I'm up early, I just listened to OTM's midweek podcast, "How Trump Re-Wrote the History of January 6."

A while ago, I was talking to a friend of mine who lived in the Soviet Union as a child. He was asking me questions about what is happening in the US, and if it is true that Trump cannot serve another term.

I replied that the constitution is ultimately a piece of paper. People have to believe what is written on that paper and make the rules concrete through their actions. This is a practice, a culture. People have to want this culture to be preserved more than an individual outcome. This is why elected officials and the US military swear allegiance to the constitution.

People can choose to do something different, and if enough other people go along, then that is the new rule and the new culture.

He told me that this sounded like the Soviet Union.

You can't build a society on lies, not in the long term. Reality is the ultimate arbiter of truth. But you can run a society on lies for a long time, for multiple generations, entire individual lifetimes. I feel like that's what we're headed into now.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/how-trump-rewrote-the-history-of-january-6

#otm