After the election midway before the inauguration in 2016 I had a dream, and I hired an artist to draw my dream! The dream pictured on the site page is close to what woke me early that morning! In my dream the hood of the Klan’s robe was covering the light dimming the projected light. The streetlights nearby were being infected, and the dimming transited across the city, county, state and country eventually the world! The dream was numinous and soul wrenching like our present-day existential predicament with the darkness of autocracy looming over our democracy. The dream has informed my last seven years; leading me to actively navigate the propaganda factories from Russia and China and the United States too! They pump out lies changing our sense of personal integrity and our personal sense of self. Science fiction is known for scary scenarios and Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is among the scariest. The “Pod People” in the story take over the identity of the people in the town when they gradually usurp individuals as they fall asleep. The horror of losing yourself and becoming an automaton to affect an alien agenda is a reminder of the horror of living under totalitarian and authoritarian governments. Mind numbing and dumbing down of the population is required to keep the trains running on time by mixing metaphors and comingling facts with fiction – diffusing the truth and confusing the population is high stakes and corporate.

How can we fight the mania which misinformation propagates? What is the prescription for relief? How can we attenuate totalitarianism with its remarkably tenacious hold once it is rooted. Comparing the lives of people living in China and Russia with our lives in America is instructive! We do not have to pass daily state administered tests of confidence and loyalty to procure goods, to find a job or to go to school like in China. Russian teachers drill preschoolers in songs with Putin’s name in them. The indoctrination starts early in both regimes. It is a hellscape of science fiction making which inflicts traumatic wounds and incapacitates agency in the human being. The point of the totalitarian state is to weaken the individual’s agency making the states job of controlling its population easier. Tactics of fear and repetition wear on the psyche in a concerted attack designed to render it acquiescent. Endless reeducation programs administering repetitiously in mind-numbing rote to the Uighur ethnic minority caught in detention centers. The Uighurs have lived in northwestern China for centuries – a practicing Muslim people – to be made scapegoats and the enemy of the Han ethnic group. The inculcation of cruelty that the ends justify the means is a corrupting agent for both victim and perpetrator.

The purpose of misinformation is to confuse and obfuscate the truth. A working principle of the mind I have defined in a theory of mind which I have developed necessitated by personal experiences which defied ready explanation. Among the hierarchy I have developed is the foundational principle that verifiably factual information is absolutely baseline necessary in order for the brain to process information effectively. When given false information the mind is hindered in the filing and processing function of memory storage and retrieval because the static and dissonance it causes to the working mind. Static is an adjective which could be used to describe the effects which misinformation and also trauma has on the mind.

Reaching back to our roots as a rural nation and taking up the mantle of George Washington’s successful seven-year campaign rendering the thirteen colonies into a nation with a revolutionary doctrine, The Declaration of Independence. Paying tribute to our history as citizens we are obligated to be imbued with knowledge which inoculates us against untruthful instillations and propaganda. Taking pride in ourselves and building an edifice of a self-large enough to have love for our country is a work in progress. We have to bother to delve and dive to make sure that we are on the truthful path and have not been veered off. Shuttering our democracy with misinformation and cowing the population with shallow educational experiences as in ideas and plans to institute religious schooling in lieu of the traditional separation of church and state represents the sallowness of malign intention meant to undermine our democracy.

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