Note/disclaimer: I write this as the outcome of the Nov. 3,2020 election is still uncertain.
Donald Trump is a colossal liar. He unceasingly spreads misinformation and disinformation, half-truths and lies. The New York Times counted some 1300 lies from Trump in his public speeches, etc., in his first year in office--that's about three a day.
And, with incredible irony, he attacks anything that is unfavorable to him or critical of him or shows him to be wrong as "fake news"--when he is the fake news.
It seriously threatens our democracy when a president seeks to undermine our news media and the very profession of journalism. Unfortunate--and very concerning to me--is that people--at least his supporters--believe him.
People do not know, have never learned, to be critical or to tell truth from lies.
Many, many years ago, when I was teaching, I used to upbraid my own students for being uncritical. I would say to them, "I could stand up here and say 'Black is white' and it would go in your ears, through you heads and then down through your arms and onto the paper of your notebooks."
There are courses I have seen to make people better able to tell what is true.
Evidently a big factor is social media. People see deliberate misinformation on social media sites and believe it. Worse, they pass it on to others.
As I hear, some social media sites have begun to put labels--labels carrying a warning--that some posts are known to be false or misleading.
Right now, as votes from the election of two days ago are being counted, he is trying to call these votes--which are simply mail-in ballots that in many states, according to their state laws, could not be counted until the in-person voting was over, fraudulent, trying to make a case that the election is being stolen from him. This is merely our democracy working--working as it should--and he is doing all he can to discredit it.
Another remarkable event of the still-young new year is the result of the run-off US Senate election in the state of Georgia. Georgia is a Southern state and surely has shown some of the prejudices associated with the South (maybe, to be charitable, I'll add "at times"), yet it has just elected a Jew and an African-American to the Senate (two different gentlemen). I suspect some Southerners of the old sort are shrieking in horror.
© 2020.
