The Big Lie Exposed

 When what you really want to do is overthrow the Government, any excuse will do.  Trump is not the leader of a movement that stormed the Capitol.  The energy behind the mini-uprising has been brewing for decades and Trump has come along and provided space for it to bloom.  He stoked the anger embers of sullen malcontents with bellows and bellowing and he did it with unprecedented ease using a new tool called social media.  And in the end he backed down.  He didn't march with his followers to the Capitol, he rather jumped into his Presidential motorcade and hustled back to his bunker to watch, to see if chaos and violence could impact the real game, the vote count.

We need to set aside, at least for the moment, the deluded belief that the Vice President could simply refuse to recognize state certified vote counts from Electors chosen on November 3rd.  This strays into the mental state of Trump, his total lack of understanding of how governments work, his near total ignorance of history, and his mistaken belief that the mob was really his to command.  Peeling away the onion of motivations of those who gathered to use Trump for their own ends is fodder for a dozen entries and though it is far more important than the question before us, we must first clear the debris left by the mob, and expose once and for all "The Big Lie."  Suffice it to say that Trump, out of desperation and not by design, thought that Pence could pull a rabbit out of his hat and make Biden go away.

We also need to set aside the fact that Trump is the leader of a cult. Yes, there were many cult followers gathered at the Capitol on that Wednesday.  And yes they are a big reason why The Big Lie has been given so much oxygen to live and grow.  I can only assume that there are people who actually believe that Trump won fair and square and it is being taken away from him by hateful Liberals and traitorous Republicans.  But the question before us is not why cult followers will hand over cups of poisoned Kool Aid to their own children, it is another question altogether.  Was election fraud the true motivation for those bent on mayhem and murder?  Was the mob simply cult members who went amok?  

We posit that the answer is no.  Trump tried to use the mob for his own convoluted totally misguided plan, but in fact Trump and his cult is being used as cover for what we will call here The Boil.  The Boil is not a coherent movement but rather an infection that grows unseen under the surface only to erupt when the opportunity presents itself.  In this case it is not caused by a single pathogen but rather arises from a river of disease, some named and some unnamed.  Nazis, White Supremacists, KKK, etc. are currents that run in this river but they tend to disguise the true source of the malady.  A source so insidious and so pervasive that we need to set it aside for future analysis.

Finally we need to set aside power hungry Craven Politicians as the problem behind the The Big Lie, they are but another group trying to leverage it for their own means.  Yes they deserve our scorn and warrant further study but anger towards them diverts us just as truly as does our anger against Trump.  Like The Boil, they do not actually believe The Big Lie, but they are less dangerous to us because their motives are so transparent that sooner or later they will whither and die.

So how did The Big Lie come to be used by The Cult, The Boil and Craven Politicians culminating in a pitiful and tragic circus?  That is a question so complicated and rich we set it aside for now.  Our focus here is why did the confluence of these three streams expose The Big Lie for what it is? We put forward three explanations.

1. The Big Lie is simply too ridiculous for Craven Politicians to defend.  And the system held.  The courts laughed, the military stood firm and common sense prevailed.

2. Trump is a bully and despite his persistence and total lack of moral fiber, in the end he backed down.  He would have lost in any case but his cowardice did not go unnoticed and he never was really in charge of the mob.  Or if he was he gave it over to chaos.  A big lie is simply not enough reason to overthrow this government.  The Cult is hollow.

3. The Boil did not choose its moment wisely.  A cowardly bully is not a good front for a sustainable revolution.  Especially if that revolution has no focus and no purpose.  Anger and discontent and frustration and paranoia alone cannot feed a revolution.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that The Boil did not choose at all.  It erupted prematurely and will be lanced and bathed in antiseptic.  It will not be killed.  It will live to erupt another day in another way.

So what can we take from this?  What lesson can we learn?

Perhaps the most important lesson is that Trump is not the problem.  The Cult will fade, Craven Politicians will be voted out eventually.  But The Boil will not simply go away.  The propaganda which serves to preserve wealth and power and privilege also feeds distrust.  The resulting inequalities have not been managed well. Whiteness, education, and property have been exposed and will not last as markers to differentiate the elite from the masses.  The last bastion, the abstraction of wealth, will not stand forever.  The question is could The Boil, which is now totally disorganized, be harnessed in the future by someone far smarter and more sinister than Trump.  Can The Boil be cauterized, and cured?

Or will the abstraction of wealth not be the last bastion?  Will propaganda become old hat and new dynamics emerge that are driven by an ever more twisted Cable of connected cells fueled by pervasive technology?  Or will elites figure it out and curb their excesses to avoid a real revolution?  Will they neutralize The Boil but keep it alive?