Funding the Big Lie

 THE BIG LIE,  everyone on the planet has become familiar with, everyone understands to be a lie. Everyone, including those who pretend to believe it, or who have managed through arduous mental gymnastics to brainwash themselves into believing it, to benefit and support their personal biases. It might be the most audacious, most egregious instance of false narrative taking hold since Christ walked out of the cave, born again. Opportunists are seeking to gain as much benefit as they can from Trump's ridiculous claim that the election was stolen from him. Jane Mayer, author of "Dark Money", an expose' of the Koch brothers and their corrupt influence on American politics,  published an article in the New Yorker titled "The Big Money Behind the Big Lie". Using the lie as pretext, Republicans all across the fruited plain of freedom's land are bending over backwards trying to legislate as much difficulty and as many obstacles into the process of voting as possible, and much more. Voter suppression is only the tip of the chilling G.O.P. Trumpist iceberg. There is a movement to give state legislatures the power to overturn the popular vote in presidential elections, and to select their own slate of electors - whenever the mood strikes them, which means, whenever a Republican majority state legislature is dissatisfied the a Democrat won the election. Alarmingly, this movement is funded by big, dark, billionaire money, of the sort that only the far right can scrape up. Even more frighteningly, this is perfectly constitutional. The constitution vaguely says that in every state the legislature shall determine the method of selecting presidential electors. Well more than a hundred years ago every state decided to let the popular vote elect the electors, well before they decided the allow the popular vote to elect Senators. Although the United State has never been and still isn't a true "democracy", it is in many respects much closer to being one now than the founders intended. the founders, in particular James Madison, believed that the common people were inferior, and inherently incapable of self government. thus, they established a plutocratic republic, which, in many ways, we still live under today. but now, disgusted at the defeat of their cult icon Trump, conservative American seems determined to utterly dismantle the democrat institutions with which we are still blessed, such as popular suffrage and direct (reasonably direct) election of the president, with free and fair elections. it may eventuate that never again will a Republican lose an election in America without false accusations of voter fraud. Such is the precedent they have established with the big lie. Even as we speak the 2020 presidential election is being recounted in Arizona, for the third time, Republicans unable to bring themselves to live with the fact that Biden won the state by ten thousand valid votes. The entire case of voter fraud being used as a pretext to dismantle democracy is in itself a vast fraud, perhaps the most damaging ever perpetrated in the U.S. And by the time this vast fraud, this big lie hoax perpetuated by conservative Trumpist America is finally out of steam, it will be time for another election, and their deplorable attack on America will doubtless renew itself.