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Alameen Templeton
Everybody all around the world doesn’t like the US’s biggest export, “American democracy”; now, even Americans are choking on the taste.
We’ve seen what it’s done in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and South Sudan, the Gulf state “kingdoms” and, of course, Palestine, where America is determined not to allow Palestinians control over their own land and future.
“American Demkarasy” has given us impoversihed countries and bombed-out cities, bereft of inhabitants, their citizens spewed out like garbage onto the streets of the world while their dead remain forgotten at home, unremembered and often unburied.
So, you can imagine how Americans are feeling, now that they’re being given just a small taste of their own medicine as the US election starts kicking into high gear.
Associated Press reports from the heart of the empire Thursday: “ Voting machines reversing votes. More voters registered than people eligible. Large numbers of noncitizens voting.
Chickens home to roost
“With less than two weeks before Election Day, a resurgence in conspiracy theories and misinformation about voting is forcing state and local election officials to spend their time debunking rumors and explaining how elections are run at the same time they’re overseeing early voting and preparing for November 5.”
The chickens are coming home to roost. America’s ability to hysterically reimagine world conflicts into political opportunities to engineer regime changes that suit vested US interests seems to be playing out at home as well.
The “evil other” that requires a congealing of jingoistic action around a sacred principle held aloft by a cooperative media amid the foreign hordes has now found home in America.
The “evil other” during the Cold War used to be Russia, and China, and all their satellite allies around the world. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the Baader Meinhoff gang, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Osama bin Laden, Ho Chi Min, Muammar Ghadaffi, Nelson Mandela, Yahya Sinwar – they’ve all had their chance as the “bad guy” on American media’s “Most Wanted” list who needs to be taken out.
‘Truth is boring’
Each character and country assassination needed a lie to be sown, to take root in people’s minds, and to sprout into a blooming flower of war powered by expensive American arms and American hysteria.
“Truth is boring, facts are boring, and outrage is really interesting,” Utah’s Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican who oversees elections in her state, tells Associated Press. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole with truth. But what we try to do is just get as much information out there as possible.”
That would be a very accurate description of how America has waged its foreign policy against the world for the last 100 years. Unfortunately for America, it’s what’s happening at home now, too.
But now, the “evil other” for Republicans is the Democratic party; for Democrats, it’s the Republicans.
Is this the last US election?
The fault lines that deepened divisions between America’s “Red and Blue” and sparked the January 6 invasion of the Capitol in 2020 are now set into concrete prejudices in supporters’ minds.
Now, even Americans are refusing to accept American democracy and articles are appearing in their media asking if this is going to be the last US election.
Democrats fear Trump won’t accept losing (he said notoriously at one Primary speech “I better win”), while Republicans are convinced the Dems are sneakily priming their vote-counting machines.
In many ways, the unwashed masses are merely following the examples of their elites, who have established a pattern of behaviour over three decades where they try their damnedest to overturn the outcomes of American elections.
In the Nineties, we saw the Democrats with the Starr Inquiry trying to chuck Bill Clinton out of office for liaisons with an intern in a White House closet.
George W Bush only got into the White House after the Supreme Court intervened and appointed him President because Republicans and Democrats couldn’t agree on how vote-counting machines had tallied votes in Florida; neither could accept American democracy. Only 30% of the electorate turned out in 2020 and Bush was put into office with less than 15% support.
Weirder and wilder
Then, we had Trump and the Republicans pushing the conspiracy theory that president Barrak Obama wasn’t American. “The American president isn’t an American.” It’s like something out of high comedy, but most Republican supporters still believe it – alongside even wilder rumours like “Michelle Obama is really a man.”
Okay!
Hold onto your seats; it gets even wilder.
The “unAmerican president” crisis was followed by “The American President Is A Russian Spy!” crisis. Yes. Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are plotting to destroy America. The Democrats are still trying to sell that story.
So, it’s easy to understand just how hard it is to be an ordinary American nowadays. You have to believe all those possibilities, while voting and paying your taxes at the same time.
It’s almost as hard a believing Gaza genocide is good, while loving your children at the same time. You see? It’s hard, very hard; hypocrisy is a heavy burden.
The gap between reality and the official conspiracy for the nation has become so wide, it’s no wonder ordinary Americans have taken to weaving conspiracies of their own; they’re just aping their masters.
And that ability has been geared up by the tendency of social media to warp and magnify “the internet of everything”.
‘A giant wave’
Eric Olsen, who oversees elections in Prince William County, Virginia, told AP combatting misinformation had become an important and challenging part of the job.
“It’s really difficult from our position, a lot of times, because social media feels like a giant wave coming at you and we’re in a little canoe with a paddle,” he said. “But we have to do that work.”
Says Associated Press Thursday: “This year’s election is the first presidential contest since former President Donald Trump began spreading lies about widespread voter fraud costing him re-election in 2020.
“The false claims, which he continues to repeat, have undermined public confidence in elections and in the people who oversee them among a broad swath of Republican voters . Investigations have found no widespread fraud or manipulation of voting machines four years ago, and each of the battlegrounds states where Trump disputed his loss has affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win.”
It’s become a very-American game, played by all – by Joe Soaps, by mid-level functionaries and even the billionaires: “In the past week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed a voting machine had changed a voter’s ballot in her Georgia district during early voting, and Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media platform X, has promoted various conspiracy theories about voting machines and voter fraud both online and at a rally for Trump in Pennsylvania,” Associated Press notes.
Genie is out of the box
Clearly, none of them trust America’s famous democracy, a trend that shows no sign of waning as the central hegemony that has always kept America on an even, regime-changing keel, has unravelled.
The genie is out of the box and will not go back in again, despite all the efforts of functionaries to keep the manipulation machine ticking over.
“The floodgates are ‘very much’ open,” said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works with state and local election officials.
“This is making election officials’ lives much more difficult,” he told AP.
AP points an accusatory finger and Trump (while, presumably, continuing to suspect he’s a Russian spy): “On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly attempted to sow doubt about the upcoming election – something he did ahead of his two previous bids for the White House. Even after he won in 2016, he claimed he had lost the popular vote because of a flood of illegal votes and he formed a presidential advisory commission to investigate. The commission disbanded without finding any widespread fraud.”
Deep distrust
Trump repeatedly claims Democrats will cheat again and uses “Too Big to Rig” as a rallying cry at rallies, AP says: “Election experts see it as laying the groundwork to again challenge the election should he lose.”
Deep distrust of American democracy has already led to a wave of harassment, threats and turnover of election workers, AP says.
Musk recently invoked Dominion Voting Systems in remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania, seeming to suggest its equipment was not trustworthy. Dominion settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News last year for $787 million over false claims its equipment could not be trusted.
Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The ‘Muslim question’
Musk, who has endorsed Trump, has repeatedly pushed misinformation about voter fraud in Michigan to his 200 million followers on X.
Michigan has the biggest concentration of Muslims in the country and, like Florida in 2000, could become the swing state that decides the 2024 election outcome. So, it’s no wonder Musk is concerned.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says he is “just amplifying conspiracy theories and in a way that directs the ire of many of his followers onto us as individual election administrators. It’s something that we didn’t have to deal with in 2020 that creates a new battlefront and challenge for us.”
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