By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / January 23, 2025
SUMMARY: Americans did not change their views causing the Big Lie to be elected. Their views were bastardized by the unprecedented number of lies and the Fascist oligarchy dictator strategies of the Russians and their allies abroad and at home. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact checking The truth is smothered by lies, told for power and for profit.” (1) The same strategies were applied to both the 2016 presidential election and to our climate culture. Because this bastardization was caused by lies, the results are illegitimate. Resist. It’s up to us now.
The deliberate nature of the lies, untruths, and misinformation, and their fantastic volume, made it the most unfair election cycle in contemporary times. Great danger now comes from the penetration of false knowledge into our culture, that caused the unfair and illegitimate election of the perpetrators of deceit. The popular press was complicit. They regurgitated misinformation, half-truths, contextual theft, and blatant lies without consideration of their veracity. This biased consumers away from truth.
The volume of lies overwhelmed reality. It negated the validity of a free and fair election creating illegitimate results. The 2024 presidential election was fraudulent. An identical concept can be seen with climate change, the Climate Change Counter Movement (we all know what this is) and nefarious Russian players that weaponized social media to cast doubt on climate pollution. The extreme volume of blatantly false interference communications created illegitimate climate change knowledge, and has caused our climate to pass a threshold where existential tipping is now active.
This article is not about what we hear in the news about the so called “reasons” why we lost – that American’s have changed their views. It is about the Russian’s fascist propaganda war, supported by Conservative lawmakers and their mouthpieces, and supported by the popular press as well. It is about a war that resoundingly defeated Liberals in this election. This propaganda war of lies and misinformation directly caused Americans to wrongfully change their beliefs. This created a false reality that allowed the Conservative candidate to be elected. This war is identical to the propaganda war that has been raging against climate pollution regulation for a generation.
Understanding the real reasons why we lost the 2016 and 2024 elections, and why we are losing the war against climate change, are fundamental to creating successful solutions to restoring both. More of the same voter and climate strategies will not result in success, unless we change our strategies to acknowledge that the incoming administration and our climate culture are illegitimate because they are based on lies.
The fundamental reasons we lost the election cannot be found in almost any of the noise in the media about why this failure was the fault of liberals; where young people, Black men, Hispanics and Latinos, women, people with advanced education, blue collar workers, and people in rural areas and in cities; flipped their votes or didn’t vote because they believed the incoming president “elect” was the better candidate. While this statement about the beliefs of Americans relative to this election may be true, it masks the reality that we are in a war with Russia and their allies both at home and abroad, and this war delivered lies that illegitimately changed reality.
This is what war in the 21st century looks like. It is a propaganda war that has fooled not only conservative voters, but liberal voters too, and this war has many unwitting accomplices. The media – NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN etc., thousands of independent and local affiliates, and vast posting and reposting on social media by both real and fake people, all are complicit in delivering false news to the American public that the supposed president elect is the best choice for president, or that neither candidate was worth choosing, causing voters to stay home.
The Russians defeated democracy in November exactly like they did in 2016, through cooperation between Russian players and the Big Lie campaign and their allies, exactly like the Mueller Report said.
The Gish gallop
We saw it all unfold before our eyes. The media, from the top networks to the blogosphere, would play a clip of the Big Lie candidate’s incomprehensible meanderings with a dozen or more lies and then only refute one or a few of them. This leads consumers of this information to believe the rest of the lies were not lies at all but facts because they were not disputed. This is an actual debate strategy: to deliver so many lies so fast, that the opponent cannot possibly refute them all in the time allotted. It is called the Gish gallop.
From Wikipedia: The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably longer to refute than to assert. The technique wastes an opponent’s time and may cast doubt on the opponent’s debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved, or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.
The Gish gallop, in combination with large areas of the country that exist in a factual news desert because of vested Conservative corporate news organization holdings, and because large numbers of individuals only consume news content from social media that (as described in the Mueller Report) is rife with fake content from Russian and domestic sources, and because of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and other media leaders who decided that for this election they would not endorse for president contrary to their history of always endorsing, and because of Elon Musks’ massive social media platform formerly known as Twitter — that unequivocally supports the lies and astonishingly fictional hoaxes of the Big Lie cult; this is what allowed the Russians to defeat democracy in the U.S. through a fascist war of disinformation. The lies caused a threshold crossing that created not one, but two illegitimate United States presidential elections.
It was a threshold crossing just like with climate change where our climate has now warmed beyond its evolutionary boundaries, both with untenable results. It has now warmed to a dangerous level because we failed to act. We failed to act because of lies and misinformation created by the Climate Change Counter Movement (we all know what this is), and the Big Lie strategies of the Russian’s Fascist dictator oligarchs abroad and domestically. When a system is changed beyond its evolutionary boundaries, any system, it begins to collapse, and the collapse will not self-restore unless the thing that caused it to begin collapsing is removed.
These systems collapses are what climate science calls tipping, but system collapse science applies to any system, anywhere. The most important of these Earth systems collapses are: ice sheet and permafrost collapse, sea level rise with barrier island and coastal wetlands collapses, forest collapses, collapse of the Amazon, and shutdown of the Gulf Stream. Once these collapses begin, their ability to sequester carbon diminishes and then reverses, so that now most of these collapses are emitting greenhouse gases, not absorbing and sequestering them.
The Amazon is now emitting, not sequestering, a gigaton of greenhouse gases every year because of mortality where only about a quarter of this mortality is from human abuses, and the rest is from drought and drought induced effects. If we do not restore the rain machine in the Amazon by mid-century, Amazon science says the point of no return will have been passed. If allowed to continue, these collapses will emit greenhouse gases that dwarf humankind’s unless we cool Earth below the tipping point – something the elimination of future emissions tomorrow morning cannot do.
Our system of democracy is little different from any other system. If enough democratic norms are destroyed, democratic institutions fail. They can be restored if the perturbation to the system is removed before the point of no return as in President Biden’s election in 2020, but if the system’s stress returns and creates enough degradation, the point of no return would be passed and democracy will fail for time frames that matter.
The Climate Change Connection
The email thefts from Hillary Clinton and John Podesta before the 2016 presidential election, and the email thefts related to the ClimateGate scandal in 2009, are prime examples of Russian interference creating illegitimate culture.
These emails were uploaded to the same Russian servers in Tomsk, Siberia, in the city of Seversk. Seversk was one of Russia’s “closed” cities during the Cold War, that remains closed to outsiders.
Meta from the stolen emails has now been traced to Ekaterinburg in Russia, at the Institute of Radioelectonics and Information Technology at Ural Federal University. Two individuals were identified in the meta, one with credentials in climate science.
Both institutional and private “hackers” are known to be widespread in Russian culture, where these efforts are looked at with high praise and pay by the Fascists who run the place.
The Russians cherry picked quotations from the emails out of context that were identified as climate science corruption or corruption by Clinton and Podesta. This false propaganda was then popularized on Wikileaks and picked up by media and Conservative voices far and wide, where the Gish gallop created a false reality based on lies.
The damage from this propaganda attack on climate science remains in our climate culture today in the form of mistrust in climate scientists because the lies propagated by the Russians dominated the news cycle. This is identical to how the untruths from the Big Lie cult have degraded trust in elected leaders because the lies have dominated the news cycle and because of their profundity, in both cases the lies have been impossible to refute.
Another of the great lies is the partisan politics myth. Liberals and conservatives today are closer than at any point in contemporary times; that is, if one considers the Big Lie cult is a figment of fascist strategy and is not a part of valid human culture because it is a lie.
Beginning with the 2016 presidential election, true conservative leaders have crossed what is now a fictitious “partisan divide” to support liberals and presidential candidate Harris and denounce the Right’s candidate as a lying, fascist, racist, rapist felon. Liberals and Conservatives have increasingly come together to fight the fascist Russian strategies; they have not been increasingly drawn apart into separate partisan groups as the lies would have us believe. Only when we look at the Big Lie cult do we see a political divide, but this divide is illegitimate because it is based on lies.
Good people on both the Left and the right often believe in fairness that tells them the answer must be in the middle of the two sides of an issue. On Earth One, maybe so. Today, the answer is not somewhere in the middle. The “middle” if anything, has shifted to the political right, not the left. Our human rights have been ground into the dirt. People of color are disrespected more today than in recent memory. Environmental rules are not getting stronger, they are getting weaker; because of diminished enforcement revenues since Reagan (another fascist strategy to defeat actions for the commons), and also significantly from obliteration of environmental rule and law by the illegitimate radical right.
The truth has been discarded, beginning with Reagan who killed the Equal Time Act and the Fairness Doctrine. Then Dubya reneged on his promise to put a price on carbon and reneged two weeks after inaugurated. The Left is not moving to the Left, it is moving to the Right trying to reduce its losses and this movement has only become stronger since the first time the Big Lie candidate and Russian allies at home and abroad created a threshold crossing of the truth, that resulted in the stolen 2016 election as per the Mueller Report.
Dems lost the election(s) because they were fooled by fascist lies, just like Hitler fooled half the world, and fascist power-drunk, money hungry wannabee dictators have been doing since time began; just like we are losing the war on climate change.
True conservatives leaders weren’t fooled, but Dems were; just like both conservatives and liberals have been fooled about climate change with the myths that warming is not a big deal; it’s a conspiracy of the deep state, it’s an immoral scheme of climate scientists to garner grant funding for their own personal aggrandizement, or it’s something to worry about far in the future, or maybe it’s even beneficial being warmer.
Without the extra perturbation to the evolutionary boundaries of the American democratic cultural system from deceit, and to the evolutionary boundaries of Earth systems from warming; without the perturbation to normals of truth and science where so many lies were Gish galloped into our minds as being undisputed truths, the thresholds to the destruction of our democratic system and to our climate system would not have been crossed.
This upcoming presidential administration is illegitimate because it was based on lies, just like our climate culture is illegitimate because lies caused us to delay action so much that irreversible and existential processes are now underway. It’s up to us now, democracy and the future of mankind with climate change are casualties of twenty-first century war, that our political, cultural Earth systems have lost.
Resist.
(1) President Joe Biden’s Farewell Speech, January 15, 2025
(2) Russian election Interference…
a. Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Elections (FBI)
b. How the Russians stole the 2016 election, MindWar
c. How Russia Openly Escalated Its Election Interference Efforts, (NYT paywall) November 7, 2024
d. Russia Is Going All Out on Election Day Interference (Wired) November 5
e. Russia and Iran ramping up influence campaigns targeting U.S. voters, federal agencies say (PBS) November 5, 2024
f. Russia Ramps Up 2024 Election Disinfo Ops (Time) November 2, 2024
(3) ClimateGate…
a. Climategate emails hacked by Russian servers in Tomsk… “The CRU files were uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia and copied to numerous sites across the world-wideweb. Shortly after, the climate skeptic blogosphere began posting a suite of allegations about the implications of this cache of emails, which they took as evidence of ‘‘corrupt science’’ and ‘‘improper conduct by leading climatologists’’ severely compromising the fact of human induced global warming. Depending on the perspective in the various media outlets, the incident was either labeled ‘‘a theft’’ or ‘‘a leak’’, but regardless of perspective, the term ‘‘climategate’’ quickly caught on and became the shorthand for the entire event.”
Skrydstrup, Tricked or troubled natures, How to make sense of climategate, Environmental Science and Policy, January 9, 2013.
b. 2019… Details of meta trace and suggested link to 2016 email thefts…Ostanin, Russia, in Effort to Undermine Action on Global Warming, Medium. July 1, 2019.
c. Climategate: A Russian Connection?, Radio Free Europe, December 7,
2009.
d. Were Russian security services behind the leak of ‘Climategate’ emails? Daily Mail, December 6, 2013.
e. Copenhagen, Climategate and Cyber-Espionage: Russians, Chinese or Oil-Interests? SLDinfo.com, March 15, 2010.
f. Climategate Email Scandal: wording taken out of context in stolen emails was widely reported as proving climate scientists were dishonest in their work. Six independent reviews cleared all scientists involved. Debunking Misinformation About Stolen Climate Emails in the “Climategate” Manufactured Controversy, Union of Concerned Scientists, Issues-Global Warming, second paragraph: “Six official investigations have cleared scientists of accusations of wrongdoing.”
g. Climategate emails hacked by Russian servers in Tomsk… “The CRU files were uploaded to a server in Tomsk, Russia and copied to numerous sites across the world-wideweb. Shortly after, the climate skeptic blogosphere began posting a suite of allegations about the implications of this cache of emails, which they took as evidence of ‘‘corrupt science’’ and ‘‘improper conduct by leading climatologists’’ severely compromising the fact of human induced global warming.
Depending on the perspective in the various media outlets, the incident was either labeled ‘‘a theft’’ or ‘‘a leak’’, but regardless of perspective, the term ‘‘climategate’’ quickly caught on and became the shorthand for the entire event.”
Skrydstrup, Tricked or troubled natures, How to make sense of climategate, Environmental Science and Policy, January 9, 2013.
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[Bruce Melton is a professional engineer, environmental researcher, filmmaker, climate science education specialist, author, and director of the Climate Change Now Initiative founded in 2005. He has recently been involved in groundbreaking climate policy development where he was awarded a special achievement award by the Sierra Club.]
