In a recent episode of “Marvel’s Agents Of Shield”, a show that I confess I really enjoy, three of our heroes are subjected to some sort of quantum-mechanical explosion. As a result, the three are thrown into an inter-dimensional rift, from which they can see and hear their compatriots, but no one can see or hear or interact with them. They are “out of phase”; the people in our regular world have no way to know they still exist, nor can they contact them. As an added threat, over time, the three in the rift are being drawn further away, and the voices from the real world get fainter and fainter. In fact, unless they can escape, they will be sucked into a nether region from which there can be no escape.
Oddly enough, this situation came to mind when I saw the results of a post-election Public Policy Poll that was just published today. This mind-blowing set of figures reveal the following surreal results, reflecting an Alice in Wonderland world view that is completely at odds with normal reality.
- Since Obama has been president, the Dow Jones has risen an astonishing 11,666 points. However, a full 39% of the people who voted for Drumpf believe that the Dow Jones has gone down.
- During the same time, unemployment has dropped from 7.8% to 4.6%. 67% of Drumpf voters, however, believe that unemployment has risen.
- In the immediate wake of the election, protests against Drumpf’s election spontaneously arose in major cities all across the nation. The vast majority of Americans understand that these protests were in fact spontaneous. But 73% of Drumpf voters believe that they only occurred because George Soros paid “professional protesters” to stage them. It is only necessary to consider the vast coordination and logistics challenge to arrange to hire these 1000’s of protesters, all across the country, and to do so the day after the election, to realize how insane such a proposition is. But a full 73% of Drumpf voters take it as gospel. Note that the poll is reporting what voters believe. Non-Drumpf voters almost universally believe these protests naturally occurred. Non-Drumpf voters understand implicitly how the election result would naturally shake people to their core, and impel them to react somehow, protesting in the streets in many cases. Drumpf voters instead create a false reality where that was only possible if George Soros paid for it.
- A full 40% of Drumpf voters believe that Drumpf actually won the popular vote, in spite of essentially blanket coverage that shows Clinton winning the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes.
- 60% of Drumpf voters believe that millions of people voted illegally for Clinton. Millions. Just consider the amount of fraud that represents. Did you vote? Did you stand in line and present your voter ID and sign the registry? Do you realize how impossible it would be for literally millions of people to vote illegally? Especially given that all these polling places are manned by 1000’s of poll workers, most of whom have been doing their work diligently for years.
- Here’s an amazing finding: a full 29% of Drumpf voters, almost a third, don’t think California’s votes should even be counted in the election. It is very difficult to construct any valid reason for such an exclusion. Difficult, that is, except for a third of those who voted for Drumpf.
- Another “opinion” that is very revealing is this: 59% of American voters believe that Donald Drumpf should definitely release his tax returns. Ask Drumpf voters? 59% of them say “No, he doesn’t need to release them.” The extent of Drumpf’s potential conflict of interest is already astounding. And even though he is exempt from pure “conflict of interest”, the Constitution clearly puts him in jeopardy for receiving emoluments (ie, bribes) from foreign powers. It is one of the two explicitly named offenses for which a President can be impeached (the other is treason). Drumpf’s actions since the election clearly imply that he is already skirting with these crimes. His tax returns would reveal unequivocally what business connections might be involved in such legally incriminating activities. Drumpf voters don’t want to know. See no evil, hear no evil.
Trumpland is a very strange landscape indeed. In this inter-dimensional cone of silence, this undiscovered country, no hint of objective reality can affect the inhabitants. They swim in a world of self-enforcing fabrications, untouched by such standards as “facts” and “numbers.” The upstart, the horrible consequence, is that we can be sure that there will be no short-term negative reaction from this pool of absolutely true believers. Drumpf can continue to make insane appointments all across his Cabinet, renegeing on virtually every campaign promise he made. He can fail to build his Wall. He can back-pedal on Obamacare. He can prove himseld a faithless a coward, failing to implement all the vows he made during the election season. And his followers will almost certainly ignore all of this, choosing instead to shout their approval, to Drumpf and each other, deaf to the real world in their heavily fortified Cone of Silence.
It will only be when the jobs continue to bleed, and not return, and when their own health care and Medicare come under attack and disappear, when the national debt explodes while the 1% scrapes the cream off the top; then, at long last they may look out from their interdimensional rift and suspect the awful truth.
The problem is, it will not just be these masses of self-hypnotized dupes who fall into the netherworld. All of us will have been sucked into Hell.
© 2016 Chuck Puckett