Is Biden's Pardoning his Son a Mistake? & Is the FBI About to Persecute the Media?
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: The will of the people is a double-edged sword.
Kash Patel Has Plan to Remake the F.B.I. Into a Tool of Trump: The man who openly hates the F.B.I. is dedicated to turning it into an instrument of tyranny.
Biden’s broken promise on pardoning his son Hunter is raising new questions about his legacy: Did he do the right thing?
Kareem’s Video Break: No one is as excited about food as this dog.
Kareem the Science Guy: Why are women more disgusted than men? It may help them live longer: Guys may smirk and call it fussiness, but that’s why women live longer and healthier.
Kareem’s Sports Moments: Oh, to be able to move like this again (if I ever could).
What I’m Watching: Movies & TV: Gladiator II is meh but The Agency and The Day of the Jackal are riveting.
Vince Guaraldi Trio Plays “Christmas Time Is Here”: Once a week until Christmas, I will share a favorite holiday song.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Anonymous (though often misattributed to Mark Twain)
Last week, I read a novel in which Americans have been hoodwinked into supporting a fascist government secretly run by an ex-Nazi intent on destroying the U.S. In the end, hidden cameras reveal the truth about this leader and the people turn on him. Then I saw Gladiator II where an utterly corrupt Rome is suddenly and unconvincingly persuaded to embrace a better government through a predictable speech and lots of murder. Stories like this provide hope that society, no matter its previous atrocities, is always on the brink of redemption. People just need the facts and they will do the right thing.
I’m not so sure. What happens when people are given the facts and they still ignore them because the lies make them feel better or enrich them? Below is an excerpt from an article I recently wrote for Bloomberg.com (“‘I’m Suffering’: What the 2024 Election Taught Me About America”) that addresses this issue:
This election has taught me that America has made a fundamental shift in the its core values. Americans have always embraced the feel-good populace myth portrayed in the cautionary 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd. The story is about drifter Larry Rhodes (Andy Griffith) who rises to fame and political power through his folksy everyman charm on radio and then TV, but who is a self-serving monster in real life. The movie poster screams this about Rhodes: “POWER! He loved it! He took it raw in big gulpfuls…he liked the taste, the way it mixed with the bourbon and the sin in his blood!” (I would have said that’s excessive hyperbole until Trump came along. Now it seems restrained.)
When a microphone is activated unknown to Rhodes, his audience overhears him berating them as idiots and his popularity plummets. At the end, Rhodes is left a broken man screaming desperately for his audience back, while one character comments that Rhodes may fool people for a while, but “we get wise to him―that’s our strength.”
Variations of that story have played in our movies and TV shows ever since, with plots that center around getting the truth out to The People, which will destroy the puffed-up politician or secret agency trying to exploit them. The stories always conclude with the truth being told and the people ejecting the pretender. Stephen King’s Firestarter ends with the truth about a secret government agency being brought to Rolling Stone to expose to the people. The spy movie Three Days of the Condor ends with the hero turning in his story about a rogue CIA group to The New York Times. News platforms used to represent the national conscience. They need only awaken our innate morality for us to rise up to do the right thing.
Americans have clung proudly to that belief that eventually, Americans always “get wise to him—that’s our strength.” I have believed it all my life. Now I know it’s no longer true.
That premise relies on the conviction that Americans actually want the truth. That they want the facts. They want expert opinions. They believe in the scientific method that has elevated humanity since the seventeenth century. However, based on the evidence of this election season, I no longer believe this to be true about the majority of Americans. Despite most Americans carrying in their pockets the most powerful educational tool in the history of humankind, so many people lack the curiosity, will power, and patriotic responsibility to fact-check. The mobile phone is like a cross to a vampire, revealing facts that send them cowering back to their mental coffins. But apparently, most people, rather than look up facts, would rather have their blood drained and become one of the undead.
Yet, what choice do good people have but to keep exposing the lies and corruption hoping that eventually the people will wake out of their stupor and send their lying masters scurrying like cockroaches for a dark corner? We have to commit ourselves to Abraham Lincoln’s famous analysis of the whims of the public: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” Sadly, you don’t have to fool all the people, just enough to vote into office the essence of everything this country stands against.
It’s up to us—as it has been throughout history—to keep shining that light of Truth until the people who want to see follow its path.