Otto von Bismarck, the original German ultra-nationalist, once argued: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable—the art of the next best.” It was a polite way of saying: “I want to be mendacious without people raising moral objections to said mendacity.”
This applies to all politicians, including the current Democratic nominee, who continues to push the audaciously fictitious claim that her civil servant maternal grandfather led a dual life as a freedom fighter while being part of the British Imperial Service.
Lying is as old as time—since Lucifer Morningstar charmed Eve into taking a bite of the apple—but the current MAGA crowd has raised it to an art form. This isn’t surprising, as their Patron Saint’s entry into politics was facilitated by the Obama Birther movement.
The conspiracy theories have only grown more insane over time, progressing from claims about Deep State control to Pizzagate, Michelle Obama, microchipped COVID vaccines, and now: Haitian immigrants eating cats.
To be fair, there are two distinct cat-related controversies here: the first being JD Vance’s ‘childless cat lady’ comment, and the second being the ‘Haitians eating cats’ rumour.
It all began after the trio of Musk-Carlson-Sacks convinced Trump to choose JD Vance as his running mate. Vance’s trajectory as both a person and politician has been rather intriguing, going from an atheist to a Born Again Christian and from calling Trump ‘Hitler’ to kissing his ring. He is undoubtedly the most millennial person on a US presidential election ticket and the first ‘tech bro’, though he has made some rather unfortunate comments in his time.
One of the most notable was when he told Tucker Carlson, then a Fox News host, in 2021 that “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
He also said: “It’s just a basic fact—you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
While the outrage was fierce, swift justice arrived when Taylor Swift first endorsed Harris-Walz and then signed off with: “Childless Cat Lady.”
But even that seems mild compared to the ‘Haitians eating cats’ rumour that emerged from Springfield, Ohio, after the actions of one Allexis T. Ferrell, who is not an immigrant but a US citizen, first arrested in 2011. She’s not even from Springfield but Canton. Despite the preposterous nature of the rumour, the MAGA crowd—including JD Vance, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr, Ted Cruz, and a number of other prominent figures—continues to push this mendacious claim.
Quantum physics enthusiasts are familiar with the concept of Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment designed to illustrate the peculiarities of quantum mechanics. In the experiment, a cat in a box is simultaneously alive and dead until someone opens the box to observe the result. This state of superposition reflects the uncertainty in quantum physics—both outcomes exist until a measurement collapses the probabilities into one.
Similarly, American democracy finds itself in a Schrödinger-like moment. Both Harris and Trump are fervently persuading voters that the future of America hinges on who wins. Until the ballot boxes are opened and counted, America exists in a state of political superposition: simultaneously alive and dead, depending on which outcome you expect. Both sides present their vision as a binary: an America that thrives under their leadership or perishes under their opponent’s. Just like Schrödinger’s paradox, the final reality will only be revealed when the box is opened—or, in this case, when the votes are counted.
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