There are two things that always get me when watching movies or reading books about the future. Of course, the comical thing is when they get things all wrong. “Back to the Future” told us of a turbulent time when cars flew, kids rode hover boards, and holograms were everywhere. Extremely weird stuff happened. Stuff like the Cubs winning the World Series. Well, that actually turned out to be true, but the other stuff was pure fantasy.

However, nothing quite compares when the crazy stuff predicted in stories of the past actually turns out to be eerily true. “1984” was meant to be a cautionary tale even back then. It chronicled the dangers of propaganda when the government became all powerful and no one was quite sure what was up and what was down.

A lie is still a lie even if it is repeated often. Yet, a lie is more easily believed the more often it is repeated. It seems that Donald Trump and the GOP are bound and determined to get you to believe whatever they would like you to believe on Hunter Biden. They are going to keep pushing that same story about the laptop until you finally believe it.

Of course, the fact that Hunter Biden had a laptop isn’t the lie. The fact that Biden has made deals where he has taken advantage of his father’s position is also not a lie. The idea that either of these two facts point to Biden as being the most corrupt president ever is the lie. The idea is not only false, but is laughable on its face.

Are Hunter Biden’s dealings problematic? I’m sure they are on some level. Nearly every president has had a brother, son, or wayward cousin they wish they could put a muzzle on and keep locked away for their own protection. Billy Carter and Roger Clinton were absolute embarrassments. Heck, George W. Bush was that embarrassment before he cleaned his act up. You’d have to settle for Neil Bush as the black sheep of that family.

Go back far enough and there is a stupid relative or friend that a president wish they didn’t have. Of course, depending on the president, these idiots either provided for temporary humiliation or were much more problematic. Of course, like in the case of Warren Harding, those scandals were much more about their own reaction than what their idiot relatives or friends did.

So, how is this situation any different? Well, on the first note, the people leveling the charge are so guilty it is not even funny. To accuse Hunter Biden of excessively profiting from the presidency or making shady deals is galling when compared to their own behavior. Heck, you could break it down by child and all of them made more combined than all presidential children in history. Ivanka and Jared Kushner probably did more than the others.

Even now, there are propagandists on Twitter trying to convince you that he and his children divested while Hunter Biden profited. Actual facts say otherwise. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes truth for millions of people. Joseph Goebbels told us how the big lie works. “1984” told us too. Seeing Back to Future’s version of 2015 was hilarious enough. Seeing “1984” actually come to life is anything but hilarious.

A funny thing happened before the Christmas holiday. Donald Trump admitted that he not only has had the vaccine, but he has also had the booster. The crowd’s reaction was interesting to say the least. Avid readers will recognize Mary Shelley as the creator of Frankenstein. The story is easy enough to remember.

As on the money as that analogy seems at first blush, I’m not certain this is a Frankenstein situation. Trump didn’t so much create this monster as much as he simply fed it and released it from it’s cage. He recognized it when he decided to run for president. Say what you want about him, but he recognized the anger that was there and plugged into it. People will make the obvious comparison with dictators and demagogues of the past. They’ll make the obvious and lazy connection to Adolf Hitler. Sure, there are parallels there, but one can always find parallels when they look hard enough for them.

The parallel I draw is not necessarily with Germany but with the French Revolution. He doesn’t fit any particular individual in that scenario. What he has done is take advantage of his place as an outsider. The country is not in as extreme a situation as France was, but there are similarities. People are smart enough to see how things are slipping away. They are largely incapable of pointing the finger where it belongs. They see education costs rising. They see wages stagnating. They see other costs going up like health care costs and housing costs. One party has been really good at pointing fingers away from them. It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s women’s fault. It’s those LGTBQ+ people’s fault. It’s ACORN. It’s Black Lives Matter. It’s Antifa. It’s critical race theory. It’s the war on Christmas.

What Trump didn’t figure is that once you get people started on a lie, they will follow that lie to its illogical conclusion. They will keep latching onto alternative treatments that don’t work. They’ll keep resisting the obvious. They’ll keep looking for scapegoats and when they don’t find a new one they’ll start pointing the finger at you.

That was seemingly going on in France at the time. The people were dissatisfied and they wanted new leadership. New leadership came in and they didn’t like them either. So, they kept revolting and they kept replacing until they stumbled into Napoleon. The funny thing is that I don’t think that’s what they had in mind in the beginning, but they did so much damage that is who they ended up with.

In that sense, I’m sure there is a comfort in someone that hates the same people you do. There is a certain amount of comfort in that hate. I can offload my failures and my insecurities onto those who I hate. The problem is that same person who helps us to point the finger either has no ideas to fix anything or actively doesn’t want to fix it. They want to fund raise off of it. They want to rob you blind while they are getting you to look at the “other”.

This photo has been circulating on social media this last week:

This is the cover of the July 1983 Moral Majority Report, a newsletter conceived and published by Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, a Reagan era mouthpiece of what has now morphed into the American Taliban.  At that time, the HIV crisis was arising, and predictably, right-wingers were judgmental about the outbreak, but worse, even then they got the virology wrong, donning masks in an effort to scare the shit out of people about a virus that didn’t transmit through the air, but by bodily fluids.

Back then, the mask was used as a weapon against science and one of their targets, the gay community.  Today, once again masks are being used as a weapon against common sense and science, but in the opposite of the use in 1983.  Back then, right-wingers donned masks to push their message; today they accost people wearing masks and rail against mask mandates to push whatever their message is today. The obvious conclusion is that conservatives are not only totally corrupted; they have been corrupted for decades, moving facts around to fit their narrative.  Add the cancer of Donald Trump, and the corruption is complete, and political conservatism becomes a toxic soup of lies, distortions, disinformation, and cruelty for the pure sake of cruelty.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in the case of the American right wing, it gets worse.

Yesterday, there was another defection of a major conservative from the Republican Party. In a speech before the Federalist Society on Friday, George Will announced that he left the Republican Party and that he was urging other conservatives to defeat Trump and to  “grit their teeth” for the four years after 2020.  You know it’s bad when George Will jumps ship.

Okay, I am about 3/4 of the way through one of the most informative yet chilling articles I have read on the Trump administration.

This stuff scares me to death.  I know I try to be funny here because Lord knows we all need it, but this is not funny.  The Department of Energy does some serious stuff and nobody in the Trump administration – especially Rick Perry – is a serious person.

Here’s just a small snippet from the article I decided to stop and share with you.  Rick Perry.

Since Perry was confirmed, his role has been ceremonial and bizarre. He pops up in distant lands and tweets in praise of this or that D.O.E. program while his masters inside the White House create budgets to eliminate those very programs. His sporadic public communications have had in them something of the shell-shocked grandmother trying to preside over a pleasant family Thanksgiving dinner while pretending that her blind-drunk husband isn’t standing naked on the dining-room table waving the carving knife over his head.

But, this is not the worst part.  It’s about #18 on the scary as crap list.

Its a very long read so wait until you can pour a cup of coffee and give yourself at least 30 uninterrupted minutes.  And then another hour to cry.

I don’t think I’m overreacting, but please read it yourself and talk me down if you can.

Oh y’all, at the rally last night, Trump said that legal immigrants who enter the United States should not be eligible for welfare benefits for five years.

Sounds like a good deal to me, because BILL CLINTON PASSED THAT LAW IN 2006.  (Sorry for hollering but my forehead hurts from banging it on the desk every damn day.)

Yeah, that’s been the law since 1996.

“The time has come for new immigration rules which say that those seeking admission into our country must be able to support themselves financially and should not use welfare for a period of at least five years,” Trump told a crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, at the U.S. Cellular Center.

The president said his administration would be “putting in legislation to that effect very shortly.”

So, is he going to claim that he time-traveled back to 1996?

I can’t take it.