Freefall

Well, voting day is done, and although the dust has yet to settle, it appears to have gone as badly as it possibly could have.

I'm sick to my stomach right now, and it's going to take me a long time to process this.  The nation I live in, and thought I understood, has apparently chosen to hand the reins of power to an egocentric, megalomanic sociopath who has never cared about a single thing other than his own self-aggrandizement.  He has no morals, no ethics, no conscience, and over half the United States thinks that he's who we want (for a second time) as leader.

To say I'm sick at heart is a vast understatement.  I'm also deeply, deeply mystified at how nothing this man does ever seems to alienate his followers.  How could what he's done not make a difference?  You MAGA types claim to be "values voters," so where are your values?

Very early on, Trump publicly mocked a disabled reporter,  He called women "fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals" -- then was asked about this comment at a debate by (very conservative) moderator Megyn Kelly.  He gave a waffling answer, but afterward said about Kelly in an interview with Don Lemon, "She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions.  You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever."  Worse, he -- now infamously -- said in an interview that when you're famous, women will let you do anything, up to including "grabbing them by the pussy."

None of this, apparently, was enough to convince you that this man is amoral.

He's a convicted felon 34 times over, faces numerous other charges that have yet to go to trial, is an adjudicated sex abuser and a multiply-accused rapist, including of under-age girls.  Of course, now he's certain to pardon himself for everything, but the fact remains that these convictions and allegations stand.

And that wasn't enough, either.

He claimed that failing to clap for his speeches was "treason."  He called the press "the enemy of the people" and just last week said that he wouldn't object if his followers "shot through the fake news" -- as well as specifically aiming their guns and firing at Liz Cheney, a Republican who has been a vocal critic of Trump and MAGA.  He said outright he'd be a dictator "from day one," and that his first priority would be exacting revenge against his critics, whom he calls "the enemy within."

We tried to lay out the obvious parallels with pre-World-War-II Nazi propaganda, but you weren't listening.

Speaking of the World Wars, in 2018 on a trip to Europe he refused to go to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery to honor the fallen American soldiers, and he said, "Why should I go to that cemetery?  It's filled with losers."  His contempt for veterans is incontrovertible; he commented on John McCain's service with a dismissive comment of "I like people who weren't captured."  This from someone who was deferred from service because of apparently imaginary bone spurs.

But that didn't do it, either.

He's stated that he's going to hand over economic control of the government to the man who took one of the most successful social media platforms ever created and drove it into the ground and the control of health care to a raving lunatic who wants to end vaccination and remove fluoride from tap water, and his response to the escalating climate crisis is "Drill baby drill, and frack frack frack!"

Those apparently don't alarm you in the least.

It seems like any one of these should have been sufficient, but the fact is, all of this stuff put together didn't make a single damn bit of difference.  He still had fervent support from evangelical Christians despite in an interview being unable to come up with a single Bible verse he liked, and calling the New Testament book "Two Corinthians."  He's a pathological liar, a serial adulterer, a financial cheat, and he and his kids were found guilty of stealing money from a children's cancer charity.  And yet the religious subset of MAGA acted as if he were the Second Coming of Christ, even creating images like this one:

This is the man you've chosen to run our country.

I'm angry, scared, confused, and lord have mercy, I am exhausted to the core of my being.  The voters have handed our country to monsters -- not only Trump, but right-wing extremists like J. D. Vance and the architects of Project 2025.  We are going to see the United States turned into a place where women, minorities, legal immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, atheists, and dissenters are not safe.

You voted for that.  I don't give a flying fuck what your reason was; you MAGA types chose to cast your vote for everything he represents and all the long, long litany of horrible things he's said and done.  And whatever happens next, you own every last bit of it.

I don't know what else to say.  I, and other moderates and liberals, feel like we're in freefall right now.  

I will continue to speak out, to my last breath.  But right now, mostly what I want to do is weep.

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Wallnau's witches

I've noticed a tendency amongst some people that is a little bit like what would happen if the sunk-cost fallacy had an unholy bastard child with confirmation bias.  It occurs when someone has put so much of their time, effort, money, and emotional energy into something that when it's proven wrong, they simply can't accept it -- and start casting around for explanations, however ridiculous or far-fetched, to account for it.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who watched Tuesday's presidential candidates' debate that I'm talking about the supporters of Donald Trump.  A friend of mine commented that prior performances by Trump had set the bar so low that all he had to do in order to win the debate was not shit his pants while in front of the camera, and he couldn't even manage that much.  Kamala Harris -- who was a lawyer, and is a skilled orator who knows how to use her opponents' weaknesses against them -- kept baiting Trump over and over, and Trump couldn't help himself.  He took the bait every damn time, with the result that his side of the debate was an incoherent rant about everything from "the kind of numbers I'm talking about, because child care is child care" (direct quote, that) to his having the best rallies in the history of politics to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's cats and dogs for dinner.

Confronted with their beloved candidate doing what can only be called a complete face-plant in front of millions of viewers, the MAGA types had to figure out how Mr. Stable Genius came across as a barely comprehensible, probably demented nutjob who couldn't stick to the script long enough to answer a single question.  I've already seen one Trump supporter claiming that the only reason Harris did so well is that she was being fed answers through an earpiece.  (Was Trump wearing an earpiece that sucked answers out of his brain?)  Another, following the "Declare victory and go home" strategy, simply said that Trump won the debate and that was that.  But no one has come up with an explanation as creative -- and by "creative," I mean "absolutely batshit crazy" -- as Pastor Lance Wallnau.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly be familiar with Wallnau's name, because he's been something of a frequent flier here.  Amongst his more "creative" ideas in the past:

• the January 6 rioters were there at the Capitol to "pick up trash."
• all of Trump's enemies would be struck down by God in May of 2024.  (It's currently September.  We're still waiting.)
• back in 2020, he declared that God would cure Rush Limbaugh's cancer and save his life.  (Despite this, Limbaugh died in February of 2021.)
• Wallnau "took authority" over Hurricane Maria in 2017, and ordered it in the name of Jesus to miss Puerto Rico.  (It didn't.)
• angels "dusted his face with gold flakes" because he loves Trump so much.
• the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (resulting in one person's death) were "paid actors" because white supremacists don't exist.

Now, Wallnau is responding to Trump's catastrophically bad performance Tuesday night -- apparently even the good pastor can't stretch the truth enough to pretend Trump was brilliant -- by saying that he flopped because he was under an evil spell cast by the moderators, who are actually witches.  Here's the quote in toto because otherwise you'll think I'm making this up:

When I say "witchcraft" I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult-empowered deception, manipulation and domination.  That’s what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala’s script handlers set up the kill box.  One-sided questions and fact checking sealed the box.  Witchcraft.  It’s not over yet, but something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again and her deception is advancing.

I dunno, Lance, every clip I've heard from Trump's rallies sounds like incoherent babbling, too, so what are you saying?  The "occult-empowered witches" are following him around?

Of course, Wallnau probably would answer that with a resounding "yes, of course they are."  And the more troubling part about this is not that Wallnau is a wacko crank spouting nonsense -- which, after all, is what wacko cranks do -- but that he's listened to, and taken seriously by, thousands of people.

Look, I get how hard it is to admit you were wrong, especially when you've invested a lot of your heart into something or someone.  But this goes beyond conservative versus liberal.  I know a good many people who lean right, and that's just fine; we might disagree on various issues, but those things we can discuss.

But how anyone at this point can look at that incoherent, babbling blowhard and think he's fit to run a country is absolutely beyond comprehension.

Wallnau apparently does, though, to the extent that he's blaming Tuesday night's fiasco on witchcraft.  Couldn't possibly be because he hitched his wagon to someone who was incompetent from the outset, but has since then demonstrated a level of fitness that includes publicly sucking up to dictators like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, and claiming that he can levy taxes on foreign countries, that there are states where it is legal to "execute babies after birth," and that white people are being denied the COVID vaccine because of their race.  It's so bad that Wikipedia actually has a page called "False or Misleading Statements by Donald Trump," which -- counting only the ones in public record that have been adequately fact-checked -- number in the tens of thousands.  Donnel Stern, writing in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2019, said, "We expect politicians to stretch the truth.  But Trump is a whole different animal...  He lies as policy, and will say anything to satisfy his supporters or himself."

So.  Yeah.  I'm probably doomed to disappointment in thinking that this might change anyone's mind, but hell, hope springs eternal and all that kinda stuff.  You never know, though.  Maybe Wallnau's witches are on to something.  I could try casting a few spells and seeing if it moves the poll numbers a notch.

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