Lipreading in the Age of Covid-19

Lipreading in the Age of Covid 19

by Marco M. Pardi

“Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything” Laurence Stern. Tristam Shandy. 1767

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“Read my lips. No new taxes.” So said George H.W. Bush while accepting the Republican nomination for President at the Republican National Convention on August 18^th, 1988. We did. And what did we get? New taxes.

While George’s words came back to him in the next election, they should not be called outright lies. Instead, they were more likely a simple display of lack of foresight; he had little idea of the quicksand his policies were developing and how they would inevitably swallow him. So even after eight years serving as our de facto President while the former actor Ronald Reagan watched his old movies, napped, and read his lines as directed, G.H.W. Bush was unable to carry out his official four year term without facing reality.

This time is different. We have a carnival barker for a president, a man for whom several “fact checkers” have documented in excess of 20,000 outright lies or deceptive statements since taking office. It would seem the fact checkers could dramatically lighten their load by switching to documenting the vanishingly rare truthful statements that may have inadvertently escaped him.

Most of Trump’s lies are so transparent they need no in-depth analysis. More concerning, however, are seemingly casual statements which go unchallenged. For example, his administration has pushed through a record number of right wing extremists to appointments as federal judges. Most of these have been below public scrutiny. But in more high profile appointments Trump routinely claims he has known the person for a very long time and has admired his work. Two questions should immediately arise: When selecting a person in a far flung region of the United States how does a five or six time bankrupt real estate grifter from New York City know this person “for a very long time”? Trump was a registered Republican in 1987. But between then and 2015 he switched his party five times, from Republican to Democrat to Independence Party of New York and back and forth as the wind blew. So how does a person with no firm and long lasting political convictions “admire the work” of anyone for a “very long time”?

It seems to me the answers are obvious. He has no idea who these people are and no idea of their judicial record. What he does have an idea of is the desire of the cabal of neo-fascists who are using him to further their own ends. They prevented his removal from office subsequent to his impeachment, thereby interrupting what should have been his frog-march into a Southern District of New York criminal court on bank fraud and tax evasion charges. Donald J. Trump is merely the mask hiding the lips of the ultra-right neo-fascist party which has been masquerading as the Republican Party since the late 1970’s. Unfortunately, unlike the surgical masks worn during this pandemic, the mask known as Trump will far more likely infect people than protect them. That seems to be the reason his party dd not dispose of him when he was impeached.

Who are the other players in this Kabuki theater? Actually, though they may not realize it, the rest of the planet has existential stakes in the coming presidential election. On one measure alone, impact on the environment, the neo-fascist party has already rolled back or eliminated every safeguard put in place by previous administrations. Some Americans may dream of escaping this nightmare by moving to some far off country. But the reality comes home quickly enough when air currents from unregulated U.S. industries, energy conglomerates, and motor vehicles bring particulates which alter worldwide weather patterns and poison those often advertised exotic springs from which so many people derive their over priced bottled water.

More specifically, both the American National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have found that the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravlenie (GRU), Russian Military Intelligence, is using a hacking tool code named “Drovorub” to break into an operating system used across many computer server infrastructures. The specific team identified is the 85^th Main Special Service Center (GtsSS) and the military unit is 26165. The Chinese are also separately involved but, unfortunately, the Ministry of State Security, the Guoanbu, is practically opaque to Western Intelligence. And, of course, the Iranians are in the mix. The Ministry of Intelligence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, more easily referenced as the VAJA, is deeply entrenched in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to name a few countries.

The Russian intent, as made clear by Vladimir Putin, is much more targeted than his directed efforts at disrupting the 2016 elections; the intent is specifically to ensure that America’s most incompetent and dangerous president is re-elected. Putin has been, and is being quite candid about this. On the other hand, China has made it clear that they “favor” a Joe Biden presidency.

How is it that two totalitarian States have such different outcomes in mind? For starters we can say that each and every Putin wish has been granted at least partially if not fully. From the start of Trump’s presidency there have been serious questions of whether Russia holds extremely damaging “kompromat” on Trump, making him a 21^st Century version of The Manchurian Candidate.

China, on the other hand, holds massive American debt. A three millennia long player in international trade and politics, China plays the long game, knowing that delayed payment is better than no payment because your debtor is defunct. And, the debt can always be played to extort concessions from the United States in the Pacific Region. For this to work, the debtor country must have stable and sane leadership, not an unpredictable and pathologically ill President – even if he is only a mouthpiece for an equally ill cabal.

So, as we move toward the countdown to elections we are likely to see the thoughts and tactics of Hitler and Goebbels put once again into action: In his excellent book, The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans quotes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, that good propaganda speaks to feelings and not reason and that “it should never admit a glimmer of doubt in its own claims, or concede the tiniest element of right in the claims of the other side”. Sound familiar? It should. It is the daily lip-synch from the Oval Office.

Of course, it must be obvious whom I will vote for, but the critical task ahead of those of us who care is to help others understand what they will be hearing and seeing over the next couple of months. In her excellent book, The End of America, Naomi Wolf advises us that, “Dictatorships specialize in faking news and falsifying documents. Hitler wrote that ‘all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand.’… To back up its disinformation campaigns, such regimes often rely on false documents. These counterfeit documents often assert that there is a threat to the home population.” Does “The Deep State” come to mind?

Trump himself has given his blessings to the Q-Anon cult. This mixed confederation gave us the famous claim that the Clintons were running a child abduction and sexual slavery ring out of the basement of New York pizza parlor. An armed man drove several hundred miles to rescue the children, charging into the place and shooting up the store only to find there was no basement. That’s the power of repeated propaganda.

In all fairness, the word propaganda began as a neutral term. It simply means to propagate or dispense or disseminate an idea or claim; it does not in and of itself indicate the claim is true or false. However, over the years the word itself has become a pejorative. If someone wants to label the claim of another as ipso facto false, they label the claim “propaganda”, and it does the job. So while lips will be moving all around us as they voice claims, it will be up to us to read them and determine their veracity.

In the hands of amateurs propaganda can be amusing. A current example is the intense television video depicting Joe Biden as responsible for needlessly ruining the lives of thousands by initiating and supporting Draconian laws which put many in prison for unjustly lengthy terms. The video was directly aimed at the African-American population. But then the Black Lives Matter demonstrations captured the news nationwide and, though it was obvious that agent provocateurs (a time-worn Republican tactic) infiltrated the demonstrations and fomented the violence and burning, many people became concerned over the call to defund the police. Actually, defund was a poor choice of words, like global warming instead of climate change. The philosophy of defunding was aimed at reducing the police capabilities to arm themselves with military hardware appropriate to invasion of another country and redirecting that funding toward increased training and community outreach. But, like global warming, the term stuck.

(The original video depicting Biden as a law and order zealot has been pulled from the airwaves. It would have directly contradicted the next false message.)

Suddenly, the Republican propaganda machine shifted to depicting Joe Biden as favoring defunding and even eliminating police (he certainly does not, and has said so repeatedly). Now we are bombarded with claims that a Biden election will bring chaos, anarchy, the end of civilization, insurmountable danger to our children, and other unpleasant disasters. But the fact is that Trump himself initiated efforts to monetarily defund police across the nation to the tune of half a billion dollars. Biden is against monetary defunding, Trump is for monetary defunding, but the propaganda still plays to the fears and ignorance of the population.

Ultimately, the ability to read lips and discern the meaning comes from sound and developed education. Our national pause as we contend with Trump’s utterly failed management of the pandemic response has hopefully afforded many the time and opportunity to better prepare themselves for the decision they will render in November. If you are eligible to do so, please vote.

The planet you save may be your own.