The eyes have it

Two nights ago I had dinner with some friends at my favorite local eatery, Atlas Bowl (best burgers I've ever had, bar none), and true to form I arrived ten minutes before they did.  So I was sitting at the table waiting for them, having a nice cold pint of beer, and I happened to overhear a conversation going on at the next table.

A very earnest, if hipsterish, young man with a fedora and a goatee was holding forth to two women about a mutual friend.  "He's trying change his eye color using meditation," he said.

One of the women sounded a little dubious.  "Really?  How would that work?"

"Well, I don't know how it works," he said, "but he's researched it.  He wants purple eyes."

"Have they changed yet?" the other woman asked.

"I dunno.  I don't think so.  But he's still working on it."

As for me, I was trying to give no indication that I was eavesdropping, but I'm afraid that I was sitting there looking like this:

After a few minutes, my friends showed up, and some time into our meal (after the folks at the next table had finished dinner, paid up, and left), I told them about the conversation.

One of my friends gave me an incredulous look.  "Dude," he said, "does this loopy shit follow you around, or something?"

Sadly, I think he might be correct.  I do seem to overhear or otherwise run into more "loopy shit" than most people -- or perhaps it's just dart-thrower's bias.  I've simply trained my mind to be more aware of it, so I notice it more often than other people might.

Anyhow, when I got back home, I thought, "how widespread is this claim, that you can change your eye color through meditation?"

So I googled it.

Holy crap.  It turns out this isn't just one misinformed hipster.  This is actually a big thing.  There are multiple websites and YouTube videos about it, giving you helpful directions on how to end up with purple eyes (or whatever color you prefer).  And I'm thinking, "How have I not heard about this before?"

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole thing is called biokinesis, and is used not just to change your eye color, but to change your hair color, hair texture, skin color, presence or absence of freckles, height, and (go big or go home) your DNA.  Check out this website, wherein we are given as proof a highly convincing gif of a girl who blinks and her eyes change from dark brown to light blue.

So how does this work?  I mean, it doesn't, but how do they claim it works?  Perhaps a direct quote would explain it best:

The Secret is the belief, it is the faith that does not doubt or questions, but one that really felt with emotion and feeling, without faith or belief not we as people, because we have something called Subconscious that creates our reality on the basis of the experiences that we've had in this plan that we call "reality" if it were not our 5 senses do not know how this is really the world, or we think it is.  

Open the mind my friends to quantum physics is there to prove things that until then were seen as "science Fiction" or "Illusion", are now making much more sense than the physics of Newton had.

Okay, readers, plug your ears, 'cuz I'm gonna yell.

QUANTUM PHYSICS HAS ABSOUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH CHANGING YOUR HAIR COLOR THROUGH SUBCONSCIOUS FAITH BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE YOU SHOULD HAVE CURLY BLACK LOCKS, YOU FUCKING LOON.

*takes a deep breath*

Okay, I feel a little better now.

But really.  I'm all in favor of meditation, but your eye color (and all of the other characteristics aforementioned) are not going to change simply because you wish you had sparkling blue eyes.  The fact is, there's this pesky little thing called DNA that controls your eye color.

Oh, wait.  The biokinesis people think meditation can change that, too.

I truly understand people's wish to have reality be other than it is, all the way down to being dissatisfied with our appearance.  I have fervently wished for some years that my hair color was other than the rather indeterminate shade of dirty blond I was handed by my parents, and heaven knows I'd improve my other features if I could.  But barring plastic surgery, which I am nowhere near vain enough to go for, there aren't any other options.

Not even "meditating about quantum physics."

But I do have to wonder why I run into this stuff so often.  At least I had enough common sense not to turn to the guy at the next table and say, "Um, you do realize that's ridiculous, right?"  I felt like I had no choice but to tell my loyal readers about it, however.

And if the young hipster who was sitting next to me a couple of nights ago should read this, allow me to apologize if I snorted into my beer a couple of times over something you said.  Don't take it personally.  It's an involuntary reaction I have when people around me talk bullshit, especially when it has to do with purple eyes.

Nevertheless, we persist

I've found it increasingly hard to be optimistic about the future, lately.

Consider what's happened in only the last two days:

• The stupendously unqualified Betsy DeVos was confirmed as Secretary of Education by a 50-50 vote in the Senate, broken by Vice President Mike Pence's vote in favor.  DeVos's nomination for the position is perhaps best explained by a direct quote from her:  "My family is the biggest contributor of soft money to the Republican Party.  I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence.  Now I simply concede the point.  They are right.  We do expect something in return.  We expect a return on our investment."
• Donald Trump lied in a claim alleging that the media doesn't cover terrorism because of "reasons":  "All over Europe, it's happening," Trump said.  "It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported, and in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it.  They have their reasons, and you understand that."  The Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check site Politifact debunked this completely -- western media overreports terrorism as compared to media in other parts of the world, and in fact, stories about terrorist attacks dominate all sorts of media across the board in Europe and North America.
• Donald Trump lied again when he said that the homicide rate in the United States is the "highest it's been in 45 to 47  years," when in fact it peaked in the mid-1990s and has been declining ever since.
• Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to Donald Trump, stated that any criticism of Trump would be labeled "fake news":  "There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media, not just the pollsters, the majority of the media to attack a duly elected President in the second week of his term," Gorka said. "That's how unhealthy the situation is and until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, 'fake news.'"  Add to that a tweet from Trump himself stating that "any negative polls are fake news."
• Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced by Mitch McConnell from reading a letter from Coretta Scott King calling into question the fitness for office of Jeff Sessions, nominee for Attorney General.  McConnell used a rule that stops a senator from criticizing another senator on the Senate floor, and the vote to shut Warren up went (predictably) along party lines.  "She was warned," McConnell said. "She was given an explanation.  Nevertheless, she persisted."  Warren shot back, "They can shut me up, but they can't change the truth."

It's easy to get overwhelmed.  We are so bombarded by crazy claims, bluster, egregious lies, and outright suppression of dissent that it's understandable why some people are choosing to turn off the news entirely.

In my opinion, that is an unacceptable response.  I know it's exhausting and demoralizing, but that is precisely why we need not to give up.  The doublespeak and accusations of "fake news" any time someone criticizes the President or his staff needs to be countered, immediately and hard.

Here are a few things I think are critical:

• Don't soft-pedal.  Label lies as lies, not "misspeaking" or "opinions" or (heaven help us all) "alternative facts."  I'm heartened to see headlines from major media now saying "President Trump Lies About ___________" -- it's about time they start labeling lies as such.  (And note that this means lies from both sides of the aisle.  Truth isn't one thing for one party and a different thing for the other.)
• Don't be afraid to take chances.  Don't be stupid about it, but realize that this is gonna be risky -- fighting the establishment always is.  Also, don't forget the adage that "all politics is local."  Join in protest marches.  Write letters.  Organize.  Keep it legal, and (when possible) keep it positive, but be willing to expend some of your time and effort during this critical period when we still have a chance to affect things.
• Let your views be heard.  When I started this blog seven years ago, it was in an attempt to find my voice -- a major and (initially) scary step from someone who is, to be honest, a socially awkward, shy introvert.  Find whatever forum works for you, whether it's blogging, social media, or standing in front of a filled auditorium firing up the troops.

So let's turn Senator McConnell's words into a rallying cry.  "Nevertheless, she persisted" -- this should become the motto of the resistance.  Let them continue with their lies and half-truths and attempts to silence the opposition -- nevertheless, we will persist.  Let them continue to demonize free speech and the press when they are criticized -- nevertheless, we will persist.  Let them continue to use their majorities in the House and Senate to circumvent our government's checks and balances, in the hopes that no one is watching or no one cares or no one is strong enough to speak up.

Nevertheless, we will persist.

I will end with a quote from one of my heroes, the incomparable Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in reforming environmental policy and supporting women's rights in her home country.  "The only way to accomplish anything is to keep your feelings of being empowered ahead of your feelings of discouragement and inertia.  There is no one solution for everything, but there are many solutions to many of the problems we face.  There is no excuse for inaction."

Politics and the classroom

A couple of days ago, I was asked an interesting question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

If you're comfortable with it, would you do a piece about what you tell your students about politics and current events?  Or maybe you're not allowed to be political in school.  I'd just be interested to understand how to accept the seriousness of all this without feeling like crawling into a hole and hiding from fear, and I know you would have a way to be honest and forthright without scaring your "kids."  How do you approach this?

It's a difficult question.  The simple, quick answer is that in general, I try to be as apolitical as I can manage.  Since I teach biology, this isn't hard most of the time (the current administration has had little effect on, for example, photosynthesis).  I do periodically have students who want to argue about politics, either with me or with their classmates -- I have one class this year that has a couple of left-wing Social Justice Warriors and a couple of diehard Republicans, and several times I have had to say to them, "This is not the venue for duking it out over political issues.  Save that for outside of class."  And to their credit, they've all acquiesced, and more or less get along (although that might be more because they sit in diagonally opposite corners of the classroom -- by their choice, not mine).

Sometimes, though, that simple answer doesn't quite cover all eventualities.  For example, I'm unequivocal that creationism and intelligent design are not science and are completely unsupported by the evidence.  I do tell my intro bio students that I have no desire to change their minds on religious matters, which may be a little disingenuous of me, because I treat evolution as a fact.  On the other hand, I'm being honest in the sense that students can be successful in the unit on evolution, and come into no conflict with me at all, by simply learning what evolutionary theory is about, irrespective of whether they believe it's true.  It is, as I always say, like learning about communism in a political science class.  This doesn't make you a communist.

These days, though, I don't get much flak over my obvious acceptance of the evolutionary model.  I've taught in this district for 25 years, and by this time, most people know me well enough to realize that I'm a staunch evolutionist but also am not going to get in someone's face about it if they believe otherwise.  Honestly, in the last five years I've had more conflicts with students over climate change than over evolution -- the politicization of that issue has of late been more pervasive and more vitriolic even than the whole evolution vs. creation fight.

But I'm fairly unequivocal there, too.  The evidence strongly supports anthropogenic climate change.  There's no real doubt about that any more.  If you choose to disbelieve it, or to think that 98% of climate scientists are in some kind of immense, evil conspiracy to lie to us so as to give us clean, renewable energy and unhook our economy from the Middle East, and are being challenged by a plucky band of honest and courageous multimillionaire petroleum companies, then that's your business.

The hardest decision, however, comes when I see an issue that I feel is of national (perhaps international) importance that has no connection to the curriculum I'm teaching.  At what point is it incumbent upon me to make sure my students are steered in the direction of taking an appropriate stand on ethical or moral issues?  I've more than once compared the events of the last six months to the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany; wouldn't it have been the ethically right action for a teacher in Germany of the early 1930s to urge his/her students to fight the Nazis, to contradict their anti-Semitic and Aryan-purity rhetoric, to stand up against the evils of the times?

I think most of us would answer "yes," but the problem is, the appropriateness of these actions is only apparent because we see what the outcome was.  We know about World War II, the Holocaust, the wholescale destruction of much of the established order in Europe and elsewhere.  We have access to information that our hypothetical German teacher would not have.  How can teachers here and now decide when (or if) it's appropriate to make a political stand in the classroom, when there is no way to know what the outcome is going to be?

This is one of the reasons that I have chosen not to discuss politics in my classroom.  The possible benefits of doing so, in affecting events in an uncertain future are, in my opinion, outweighed by the breach of ethics that would come from my pushing my political views on a young, impressionable, captive audience.  Things would have to be a great, great deal worse before I'd take that step.  I do encourage them to watch the news (including suggesting to them to get their news from a variety of sources), I urge them to take a stand on issues that concern them, and (for the ones old enough) I tell them they should vote.

Other than that, I really have no business bringing politics into the classroom.

I think I'm more or less successful in being non-partisan, to judge by my Critical Thinking classes.  I always tell them that I'm not going to divulge my own opinion on anything we discuss; my job is to needle everyone into clearer thinking, whether or not I agree with them.  One class was particularly insistent about knowing my political leanings, so when someone brought it up (again) on the last day of class, I asked them to guess where they thought I was on the political spectrum.  No one chose far right (I suppose that's understandable enough, given my obvious acceptance of evolution and climate change).  Other than that, it was a nice bell curve.  A few said center right, a lot said center, a few said center left, one or two said far left.  A couple insisted I must be a libertarian.

So I guess I'm doing something right.  Or left.  Or center.  You understand what I mean.

Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there. "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

Multiverse massacre

By now, most of you have heard about the Bowling Green Massacre, a horrific attack by Iraqi immigrant terrorists in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway cited as yet another reason we shouldn't accept Muslim immigrants into the United States.  "I bet it’s brand new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre," Conway said.  "Most people don't know that because it didn't get covered."

Well, as everyone in the United States, with the possible exception of Donald Trump, knows by now is that the reason it didn't get covered is that it never happened.  Kellyanne Conway, whose job description seems to include "make up random shit if it supports what Trump is currently doing," eventually admitted that she'd "made an honest mistake," which is apparently how this administration is labeling outright, bald-faced lies.  The admission, however, didn't stop her from being excoriated on social media.

And also:

Or, best of all, if you'd prefer a twofer:

But because there's no story so weird that people can't work together to make it way weirder, just a couple of days ago claims began popping up on woo-woo websites claiming that yes, actually there was a Bowling Green Massacre, it just happened in an alternate timeline that for some reason only a few of us remember.

Thus, we can add the Bowling Green Massacre to the Berenstain Bears and Nelson Mandela's untimely death as another example of... the Mandela Effect.

The Mandela Effect, you probably know, is a phenomenon wherein someone (or several someones) recalls the past differently than the rest of us, and rather than doing what most of us do, which is to say, "Huh.  I guess I'm remembering wrong, then," said individuals decide that what happened is they have side-slipped into our world from an alternate path in the multiverse in which the event in question (such as the annoyingly moralistic cartoon bears being the Berenstein, rather than Berenstain, Bears) actually is reality.

Here's how one commenter describes his confusion over the imaginary Massacre:

I know the press is (unfairly?) hammering Kellyanne Conway about this and everyone just assumes she made it up, but does anyone else remember an actual Bowling Green Massacre? 

And I’m not talking about the arms smuggling scheme or whatever that all of the articles I’ve read seem to think she might have been talking about.  I mean an actual, honest-to-goodness terrorist attack. 

I definitely recall a bombing in Bowling Green that killed … maybe a dozen people?  I think it happened either at the end of the Bush administration or the first month of the Obama administration.  I’m pretty sure it involved a suicide bomb being set off on a city bus.  The way I remember it was a young Muslim guy–he could have been in his late teens, possibly early twenties? (I’m ashamed to admit this, but I remember seeing his pictures on the news and thinking he was kind of cute.)  He hid an IED inside a dufflebag or knapsack or something and I think he detonated it using an ipod or some kind of portable music player. 

Later, they arrested a second, older Muslim guy.  I think he was responsible for building the bomb.  They were definitely both Iraqi refugees, like Conway said.

Which all sounds pretty persuasive, except for the fact that -- allow me to reiterate -- none of it happened.  But dozens of people chimed in about how yeah, they remember it too, and they added more details about the attackers and the victims and the aftermath, and the whole thing is showing every sign of snowballing.

So I guess there is no end to the mental gymnastics people will go through to avoid being wrong about stuff.  Me, I tend to agree more with Neil deGrasse Tyson: "We have a high opinion of our own brain as a data processing device, when in fact we should not."  Experiment after experiment have shown that our recollection of the past is incomplete at best and full of false memories at worst.  For me, the Ockham's Razor-ish explanation requiring the least ad hoc assumptions is that we're really prone to remembering things wrong, and some of us (e.g. Kellyanne Conway) make the problem significantly worse by inventing new fake stuff to confuse us further.

Of course, there'll be those that disagree with me.  The multiverse is real, and there's a parallel timeline in which Kellyanne Conway doesn't lie every time she opens her mouth.  Those of us who don't recall the Massacre simply live in what one person referred to as a "BGM-null universe."

Or, as I like to think of it, reality.

Reaching for the stars

It has long been one of my dearest wishes to have incontrovertible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in my lifetime.  I've been a staunch supporter of SETI; in fact, my screensavers both at home and at work are from "SETI at Home," which pilfers a little bit of the computing power of computers that are on but not currently being used to analyze signals from the Arecibo Radio Telescope for signs of extraterrestrial communications.  My classroom walls have lots of ET-related stuff, including a poster from the Roswell UFO Museum, a sky map showing the location of various exoplanets, and Fox Mulder's "I Want To Believe" UFO poster.

Unfortunately, though, SETI has thus far come up empty-handed, and the accounts of UFO sightings have been, one and all, beneath the threshold of evidence that most of us science-minded types would be willing to accept.  And honestly, it's unlikely that ET, should it exist, has come here.  The distances involved are simply too big.  The same barrier (even more unfortunately) prevents us from going there.  Until Zefram Cochrane invents the warp drive, we're pretty much Solar System-bound.

But that doesn't mean we can't explore -- we just have to find a different way.

One of the most intriguing ones I've seen I had never heard of until yesterday.  Called "Breakthrough Starshot," this is an initiative to send unmanned probes out using the idea of a light sail -- a lightweight craft propelled by light pressure -- to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, which just last year was shown to have an exoplanet of its own.  The Breakthrough Starshot site says:

In the last decade and a half, rapid technological advances have opened up the possibility of light-powered space travel at a significant fraction of light speed.  This involves a ground-based light beamer pushing ultra-light nanocrafts – miniature space probes attached to lightsails – to speeds of up to 100 million miles an hour.  Such a system would allow a flyby mission to reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years from launch, beaming home images of its recently-discovered planet Proxima b, and any other planets that may lie in the system, as well as collecting other scientific data such as analysis of magnetic fields. 

Breakthrough Starshot aims to demonstrate proof of concept for ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation.

The cool thing about this is that it removes not only the distance barrier, but eliminates one of the biggest concerns -- which is how, even if we could achieve the kinds of speeds Breakthrough Starshot talks about, we could protect the crew of a manned mission from the effects of being in space for that long.  Just a few weeks ago, a study of identical twins Mark and Scott Kelly showed that Scott, who had just come back from a year aboard the International Space Station, had significantly less bone density than his brother.  (Scott also showed a slight lowering of cognitive function, but it is uncertain if that was an effect of the mission.)

So it's pretty certain that long-term space travel will result in some fairly major changes in metabolism and bodily function, not to mention the psychological strain of being cooped up for years on a spacecraft millions of miles away from terra firma.  The idea that we could get the information we're looking for remotely, without risking human life, is pretty exciting.

Breakthrough is also sponsoring two other programs besides Starshot:

Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million program of astronomical observations in search of evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. It is by far the most comprehensive, intensive and sensitive search ever undertaken for artificial radio and optical signals. A complete survey of the 1,000,000 nearest stars, the plane and center of our galaxy, and the 100 nearest galaxies. All data will be open to the public. 

Breakthrough Message is a $1 million competition to design a message representing Earth, life and humanity that could potentially be understood by another civilization. The aim is to encourage humanity to think together as one world, and to spark public debate about the ethics of sending messages beyond Earth.

Of the three, however, Starshot is the most exciting to me.  Just the idea that we might, in my lifetime, receive digital images of a planet revolving around another star is one of the most thrilling things I can think of.

So keep your eye on the Breakthrough Project.  It sounds like they're going about things the right way, and that this might be our best hope for finding out if we have neighbors.

Until Zefram Cochrane comes along, of course.  After that, screw being here, I'm going boldly where no one has gone before.

Sliding toward fascism

In psychologist Jonathan Haidt's seminal talk "The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives," he makes an intriguing statement:  "The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve, it's really precious -- and it's really easy to lose."

While I buy Haidt's basic premise -- and you should watch the talk, his claims are fascinating and well backed up by evidence -- I can't help but feel that a significant fraction of today's self-styled conservatives have completely gone off the rails.  True conservatism entails a respect for the rule of law, and protection of the interests of one's own community, state, and country.

In the last few weeks, this has been replaced by a reckless disregard for anything but consolidation of power at any cost.

We have a president whose actions seem hell-bent on alienating every ally we have, and just in the last three days included his disrespectful phone call to the Prime Minister of Australia and a veiled threat to send the military into Mexico to deal with the "bad hombres" down there.  Worse still is the sense that Trump has no real understanding of history or knowledge of international policy; in a conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel last week, she had to explain to the President what the terms of the Geneva Convention are.

The most frightening thing of all is his capacity for whipping his followers into a frenzy, and their single-minded devotion to him.  People who have received national attention after criticizing Trump have received credible death threats.  Even smaller fish like myself have felt the backlash of questioning Dear Leader; one of my previous posts, in which I asked "what would it take to convince you that you were wrong about Donald Trump?", was vehemently labeled as "psychological manipulation" by one reader.  Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes, in an article in The Atlantic:

Authoritarianism needs that predator edge; that shared understanding that the leader’s body carries within it the potential for violence– and the power to make it difficult to prosecute him.  Trump’s attacks on women; his targeting of Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, and others as dangers to the nation; and the threats from his supporters against the lives of ordinary citizens that follow his criticisms of them on Twitter (such as the union leader Chuck Jones and the college student Lauren Batchelder) all go into the category of things it’s safer not to talk about.  Normalization is actually decriminalization, a willingness to forget that such things were once thought of as lawless behavior.

All of this is symptomatic of a trend I'm seeing toward cronyism and loss of transparency and suppression of dissent.  And if the signs themselves aren't scary enough, read the article "Wait Calmly," by Volker Ullrich, that appeared in the German news source Die Zeit yesterday.  It chronicles the responses of German politicians to the rise of Adolf Hitler -- and how, across the board, the general reaction was, "It'll be fine."  In early 1933, the newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published an editorial in which the author stated that he was willing to wait to see if Hitler  would prove "whether he really had what is needed in order to become a statesman."  His ignorance of policy and law was excused, with his followers saying that it was more important that he rebuild Germany as a nation than it was for him to be well informed.

Even after Hitler became chancellor and began to purge the opposition, the "it couldn't happen here" sentiment was rampant. Theodor Wolff, the editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt, said that even if Hitler wasn't a nice guy, in Germany there was a "border that violence would not cross."  Germans, Wolff said, would protect the "freedom of thought and of speech," would create a "soulful and intellectual resistance" that would prevent Hitler ever from becoming a dictator.

Most appallingly, the chair of the Central Association of Germans of Jewish Faith said, "In general, today more than ever we must follow the directive: wait calmly."

This was printed on January 31, 1933.  Five months later, Hitler and his cronies had suspended the German constitution and fundamental human rights, eliminated political parties, required that radio and newspapers release news that was consistent with the National Socialist party line, and stripped Jews of their equality under the law.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

If that parallel isn't terrifying enough, consider a second one: the similarities between what is happening right now in the United States and the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.  As Andrés Miguel Rondón lays out in his article "In Venezuela, We Couldn't Stop Chávez.  Don't Make the Same Mistakes We Did," Chávez rose to power on much the same kind of wave that Trump has -- populism, nationalism, breaking off ties to allies who were perceived as exploitative or hostile, demonizing the opposition, and playing the role of a plain ol' guy who is just brutally honest and "speaks his mind."  Rondón writes:

The Venezuelan opposition struggled for years to get this. We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chávez’s electoral base.  “Really, this guy? Are you nuts?  You must be nuts,” we’d say. 

The subtext was clear: Look, idiots — he will destroy the country.  He’s blatantly siding with the bad guys: Fidel Castro, Vladi­mir Putin, the white supremacists or the guerrillas.  He’s not that smart.  He’s threatening to destroy the economy.  He has no respect for democracy or for the experts who work hard and know how to do business.  I heard so many variations on these comments growing up that my political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually stupid. 

Neither is Trump: Getting to the highest office in the world requires not only sheer force of will but also great, calculated rhetorical precision.  The kind only a few political geniuses are born with and one he flamboyantly brandishes.

Chávez died in 2013, and Venezuela still hasn't recovered from the years of isolationism, corruption, and damage to the governmental infrastructure.  In October of 2016, it was declared by CNN Money to be "the world's worst economy" despite having some of the largest known oil reserves, and there are now widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities, even among the former Venezuelan middle class.

The problem is, the message coming from the Trumpian populists -- I'm not going to slander actual conservatives by using that term -- has been amazingly successful, as Hitler's and Chávez's were before him.  Don't believe the media, they're lying.  Fight like hell against people who criticize Dear Leader.  Anyone who objects to what Trump, Bannon, Spicer, McConnell, Ryan, and others are doing is at best a "whiny, fragile snowflake," simply throwing a snit fit over having lost, and at worst a traitor to America.

In other words, don't question anything that comes from the Party, but ignore everything else.

People keep saying "it can't happen here."  We're not the Weimar Republic, we're not pre-Chávez Venezuela.  What terrifies me is that the same sentiments were widely spoken in the Weimar Republic and pre-Chávez Venezuela only months before dictatorship emerged.  Every democracy thinks it can't fail, can never be upended by fascism -- until it happens.

My own personal difficulty with fighting all of this is that I was taught by my (very conservative) parents to play fair, be nice, not pick fights, stay respectful, let others have their opinions.  But that, I think, is no different than the chair of the Central Association of Germans of Jewish Faith telling his constituents to "Wait calmly."  We can't be silent.  We have to challenge these people on their own turf -- while we still have a chance to.

I'll end with a quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers that I've always thought was heart-wrenchingly poignant.  When King Théoden of Rohan is facing legions of Orcs swarming into Helm's Deep with the intent of slaughtering his people, he looks down on them in despair and says, "What can men do against such reckless hatred?"

And Aragorn replies, "Ride out to meet them."

To which I can only respond: Amen.