family intends to rule the world until the end of time, because the United States now stands at an historic threshold; it is perilously close to conquering the nearly 200 countries that make the community of nation-states. The Trumps intend to take advantage of an opportunity provided not even to Hitler; they will sit on a golden throne at the top of the world.
Who wants their kids admitted to a prestigious college?
Cooperate.
Who wants their kids to land big jobs?
Collaborate.
Who wants to live disease-free to the very end of a most pleasant retirement?
Capitulate.
These are the choices.
Is it possible to gain the whole world while keeping the nation’s soul safe and sound? Every Trump lunatic believes it is. Keep America First while undermining its constitution, its institutions, and its values; everything will fall into place like it should.
Folks who care about right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, fair-play and corruption must now make choices that will bring down a wall of concrete on themselves and the children they love.
The time is now.
The time is come.
It’s time for parents to eat their children.
It’s time to worship the Fuhrer.
Our ancestors fought a revolution so that their progeny wouldn’t be bullied — not by drug lords; nor by malignant kings who torture for kicks; nor by bubble-encapsulated queens who tell their starving subjects to eat cake whenever they are truly hungry; nor by heartless thugs who cage thousands of family-separated orphans to make the point that they won’t be disobeyed.
Our national heroes fought a revolution so that people might someday choose their leaders and through them their way of living. When the people finally got their chance, most stayed home. Those who chose — those who made an effort to choose — chose leaders who wanted only to rule in the cruelest ways imaginable.
Call people stupid while smiling down at them when they praise every crazy thing you do and say — it’s a living hell for the powerless; the irony is that the powerless come to love their supreme leader in time; abused people, like domesticated pets, learn to love and trust their masters, eventually.
The world is sliding into an abyss of unfairness and worse. It’s the way of history. Every generation of humans fails to make the world a place they would gladly take the chance to be born into a second time.
Only fools would choose to be born into a world of ten-billion suffering souls. What are the chances that anyone will be born into a happy place with safe food and water, loving friends, and fun things to do?
What are the chances?
A case can be made — I won’t make it — that the odds are near zero. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a weird irony if the wealthy and the cruel were born again strictly by chance not into Hell but rather into a second life on Earth — the same Earth they built and looted in their first life.
The catch is that they will not be allowed to choose their parents or on which continent they will live. The selection of their circumstances will be made by chance alone. A lottery determines their start in life, their potential, their possibilities.
It seems fair, doesn’t it?
Reasonable demographic analyses show that the prospects for a happy second-life are weighted heavily against them. A second-life lottery will ruin most of those unfortunates who are forced by their success to play it.
The situation in America today is one where most people are in blind denial of the calamity that has befallen them. No one wants to believe that the president is a dictator who they are powerless to resist. He is enabled by terrible people — cowards, most of them — who enjoy hurting people. Many aren’t Americans.
Some deluded folks have embraced the president. They, like the Germans of the 1930s, are oblivious to his evil ways. Many believe they themselves are good — blessed by a higher power — but they lust after evil as if it were as harmless as a whore. They embrace and cling, pant and sweat to divert their minds from a raging venereal assault that will surely overwhelm them on the day they finally understand that they have lost everything.
To vote in 2020 for or against the monster who torments us is as futile as it is dangerous. With help from the bad people, Donald Trump is going to crush America out of existence.
Even if everyone stays home, Donald Trump will say that the largest turnout in history gave him the greatest electoral victory ever.
Should he lose, he will deny the result and claim the election was rigged. He will not step down until he dies, no matter how many “traitors” step forward to question his version of the facts.
Most folks know on some level that the president is a liar and a father of lies. Will people allow themselves to be fooled again?
Boycotting the 2020 election means that “we the people” are choosing not to validate the politicians who refused to secure our elections; who redistricted away our ability to fix roads and other infrastructure; who trampled health care, food quality, and earning potential.
Boycotting the 2020 election will show the oligarchs that we have given up on the idea that things can be set right. Some folks, yes, refuse to believe they are victims; that they are chattel who lost the freedom to change society when Trump seized power.
We have to embrace realism. Billionaires are not our friends. Oligarchs are the enemy. We can’t challenge them, but we can puncture their collective illusion that the rest of us enjoy playing gladiator games in their stadiums.
Some might wonder why anyone would advocate boycott when the election is one-and-a-half years away. Well, the election is what the talking heads on billionaire-media obsess over.
No one talks about impeachment (except that it’s a bad idea), because Israeli, Russian, and the evangelical mob-bosses want Trump. It seems like an unlikely menage de trois until folks understand that bullies have a common interest — to exercise a humiliating power over little people.
Guess what?
If you are reading this essay, the chances are good that you are one of the little ones. The bosses who laugh at your antics don’t care about you or me at all.
Yes, we should let them speak for themselves — who can stop them? They advertise their warped values on every channel, station, and website! — but trust me, everyday folks like you and me share a dilemma: we are adrift in rowboats on a big ocean where unruly warships stream.
The battleships are not going to rescue anyone in a rowboat no matter how desperate their cries for help.
Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychologist who once worked for the CIA, told anyone who would listen, “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
Dissent. Resist. Boycott.
In the face of a smothering totalitarianism paid for by the monied and the powerful, we have no other choice. Cooperation, capitulation, and collaboration will bring ordinary folks nothing but loathing and loss of self-respect.
Until “outlaws” who have paid their debt to society are allowed to vote free and fair, no one votes. A forgotten prophet once said: we are all outlaws in the eyes of America.
The wealthy live behind gates for a reason.
I am asking Americans to work hard between now and Election 2020 to make voter turnout low.
Set a record.
35% or less might become, maybe, someday, a distress-beacon that the historians of democracies do not ignore.
Everyone stands for something. Why not stand for what’s right? Or take a knee. In the fresh, clean air of freedom, every powerless person can make that choice.
This essay is going to be a little short of words compared to most on The Pontificator. Brevity will relieve friends who might read my essays to be polite or feign interest. I wish I had more readers like them, but most who read I will never meet. I don’t know what they love or hate.
I know this. If the GOP retains its lockdown on all branches of the government after Tuesday’s “election”, the Confederates will have won their Civil War. It took 150 years, but they will have won. Donald Trump is a modern Jefferson Davis — the first president of the new Confederacy.
Trump is bigger than Jefferson Davis. Like Davis, the president works for a coalition of revolutionaries who despise democracy. They support a modern version of slavery, on which they pin the heroic title of Capitalism, right?
They are eager to kill to protect it. It’s why they are rabid Second Amendment advocates; it’s why they harass and threaten liberals on-line, on the phone, in the press, in the churches, and inside state legislatures.
It’s a system where everyone works for the wealthy to manipulate and exploit ignorant people who actually believe they are going to be rich and powerful oligarchs themselves, someday. All that is required is to work hard and prepare, prepare, prepare.
Sure, that works. Ask any brick layer or steel worker. Ask an auto worker. Ask a teacher or a nurse or a restaurant busboy. It isn’t going to happen.
Get real.
The only chance working people will ever have to earn high incomes is if rich people share the wealth by paying fair wages and taxes, which is the opposite of what they decided to do when they rushed through the recent “tax cuts.”
About 90% of the cuts went to the one-percent, right? Of course, the poor can buy lottery tickets. Lottery tickets sometimes work, don’t they? Doesn’t everyone in the USA have someone in their family who has won millions in the lottery? The lottery has been going strong since the early 1970s — almost fifty years. It must be working, because more people play the lottery than ever before.
Divide hard-working folks — who after long days at work don’t have the time or energy to think things through — with any number of issues that make no sense. The classic issue is abortion, of course. It always is.
Any woman can secure an abortion. It only takes two inexpensive pills or a boyfriend who has watched a couple how-to videos on the dark web. The only political question is whether abortions are going to be legal and safe or illegal and risky.
Legality or Constitutionality makes no difference to desperate women, but it might mean that a few unfortunates will spend time in prison away from their families should they get caught. Fear of prison increases anxiety, but it won’t stop a female impregnated by a man she hates. She will abort.
It’s been this way since the beginning of history. Before the process of abortion was known, women took their unwanted babies into the mountains to be eaten by wolves and crows.
The president has promised to punish women who have abortions. Judge Kavanaugh, the drunk sex addict and party animal who terrorized Dr. Ford during an alcoholic rut, promised Senator Susan Collins that he won’t overturn Roe v. Wade. He made the promise to secure her vote.
As the president likes to say, “We’ll see what happens.”
There are so many other fabricated issues; so many “scary” people — immigrant rapists, immigrant invaders, gays and their spouses, black political candidates, Mexicans who vote, socialist doctors, Obama and his ACA, Muslim terrorists, Muslims who aren’t terrorists, native Americans who don’t live in houses or apartments who want to vote, unindicted Hillary and her co-conspirators, lying reporters, homeless people, immigrant children who must be separated from parents and confined in cages, angry mobs of Democrats, and on and so on…. The list of imagined “terrible people” who everyone must fear is as long as America itself.
It’s a white supremacist’s wet-dream — burning crosses with any number of “horrible” people duck-taped to the raging firewood. Ethnic and cultural cleansing of “evil” Americans seems to give supremacists a certain cathartic release. It’s what lynching and castrating were all about decades ago.
Read Trump supporter twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it. They will terrify the uninitiated. It’s always pics of automatic weapons, Confederate and American flags, photos of prominent progressives with target-crosses on their faces, and a little blurb about how much the tweeter hates liberals and loves Jesus and President Trump. Often a Bible verse is added for righteous measure.
People who hate gravitate toward demagogues. The USA has enough haters to elect Nazis to every office in the land. On Tuesday, those of us who have a different opinion of right and wrong are going to find out who is right and who is wrong.
Are we going down like lemmings off a cliff into the maelstrom below? Will Americans drink the Kool-Aid of a Jim Jones sociopath?
We will soon know the truth about our country — if the Russians (or the Republicans who own the voting machines) don’t manipulate the results, as some in our intelligence agencies say they have already. In Texas early voters report that some machines are flipping votes for certain candidates. It’s a bad sign of problems to come on voting day.
Reality Winner is the incarcerated NSA worker who exposed voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. She is serving a five year sentence.
NSA worker Reality Winner is in prison with no access to media, reporters, phones, or computers for a reason, right? Once people lose confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, the alternative is Civil War. We did that once. The war turned into a bloody mess that destroyed a generation of Americans. It’s a war that continues to be fought.
What if a miracle happens? What if the election is fair?
What happens if suppressed voters manage to get to the polls to cast provisional ballots when necessary?
What if all votes are counted; no one tampers with the computers nor the voting machines; everyone stays in line and votes until midnight if necessary in those states where the GOP disrupts minority voting to make it as difficult as humanly possible?
What then?
What if the GOP is thrown out and the Democrats take control of the Senate and the House of Representatives? It seems like a hopeless pipedream, but stranger things have happened.
The president will question the accuracy of the count, of course, and a countdown to revolution will begin by alt-right fanatics who are itching for a fight. They’ve already killed a dozen Jewish people inside a Temple in Pittsburg; they’ve threatened the lives of the most influential Democrats in the country — including two presidents. Right?
Does anyone think that white supremacists are going to end their bloody rampage short of total victory or defeat? Winning is going to be as problematic as losing, unfortunately.
An added burden is that everyone who has an ounce of political sense knows that the president is working with Russian and Israeli mafias to lockdown the country. We are going to become Russia with our own Vladimir Putin if certain oligarchs get their way.
Anyone who isn’t afraid has a false confidence reminiscent of passengers on the Titanic or the Jews who waited eagerly for the Nazis to cleanse them with warm showers.
Are Americans out of their minds? This election shouldn’t be close.
How can evangelicals support the GOP? An impeachment victory by Democrats will ensure that Mike Pence, a sincere Christian by all accounts, will replace a president who had no history of association with any church or group of believers until he made his convenient Faustian covenant with Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
We can impeach and remove our demented president. Some Democrats say Mike Pence will be worse. But sensible people must know that his hand on the nuclear button will be a safer hand, because he isn’t completely crazy like the Donald. Who can’t see it?
Is this lunacy what Americans want? Is this insanity what our brothers and sisters in arms fought and died for in all the wars we’ve won to keep freedom alive?
I don’t think so.
We’ll find out soon enough.
This election is a litmus test. Pray that all of us on both sides can survive and endure the results, which are sure to change America for good or ill.
