Citizens United, Loopholes and Mythology

Let’s face it, the United States has one of the most unfair systems of taxation in the developed world. Start with the fact that the United States has the highest level of income inequality in that developed world. The wealth gap is equally reflective of this disparity. According to the Federal Reserve, the bottom 50% of Americans only controlled roughly 16 times less than those in the top 1%. Wealth in the United States is completely out of whack, and the system is designed to shift the tax burden on earnings and not asset growth (except on sale or death). A rich person can borrow dramatically huge sums secured by their growing wealth, deduct the interest, roll over the debt every few years, and never pay taxes on the loan amount. Most Americans work for a living and pay taxes on their salaries and wages. Hmmm.

To understand income inequality, economists have created a mathematical tool to provide a precise metric. The “Gini coefficient,” also known as the Gini index is the statistical measure which is used to measure the distribution of the income among a population, simply, income inequality.  “The U.S. has the highest Gini coefficient among the G7 nations. The top 1% of earners in the United States earn about 40 times more than the bottom 90% of earners. About 33 million U.S. workers earn less than $10 per hour, placing a family of four below the poverty line.” World Population Review (2022). While President Biden has raised the minimum wage to $15/hour for federal employees and many states have made the same or larger commitment in general, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, set and unchanged since 2009.

The explosion of income inequity in the United States, according to a Pew Research Center report (1/9/20) “is found to have increased by about 20% from 1980 to 2016 (The Gini coefficient ranges from 0 to 1, or from perfect equality to complete inequality). Findings from other researchers show the same general rise in inequality over this period regardless of accounting for in-kind transfers…

“The growth in income in recent decades has tilted to upper-income households. At the same time, the U.S. middle class, which once comprised the clear majority of Americans, is shrinking. Thus, a greater share of the nation’s aggregate income is now going to upper-income households and the share going to middle- and lower-income households is falling.” The gap only widened during the pandemic, as companies were able to shed excess numbers of employees to be replaced with growing AI-driven automation, ultimately increasing efficiencies while maintaining revenues. A few companies – notably those that relied on an in-person mass attendance – suffered; most did not.

A paper released by the Federal Reserve Bank in St Louis (10/16/17), applying the Gini index, noted: “When we analyze countries… separately, interesting patterns emerge. For instance, income inequality in the U.S. is large, despite the U.S. having one of the highest levels of income per capita in our sample. Specifically, the Gini coefficient of the U.S. was 40.46 in 2010, very close to the average Gini coefficient of African countries in our sample… In contrast, Nordic countries in Europe—such as Finland and Sweden—have a similar income per capita as that in the U.S., but much lower Gini coefficients.

“The lower inequality in these countries could be explained by a tax system that redistributes income across countries and includes generous transfers like social security, health insurance and unemployment benefits. In fact, poorly designed tax systems, tax evasion and tax avoidance are part of the reason why Latin American countries have the largest Gini coefficients.” In short, the United States parallels banana republics when it comes to income inequality… by statutory determination. Why? It starts with our already unfair tax code, one further heavily lobbied by corporate America when their ability to fund political campaign issues was unleashed and uncapped by the US Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United vs FEC decision. Hence the 2017 massive corporate tax cut, cutting rates from 35% to 21%.

It is also driven by one of the most basic planks in Republican economic policy: the completely disproven (i.e., it has never worked anywhere on earth) concept of supply-side economics (aka trickledown, incent the job-creators Reaganomics – even Ronald Reagan had to raise taxes because of the resulting shortfalls). The theory goes that if you cut taxes for the mega-rich, they will immediately go out and create high paying jobs by the boatload. Think about that. Assume you are a billionaire with a mega-tax cut. Do you instantly go out, without some fundamental determination of a sound business plan that will make profits, and hire people? Of course not. You didn’t get rich by being knee-jerk stupid. As reflected in the stock buyback frenzy that followed the above noted 2017 slash of our corporate tax rate, there was no significant increase in those good jobs.

These facts reflect why there has been a rise in “take me back to the good old days” populism. Politicians, unwilling to address the fundamental reality of an unfair tax code and a stock market designed to enhance growth of big-investor portfolios (how much of your income is determined by stock ownership?), have embraced a policy of blame, laced with the false promises of supply-side economics, to perpetuate a flawed system the benefits their contributors. That does not seem to dissuade populist voters from keeping these “protectors of the rich” in office. They buy the rhetoric without questioning the substance. Mega-rich corporations often pay zero taxes. 

“[In 2020, for example, a]nalysts determined that the 55 companies, all part of the S&P 500 or Fortune 500, would have paid a combined total of $8.5 billion last year if they had paid at a 21% rate (the statutory federal corporate tax rate) on their profits… Not only did they avoid paying any taxes on their profits, but these companies also received $3.5 billion in tax rebates, according to ITEP [Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy], a left-leaning, non-profit research group that analyzed each firm’s annual financial reports.” Forbes.com, April 2, 2021. Big names like Nike and AmEx.

If we taxed massive wealth at a federal level – primarily in stock ownership and real estate – we might begin to level the playing field. But experts argue that would disincentivize investors from taking big entrepreneurial risks, thus stymying the economy. They point to failed attempts in some European countries at applying such taxes, but none of those efforts focused on mega-wealth. If we established a small tax on accumulated wealth above $5 billion, it would begin to right an egregious wrong. Likewise, implementing a minimum tax, applied before the loopholes kick in, to corporations and mega-wealthy individuals, income inequality might also be tempered. Of course, tackling those loopholes – a fight against Citizen United campaign dollars – would go a much longer way to right the ship.

I’m Peter Dekom, and whatever else is said and done, the United States has one of the least equitable systems of taxation on wealth and high income on earth… at the expense of most of us.

Putting Words in Your Mouth, Expressions on Your Face

Putting Words in Your Mouth, Expressions on Your Face

Trust, Technology & Artificial Intelligence

 65% of Americans do not trust their government to do the right thing. A huge reversal from three quarters of a century ago, with most of the erosion coming in the last quarter century. 70% of Republicans still do not trust that their state and federal governments delivered a free and fair election last November, such that Donald Trump was in fact the duly elected President… despite lacking a shred of meaningful evidence to support that claim, way over a year later… with minions pouring over whatever they can find. Dems call that the “Big Lie,” and statistics and legal investigations seem overwhelmingly to support that description. 

When right-wing media dramatically accused voting machine manufacturers of hooking their stations, via the Internet, to foreign controlled and pro-Biden sources, their lawyers forced massive retractions when it was proven that these machines are never connected to the Internet. Defamation actions are pending.

More recent moments in the sun for right-wing media? During his term in office, President Trump appointed special counsel, John Dunham (still in the Dept of Justice), to investigate the Russian investigation. Trumpy pundits recently layered in a few embellishments on Dunham’s work. They claimed Dunham had solid proof that Hillary Clinton personally pushed the nation’s intelligence agencies to spy on President Trump. To hear Fox News – particularly stalwart anchors like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson who accusedly uttered Hillary’s name literally hundreds of times – and its right-wing mini-networks (OAN and Newsmax), the proof was overwhelming. 

Except on Thursday, February 17th, Dunham distanced himself from the fray, and explained that his investigation had nothing to do with spying on President Trump; he was only investigating what had occurred during the Obama administration. All these news outlets fell embarrassingly silent almost immediately. Hillary mumbled that perhaps all these actions had risen to “actual malice,” the threshold to sustain any defamation litigation against a public news network or publication.

Even though these days the most significant and massive political mendacity seems to come from the Trump-dominated Republican Party, the Dems are hardly above embellishment and fabrication when the mood suits them. And if political parties can lie at this magnitude of malignant fabrication based on innuendo, conspiracy theories and embellishment… without “proof”… what happens when they can manufacture “proof” (or a damned good semblance thereof) that becomes exceptionally difficult to refute. Particularly for those who form their opinions on first impression… when that “impression” jibes with what they want to believe.

Every couple of months, I check into the world of computer-generated audio-video “realistic” simulations. It still takes a bit of expertise and sophisticated software to do it to a level of virtual undetectability, but increasingly off-the-shelf programs, available to anybody, are coming very close to the level of resolution and vocal replication of film and television professionals. And if you want to be afraid, even the title of a report (accepted for publication on December 20th) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences for the United States should terrify you: AI-synthesized faces are indistinguishable from real faces and more trustworthy by Sophie J. Nightingale and Hany Farid (an academic psychologist and comp sci engineer).

Based on an extensive series of recognition experiments, bottom line, test subjects in this study often preferred the synthetic persona as “real” and found the genuine audio-visual representations as “fake.” The authors warn us: “Artificial intelligence (AI)–synthesized text, audio, image, and video are being weaponized for the purposes of nonconsensual intimate imagery, financial fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Our evaluation of the photorealism of AI-synthesized faces indicates that synthesis engines have passed through the uncanny valley and are capable of creating faces that are indistinguishable—and more trustworthy—than real faces.

“Artificial intelligence (AI)–powered audio, image, and video synthesis—so-called deep fakes—has democratized access to previously exclusive Hollywood-grade, special effects technology. From synthesizing speech in anyone’s voice (1) to synthesizing an image of a fictional person (2) and swapping one person’s identity with another or altering what they are saying in a video (3), AI-synthesized content holds the power to entertain but also deceive.

“Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are popular mechanisms for synthesizing content. A GAN pits two neural networks—a generator and discriminator—against each other. To synthesize an image of a fictional person, the generator starts with a random array of pixels and iteratively learns to synthesize a realistic face. On each iteration, the discriminator learns to distinguish the synthesized face from a corpus of real faces; if the synthesized face is distinguishable from the real faces, then the discriminator penalizes the generator. Over multiple iterations, the generator learns to synthesize increasingly more realistic faces until the discriminator is unable to distinguish it from real faces…

“Perhaps most pernicious is the consequence that, in a digital world in which any image or video can be faked, the authenticity of any inconvenient or unwelcome recording can be called into question… Although progress has been made in developing automatic techniques to detect deep-fake content current techniques are not efficient or accurate enough to contend with the torrent of daily uploads… The average consumer of online content, therefore, must contend with sorting out the real from the fake.” 

In a world of mass political deception, the proclivity of once “trusted” political leaders and major media figures knowingly to lie and accept the falsehoods of untrustworthy sources, imbuing them with their imprimatur of “authenticity,” the big and very unanswered question remains: can a “free speech” democracy survive? Replay the siege on the Michigan State Capitol on April 30th of last year, the Unite the Right Charlottesville, Virginia protest in August of 2017 and last, but hardly least, the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol attempting to reverse election results by violence… and reach your own conclusion. The above sequential photographs are real people reacting to fake news. Imagine how these people could justify their violence if they had “graphic proof” in support of their pernicious views.

I’m Peter Dekom, and every day we learn a little bit more about the fragility of the American experiment with Democracy… which is facing so many existential threats.

The Fire the Next Time

“Too often, our response is tardy, costly, and after the fact, with many countries 

suffering from a chronic lack of investment in planning and prevention.” 

UN Report on the increasing number and intensity of climate change caused wildfires

Among other issues, the recent, pre-Ukraine invasion, Sino-Russian accord addressed the continued supply of fossil fuels from Russia to China, obviously acknowledging a Russian expectation that exports to Europe would be curtailed. China attempted to cast a supportive wink to Russia as the latter saber-rattled against Western provocation and Ukrainian threats to Russian-backed separatists. But once Russia invaded to almost universal condemnation, China began sending messages that supporting overwhelming Russian aggression might not have been part of their bargain. Nevertheless, since both China and Russia are massive contributors to greenhouse gasses, their participation in addressing global climate change is essential. Catch-22. Tackling climate change requires global cooperation. Russia has to be part of the equation.

This completely unnecessary and unjustified war comes on the heels of United Nations sponsored research on what planet earth can expect in the near future with wildfires. The report was horrific. The report, Spreading like Wildfire: The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires, was released on February 23rd on the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) website, which summarized “that climate change and land-use change are making wildfires worse and anticipates a global increase of extreme fires even in areas previously unaffected. Uncontrollable and extreme wildfires can be devastating to people, biodiversity and ecosystems. They also exacerbate climate change, contributing significant greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.

“UNEP is issuing an urgent call to governments to rethink their approach to extreme wildfires. By calling for a new ‘Fire Ready Formula’ and recognizing the important role of ecosystem restoration, we can minimize the risk of extreme wildfires by being better prepared and building back better in their aftermath.” Basically, most of the world’s governments are woefully unprepared for what appears to be inevitable. Matthew Brown, writing for the February 23rd Los Angeles Times, accentuates some of the harshest risks outlined by the report:

“The Western U.S., northern Siberia, central India and eastern Australia already are seeing more blazes, and the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires globally could increase by a third by 2050 and more than 50% by the turn of the century, according to the report from the United Nations Environment Program… Areas once considered safe from major fires won’t be immune, including the Arctic, which the report said was ‘very likely to experience a significant increase in burning.’… Tropical forests in Indonesia and the southern Amazon of South America also are likely to see increased wildfires, the report concluded.” For those of us in the fire-prone Western states like California, the message is frighteningly clear, as Haley Smith, writing for the February 24th Los Angeles Times tells us:

“Even the Arctic, previously all but immune to the threat, faces growing wildfire risk because of climate change and other factors, according to the report, which was published Wednesday ahead of the upcoming U.N. Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya… The findings likely sound all too familiar to California residents, who for years have been living with the reality of hotter, more frequent and more intense wildfires. The five largest blazes recorded in the state have all occurred since 2018, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

“Yet the new report shines a light on the hard lessons California is learning — including what it’s getting right and what more needs to be done. In the fire-prone American West and around the world, too much focus remains on response instead of preparation. What’s more, wildfires pose urgent questions about land use and public health that extend far beyond the boundaries of their flames.

“‘We hear that people in D.C. think of fire as a Western issue, or a Californian issue, but it really isn’t — it’s a global issue,’ said Max Moritz, a wildfire specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension in Santa Barbara who contributed to the report. ‘It affects all of us.’… [The report notes] that most governments typically dedicate more than half of their wildfire spending to response and less than 1% to planning.

“In some ways, then, California is already ahead of the curve. Gov. Gavin Newsom last year unveiled a $15-billion climate change package, which included $1.5 billion for wildfire response and forest resilience. This year’s proposed budget adds $1.2 billion, much of it for forest thinning, prescribed burns and other projects intended to reduce fire risks.

“But while the numbers reflect a shift toward preparedness, more can be done. The state last year also spent more than $1.1 billion in fire suppression emergency costs, according to Cal Fire… California’s response is [however] lacking in clarity, according to a separate report from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, which found that additional wildfire funds are merited ‘given the worsening pattern of large and severe wildfires in recent years’ but that an ‘absence of a strategic wildfire plan makes it difficult to assess’ whether the proposed plans are the best approach.

“Wildfire adaption doesn’t end with budgets and finances, however. Stronger regional and international cooperation, as well as the incorporation of shared best practices, can help elevate the global response, the U.N. report said… One such tool is prescribed burning, a practice that involves the intentional use of fire to clear away the dried vegetation that accumulates over time. The practice is not new in California: For centuries, many of the state’s Indigenous communities considered prescribed burns essential for forest health and employed it to great success.” 

Bottom line: even the best-intentioned efforts to combat this scourge suggest that we still really don’t know what we are doing. We better learn… fast. I wince after massive fires wipe out entire communities… and watch local residents begin rebuilding in the same fire-prone area. We are stubborn, but there comes a point where stubborn is simply not sustainable.

I’m Peter Dekom, and global cooperation, research, data and open continuing dialog are essential if we are ever going to get terrifying wildfire damage under control. 

American Complicity in Russia’s Invasion

 

“[T]here’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.” 

President Donald Trump in a call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, on July 25, 2019.

“Yesterday, reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart. I said, of course, he’s smart…. 

Yes, he’s smart. The NATO nations and indeed the world as he looks over what’s happening strategically, 

with no repercussions or threats whatsoever. They’re not so smart. They’re looking like the opposite of smart… 

The problem is not that Putin is smart . . . it's that our leaders are dumb." 

Donald Trump at #CPAC February 27, 2022.

Like it or not, the words of the President of the United States, while in office acting in his official capacity, are usually and properly construed as the voice of the nation itself. The first quote noted above, an excerpt from a call between two presidents (Trump for the United States and Zelensky for Ukraine) took place more than a year before the 2020 American presidential election. Trump was already attempting to discredit possible Democratic rivals for the office. His lead henchman in this effort was his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, often bolstered by Trump’s use of individuals he appointed to high federal office for his personal agenda. 

At the time, Russia was deploying its notorious “little green men,” Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms fighting purportedly as Russian-speaking Ukrainians, in the easternmost provinces of Ukraine. Zelensky desperately needed $391 million of combined humanitarian and military aid approved by the US Congress to sustain resisting that clandestine Russian effort. Delivery of that aid was subject to implementation by the US military and the Executive Branch. When Zelensky did not jump at Trump’s telephonic request to find dirt on the Bidens, Trump simply froze that shipment to Ukraine. Ukraine needed that shipment immediately, but…

Decried for using his office and his diplomatic power to foster personal gains without any direct benefit to the United States, Trump was impeached over that call. Evading conviction by the lockstep vote of a majority of Republicans in the Senate, deeply fearful of losing that dedicated Trump base essential to sustain their electability, the former President was saved from what might have generated a genuine conviction under a less polarized and more constitutionally responsible Senate. It was to be only Trump’s first impeachment.

When you combine Trump’s almost sycophantic fawning all over Vladimir Putin every time they met or spoke with Putin’s wink-wink election interference in the 2016 election focused on discrediting Trump’s opponent, a fact established by every federal intelligence agency, you begin to see a pattern that would ultimately embolden Putin, imbue him with a belief that the United States was unconcerned with his expansionist vision for Russia, to invade Ukraine. Aside from the weakening polarization efforts in his divide and conquer strategy to maintain person power – efforts that led both China and Russia to believe that the United States was seriously unraveling – Trump’s outright efforts to isolate the United States further sustained these autocrats’ belief that they had little to fear from an American paper tiger.

Indeed, Trump’s proclivity to cozy up to dictators, withdraw from treaty commitments and pursue a go-it-alone “America First” policy that alienated most of our nation’s traditional allies, even Trump’s unabashed antipathy for NATO itself, further added to the Russian belief that neither the United States nor the highly US-dependent NATO alliance would be serious barriers to Putin’s ambitions. Certainly, the whimpering and minimal Western “sanctions” resulting from Putin’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea substantiated that this laissez-faire attitude was also shared by Democrats. 

Throw in a very elderly Joe Biden, famous for slips of the tongue often attributed to the effects of age, governing a deeply divided nation – as Trump continued to voice that he was the victim of a fraudulent election without any meaningful proof – and Putin’s self-confidence could only grow. Biden’s awkward withdrawal from Afghanistan only reinforced Putin’s negative image of the new American President. Democrats and Republicans!

Putin’s view of NATO and the United States found more reasons to write us off. Writing for the March 21st Los Angeles Times, Tracy Wilkerson and Sarah D. Wire, add these thoughts to Putin’s smoldering fire: “Numerous experts and current and former officials say Putin was emboldened by the Trump years. The former KGB officer turned president ably manipulated Trump into publicly backing his denials of having interfered — to Trump’s benefit — in U.S. elections. And, according to former aides, Putin convinced Trump to accept his claim that Ukraine was part of Russia.

“It is impossible to know all of Putin’s thinking as he launched the ferocious war that has already claimed thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives and obliterated parts of the fledgling democracy that sought to strengthen ties with the West.

“By most accounts, Putin stewed in grievances for years — the expansion of NATO farther east into his sphere of influence, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a post-Cold War world order that marginalized Russia — waiting for an opportunity to build back his vision of a grand Russian superpower empire…

“‘I think Putin saw how Trump viewed Ukraine ... as a pawn,’ Marie Yovanovitch, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who testified against Trump in the impeachment trial, said in a recent TV appearance. Putin saw ‘that we had an administration that was willing to trade our national security for personal and political gain.’ 

“Fiona Hill, a highly regarded Russia expert who served on Trump’s National Security Council and also testified during the impeachment trial, said the former administration did take steps against Moscow on other issues, expelling diplomats and imposing sanctions. But at a ‘critical period,’ when Ukraine was fighting Russia and needed weapons, Trump had his own political future in mind… It sent ‘a message to Putin that Ukraine is a plaything for him ... and for the United States. And that nobody’s really serious about protecting Ukraine,’ Hill added. ‘And that was ultimately a sign of weakness.’”

As Putin was on the precipice of invading Ukraine, Donald Trump continued in his adulation of the Russian President, calling him a “savvy” “genius.” Putin sensed that the United States was more destabilized than ever. The above second quote simply underscored our weakness and former President Trump’s continued ability to keep America deeply divided. Trump still had escaped any criminal indictment; he was not convicted by the Senate and did not face any challenges to his leadership of the GOP; he still had maintained the powerful support of his base. He was strong. He was untouchable. And Putin knew that with a weak and unraveling United States, now was a good time to take Ukraine.

I’m Peter Dekom, and like it or not, the United States set the stage, provided a greenlight if you will, to Putin’s decision to invade and conquer Ukraine.

Living in an Alternatrive Universe

  

Vladimir Putin’s depiction of an American incented Ukrainian genocide, “Nazification” in his words, against Russian-speaking Ukrainians is at the core of his justification for an unprovoked invasion and full-on war against his neighboring country. To Putin, NATO and Europe are mere puppets of the mendacious American regime where there is no fair and balanced reporting, with almost all media outlets towing the Biden line. Except for one American news network, Americans, he states, are being fed a litany of falsehoods by their government. That network is Trump-favorite, Fox.

According to the March 21st Daily Digest, “Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has praised the Fox News coverage of the war in Ukraine. Despite the increasing isolation that Putin and his government are facing, the Kremlin still finds a few good friends in this critical time and the conservative news cable channel seems one of them… ‘We understood long ago there's no independent Western news media,’ Lavrov was quoted by The Guardian on March 18. ‘If you take the United States, only Fox News is trying to present some alternative point of view.’

“These praises are unsurprising. Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, the host of the most-watched cable news program in the United States, derided that the Ukraine conflict was ‘a mere border dispute’ just before the invasion. Since then, Carlson has tried to recant his previous statements.” Excerpts from several of Carlson’s pro-Russian statements on Fox have been prominently featured on Russian state-control media as evidence of the “lies” being told by the US government to its people, with few daring to contradict that position.

It is illegal in Russia to describe as “war” what Putin insists is merely a “special military operation” to prevent Nazi leadership, under Ukraine’s beloved President Volodymyr Zelensky (himself Jewish whose family endured through the WWII real Nazi Holocaust), where only military targets are being damaged. The global images of decimated residences, schools, hospitals and thousands of slaughtered civilians are fake, according to the Russian government. Even as Russian soldiers in the field are telling their relatives in Russia that the war is very real, civilians targets routine and that they not only not being greeted as liberators by locals, but they are also indeed being killed by them… their relatives all too often reject that reality from the front. 

The few civilian casualties, Russia claims, are those unfortunates being used by Ukraine as human shields to legitimate military targets. The 141 out of 193 nation censure of Russia by the United Nations General Assembly is never reported, only the perfidy of the West baiting Russia with threats of NATO expansionism, replete with a non-existent US-supplied biological/chemical warfare laboratory in Ukraine. Sounds like the Bush administration’s touting of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq. 

But given the plethora of global opprobrium against Russia, the mass of visual evidence of Russian imposed death and destruction on innocents all over Ukraine, Americans are dumbfounded by the naïve belief of a vast majority of Russians of Putin’s “just cause” in stopping Nazi genocide, echoes of Russia’s historical elevation of their triumph against Nazi’s in WWII – The Great Patriotic War, that every Russian learns about in school. Yet Russia has a fully controlled press; all media is now state media. Getting information from any other source, which seems to have incented some Russians to defy authority and risk long prison sentences in their protects, is flatly illegal.

Mass belief in the absurd is understandable in a totalitarian regime with only state-controlled media. That so many Russians believe in mythology; Americans stare in disbelief. Yet here in the United States, the populist right, still controlled by Putin admirer Donald Trump, is a mass constituency of diehard adherents to equally absurd mythologies. 

Like QAnon. “QAnon's core belief is that the world is controlled by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping child molesters whom Trump is secretly battling to stop, and that Q, an anonymous entity, reveals details about the battle online. The cabal is thought to cover up its existence by controlling politicians, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Q's revelations imply that the destruction of the cabal is imminent but also that it will only be accomplished with the support of the ‘patriots’ who make up the QAnon community. This will happen at a time known as ‘the Event’ or ‘the Storm’, when thousands of people will be arrested and possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay prison or to face military tribunals.” Wikipedia. As ultra-right-wing Senator Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) attempts to paint Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, as soft on pedophiles (she isn’t based on actual records), it’s abundantly clear which playbook and constituency he is attempting to satisfy.

QAnon has a lot of believers, by the way: “Washington, we have a problem — politically, informationally and societally — when 15 percent of Americans agree with the QAnon statement that the U.S. government, media and financial worlds ‘are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation.’… Or when 20 percent agree with this statement: ‘There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.’” NBCNews.com, 5/27/21

To this day, the majority of Republicans still believe, as Donald Trump continues to insist, that Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020. Every red state has passed or has legislation pending intended to purge fraudulent voting from their process – despite no meaningful evidence of voter fraud – which has the secondary intended impact of denying equal voting access to voters likely to tilt Democrat. This belief was so strong that hundreds if not thousands of Americans were willing to attack the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to reverse the election, and to this day, Donald Trump refers to them as “patriots,” whom he may well pardon if he returns to the presidency in 2024. 

What’s more, those who opposed COVID vaccines manufactured falsehoods claiming the vaccine planted thought-control chips in their bodies, induced magnetic fields, altered their genes or inflicted damage far worse than the disease itself, that a horse de-wormer and hydroxychloroquine cured COVID. All absolutely medically proven false. Governors and legislators in red states are telling adoring constituents that public school teachers are promulgating Marxism and homosexuality in their classrooms. Without any genuine evidence. These states are passing laws to ban such teachings. They call it an important facet of their battle against a non-existent “culture war.” Seriously. Who are we to call the kettle black?

    I’m Peter Dekom, and when we deride the “Nazi genocide” falsehood at the core of Putin’s global message… and the hordes who believe it… perhaps we should take a long hard look at ourselves first.