Facts do not serve the brave, new world ... by gimleteye

What follows is the most devastating, sad and tragic news report of 2016, a year for the record books if anyone will be keeping them from here on, because fact means nothing in the aftermath of the Black Swan election of president of the United States.

Donald Trump is our president because he ran an unprecedented campaign based on his conviction that packaging is everything. Content is nothing. He was correct. But his apparent victory -- despite losing the popular vote by 2 million to Hillary Clinton -- needed a substantial and heavy boost.

The NPR report on fake news discloses the seediest side of packaging that swung the election to Trump. It is important to acknowledge, too, that fake news exists as part of an ecosystem that flourished through the multi-billion dollar fortune of Rupert Murdoch; the first media tycoon to understand how to sell content based on lies and half-truths.

If Fox News is the top predator in the ecosystem of fake news, the Tyranasaurus Rex, fake news emerged in this election cycle like a swarm of velociraptors on the unwitting American public.

Fake news sites overwhelmed content produced by journalists and the mainstream media that has been scrambling to achieve value for shareholders (including top compensated executives) amidst the free, on-line scrum.

I don't have bold answers. Just observations. This Thanksgiving weekend, here is a final one: give great credit to the writers and journalists who decoded how Russian intelligence, lead by former KGB strong-man Putin, first assessed how the internet and the culture of Fox News had weakened the Fourth Estate, then hacked the presidential election.

Thanks to the fake news "free market" for news and Russian intelligence, the United States is now run by its own oligarchy. But our oligarchs are bound by Christian theology, greed, and poorly match next to Russia's criminal enterprises.

H.L. Mencken acidly predicted more than half a century ago, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Donald Trump is far from a moron, and so Mencken was wrong about that part. He was right about "the inner soul" of the people because all people, whether pre-war Nazi Germany, or the post-industrial heartland of the United States are easily lured by the promises of charlatans and demagogues. It is an understanding that Karl Rove, Steve Banon, and Josef Goebbels have in common.

In a certain light, Donald Trump is the savant who never read a book but understood that if branding was everything, and the accumulation of wealth is both God's work and pinnacle of human achievement, that the highest office in the world could be captured -- if voters were frightened enough to surrender their reasoning powers -- by a charismatic leader who matched the promise that anyone could achieve success by wishing upon his imagery, pomp, and circumstance.

Fact counts for nothing. In fact, watch what happens to the budgets of NASA, of NOAA, and the federal capacity to generate data on climate change: science and objective reality is the sworn enemy of such scheming, whether in Moscow or Washington, DC. Anyhow, read or listen to this NPR report and count on NPR's government funding to be slashed by the Trump White House and Republican Congress. Facts do not serve the brave, new world.