Brett Baier asked an important question to Kamala Harris that she couldn’t answer. If Donald Trump is so bad then why are so many people supporting him? Good question Brett. I think the answer can be seen in some of the political ads we have been seeing. Those that are running ads these days actively think we are idiots based on what they are feeding us. I made the mistake of flipping it on “Forensic Files” late last night and saw this brazenly mendacious bullshit on full display.

I saw three kinds of ads that made my blood boil. The first one was a local commercial asking people to vote out “all Democrat judges” because they are “soft on crime.” These commercials are not so offensive by themselves, but when you run five or six of them consecutively and offer absolutely zero context it becomes obnoxious. Of course, those ads offer nothing in the way of context. They are just bad judges. Got it.

Not to be outdone, a PAC on behalf of Ted Cruz told us that Collin Allred voted against the parents bill of rights so now he supports gender reassignment surgery at school. You have to be a real piece of Samsonite to believe a word of this ad. Where do I even begin here? I earned a degree in Political Science and now support English classes. Could you imagine me working a scalpel to turn Harry into Sally? Am I supposed to be manning the anesthesia machine?

Has anyone seen a school nurse’s office? Where in the hell would we store the surgical equipment necessary? We barely have the supplies to bandage a wound suffered on the playground much less perform complex medical procedures.  Then I saw a disabled veteran in an ad saying that Allred supported sex change operations for people in the military and children. First of all, the grammarian in me is asking a ton of questions. Are children in the military?

Obviously, we had a transfer of ideas that wasn’t properly punctuated and separated for our consumption. How many people are we talking about here? How many children are getting sex change operations? How many men (I’m assuming men) in the military are getting a sex change operation? If we are to believe that Kamala really wants to fund sex change operations for undocumented migrants (as the highly edited ad that clearly skipped from phrase to phrase suggested) then how many are we talking about?

Fortunately, I can answer that question for you. According to most sources, a little over one percent (1.14 to be exact) is transsexual. As an observant American, I can vouch for those numbers just based on what I see and going through all the people I know. I also know based on my experience in the classroom that fewer children are transsexual. Those statistics are currently sitting at 0.6. percent.

The point is very simple and goes back to the question that Baier was asking. There are two important things of note in the transsexual question. First, most people don’t have the first damn clue how many people are getting gender affirming care. They think the percentage is much higher than it is. Furthermore, they don’t have the first damn clue what gender affirming care actually is.

Secondly and more importantly, most Americans have little ability to filter out obvious bullshit from actual information. Too many people have not developed an active bullshit detector. If a story sounds outrageous then it probably is. We have information at our fingertips that can actively debunk this nonsense. Too many Americans are not doing that.

So, to answer Baier’s question I can simply say that millions of people are politically ignorant. When someone is ignorant you can tell them anything and they will believe it. You have to have some knowledge before something outrageous begins to sound outrageous. Without that knowledge then it just all gets baked into a bulging bullshit cake.

Grace— disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency

I went to Merriam for that definition of grace. I noticed that there were a grand total of eight categories with sub-definitions below them. So, if something else were coming to your mind you are likely also right. The definition above just happens to fit what I’m thinking in the moment.

Further defining terms we find that clemency can be defined as “an act or instance of mercy, compassion, or forgiveness see also amnesty, commute, pardon, reprieve.” In these trying times, forgiveness can be difficult. I wrote a piece earlier about forgiveness and I invite everyone to take a look. It is essentially a state of being and a realization more than anything else.

I say all this because a friend reacted angrily and in a bizarre manner to a piece I wrote last week. The initial reaction is usually one of defense. The response claimed I had said and done things that I had never said or done. So, the first reaction is to go through the rolodex of memories to try to determine where that was coming from. You then move onto anger. When someone clearly says you have said things you’ve never said or done things you’ve never done it can be bewildering and infuriating at the same time.

I’ve quickly moved on. Some of my other friends have not. The difficulty is that these things are all public now. Everyone on my friends list can see and as you’d expect they run the gamut. So, some friends want to defend me. Some probably feel the frustration by proxy.

I am asking for one simple thing: grace. That grace can go any number of different directions. It can obviously go to me as I am not going to turn down anyone or anything’s grace. However, it should also go to my friend. He is a decent person that might be triggered by some powerful feelings, confusion, and a boat load of misinformation.

One of the things he accused me of is being compliant. I find that term to be pretty charged in the way he intended it, but it is an ironic term. We are all compliant to something or someone. Someone that professes to be Christian (as he and I both do) are compliant to the word of God or at least our own interpretation of the word of God. He meant to political authority figures or prominent experts in a field.

I plead guilty to that one. One of the best things we have done as a species is specialize. When it comes to a world wide pandemic I’m going to trust an immunologist who has studied viruses for more than 50 years over my own best judgments and instincts. I got a D in college Biology. I felt like I understood the material better than that, but not much better.

Regardless of party or ideology, we have an absolute epidemic of people deciding they know as much as experts because they saw a YouTube video their cousin sent them. We have parents or even private citizens deciding we are teaching things in school we have never taught based on absolutely zero evidence. Instead of asking us they “do their own research.”

Someone famous once decried people that know things that just aren’t so. False knowledge is worse than ignorance. It rots the brain and causes people to believe things that have no basis in reality. I can’t hate people like this. I want to offer them love and support and will do as much as I can. That might be my own failing, but that is what it is.

Gym Jordan was on MTP this morning babbling about how law enforcement has been weaponized, but only when it comes to conservatives being investigated.  He’s all over the “weaponized” FBI trying to protect school board members whose lives are being threatened, but completely blind to the tsunami of blatant law breaking on his own side.  When Chuck Todd brought up the fact that the NY Assistant US Attorney, Charles McGonigal, has been charged with taking money from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, Jordan stated he was going to investigate that, but brushed Todd off when he pointed out that Paul Manafort was Deripaska’s primary contact between the TFG campaign and the Russians.  He wants to investigate the Steele dossier, but is not interested in investigating whether the US Attorney’s office in NY was suppressing the dossier and leaking other stories to the press intended to damage Hillary during the 2016.  The new conservative House majority has only a few goals for this term – cementing in their own power, hamstringing the federal government, and exacting revenge for TFG’s loss in 2020.  That’s it, period.  They don’t give a flying shit about their country or their constituents; their only tools are retribution and disinformation.

When asked about the George Floyd act and reforming policing in the US, Jordan took the usual position of conservatives today, saying that the US government has no role in policing reform and that it must be handled at “state and local levels”.  This is the strategy now followed by most Republicans who shirk responsibility to avoid being blamed for the consequences.  It’s also the SCOTUS’s normal response to all issues of privacy, individual rights, civil rights, and voting rights.  The Court, under Roberts, has now taken the position of taking no position on critical issues like privacy, gun safety laws, campaign finance, radical gerrymandering, and systemic voter suppression, punting all those issues to the state level which in 35 states is under the iron fisted control of minority Republicans cemented into power by…wait for it…radical gerrymandering and voter suppression.  The Court has also gone so far as drawing the idiotic conclusions that money doesn’t corrupt and that magically the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed.

At the state level, DeSantis and Abbott are the poster children for shirking their duty.  They both habitually override local county and city officials who are trying to protect their own citizens by grabbing power at the state level to hamstring them, but then take no responsibility for massive failures like the 2021 Texas power failure that killed 700 Texans.  By keep a “free market” ideology where free markets don’t exist, they avoid blame when their own constituents suffer from their negligence.  By hiding behind idiotic libertarian ideology that has never worked anywhere on the planet, they can blame faceless villains rather than doing their goddam jobs to improve the lives of their constituents.

This is the biggest fraud that’s been committed against the American people, but they retain power through two strategies – using disinformation to blame non-existent bogeymen for their own failures, and radical gerrymandering that creates a base of voters who believe their destructionist rhetoric and bullshit.  AND, it’s getting worse, not better.