The Lie That is "The Big Lie"
“…Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free…” - The Beatles - “Blackbird”
Amid the calls for “unity” and “healing” and “let’s move on” from Conservatives after the Trump Riots, lies the ashes of “The Big Lie.”
The meme of “The Big Lie” is what the media and mostly white political pundits think is at the root of all this unrest, and if we can just call it out, things will get back to normal.
The “Big Lie” is that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by voter fraud and other shenanigans by the Democrats. Trump actually won by a landslide, but because of the corruption of the Democrats, he’s not actually allowed to enjoy his victory and take his rightful place in the White House for a second term.
Former Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), writing in The Hill in December, noted: “Just yesterday [Donald Trump] tweeted ‘we won Michigan by a lot!’ and ‘fraudulent election results in Arizona’ and ‘fake election results in Nevada.’ You would think that fraud of this magnitude, across so many states, would yield a scintilla of evidence. But that is the beauty of the big lie. It relies not on evidence, but on emotion.”
And then there’s Jonathan Freedland, writing last week in The Guardian: “That is the fiction that propelled those crowds to break into the halls of Congress: the big lie of the stolen election. The most obvious corrective to lies are the facts that people can see with their own eyes.”
If we just point out to these people that they have been duped, if we just show them what they believe is not true, they will come to the correct conclusion and see the error of their ways.
Sometimes the media are so naive.
They assume these Q-Anon-believing, conspiracy theory wackos are capable of critical thinking. Which they have proven they are not. If we show them the facts in black and white, they’ll come up with some stupid excuse or theory for why we’re wrong and they were right all along. Sliding the facts under their noses will not force them to have a “Come to Jesus Moment” and see the error of their ways. They’ll blame it on George Soros, or Hillary’s emails or Black Lives Matter.
These are the same people, after all, who believe that Trump had nothing to do with the riots. He’s just misunderstood. He’s just minding his own business, trying to president, when these Democrats come along screaming “impeach” and “remove him from office” because they hate him and everything the Republicans stand for.
They have fallen for “The Big Lie” hook, line and sinker.
And yet, even “The Big Lie” is a big lie.
The media has been pushing the theory of “The Big Lie” because they are afraid to call out what is actually happening. When the right says the “election was stolen” from Trump, what they really mean is that too many black people were allowed to vote in this election. It’s Racism. With a capital “R.” Too many people on the other side were allowed to vote against their guy. And that can not be allowed.
They see a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest as a riot, not because the protesters were causing trouble, but because the police were cracking down on protestors and they were trying to protect themselves. And by the way, what gives them the right to protest in the first place?
They were not protesting to try to correct an injustice. They were protesting to make Trump look bad and to build a case for impeachment.
In The New York Times today, Astead W. Herndon spoke to Joe Pillizzi, a Kenosha, Wisconsin man who believes Black Lives Matter is the cause of all the trouble.
“If the Black Lives Matter didn’t do what they did, I don’t think the Capitol attack would have happened,” Herndon quoted him as saying.
And then there’s Eileen Grossman, a Republican racist from Rhode Island, as quoted in The Times article:
“I know that the violence was caused by bad actors from Antifa and liberal progressives as well as Black Lives Matter,” Ms. Grossman said, without citing any evidence. She added, using an acronym for ‘Republicans in name only,’ that the Republicans who voted for impeachment would face primary challengers. ‘They are RINOs and traitors.’ ”
But, in a delicious bit of Karma, Grossman said she moved from Rhode Island to Georgia recently because she wanted to live in a Red state.
So how did that work out for you Eileen?
“The Big Lie” is not that the election was stolen from Trump. “The Big Lie” is that racism is alive and well in the Republican Party and no one is willing to say so.
We need to “unify” the country. There needs to be “healing.”
Which means that us Democrats must come around to the Republicans’ way of thinking, or else.
How else can we get back to the way things were and continue with our knees on the necks of the African-American and other minority communities?
The rubes can easily wrap their heads around a concept like voter fraud because the media has been hammering on it for the past four years. Just imagine where we would be if the media had been calling out the racism in the Republican party all that time (let alone for the past 50 years).