What I learned in 2020

At the end of each year, I like to summarize what I learned in the last year.

A major USA election can be stolen and a puppet installed as President.

Gene sequencing has medical benefits. After 25 years of hype about medical cures, it appears that the technology helped find the vaccines to stop the Wuhan virus. The sequence allowed the vaccine to be developed in two days! (Then a year in testing and production.)

The rich elites do not even need much of the infrastructure, and are happy to shut it down.

The public can go nuts about video showing a fentanyl overdose death (George Floyd), and nobody dares say the obvious truths.

I never thought that anyone would close the churches, and I am still surprised that they do not complain more.

Physicians can be fired, for questioning the necessity of lockdowns.

Our medical and scientific establishments are hopelessly politicized.

White Fragility is a theory of White Supremacy that academia accepts.

The entire news media attacked Pres. Trump as an authoritarian, while he is actually the least authoritarian President in decades. This was just explained by leftist journalist Glenn Greenwald, who makes these points:

1.) Donald Trump was never an authoritarian. That is, he never wielded the power that he could have.

In 2020 alone, Trump had two perfectly crafted opportunities to seize authoritarian power — a global health pandemic and sprawling protests and sustained riots throughout American cities — and yet did virtually nothing to exploit those opportunities. ...

2.) The authoritarian myth was made up by the media to attract clicks, dosh, and attention.

The hysterical Trump-as-despot script was all melodrama, a ploy for profits and ratings, and, most of all, a potent instrument to distract from the neoliberal ideology that gave rise to Trump in the first place by causing so much wreckage. ...

3.) The Democrats, among them Biden and his administration (he calls them “neoliberals”), as well as previous presidents who waged war without the proper authorities (e.g., Obama), are the real authoritarians.

... as I wrote in a Washington Post op-ed in late 2016, the U.S. Government itself is authoritarian after decades of bipartisan expansion of executive powers justified by a posture of endless war. With rare exception, the lawless and power-abusing acts over the last four years were ones that inhere in the U.S. Government and long preceded Trump, not ones invented by him. ...

4.) The Democrats are further culpable because they’re in league with the large monopolies, like Facebook and Amazon—companies that are really destroying America. (Greenwald goes on and on about this. )

What makes this most menacing of all is that the primary beneficiaries of these rapid changes are Silicon Valley giants, at least three of which — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — are now classic monopolies.

Greenwald is right about this. The press lying and manipulation of public opinion about Trump is beyond what I thought was possible.