Trusted reading sources of the day tell me that, at this very moment, I am likely missing a lecture to the American people from the Dufus in Chief on the state of the American soul:

JOE BIDEN, SOUL DOCTOR

Tonight Joe Biden will deliver a speech on the state of America’s soul, or something like that. … I will hazard a guess that in this nation of 320 million, there is not a single person who looks to Joe Biden for advice on matters of the soul. …

So what is going on here? The most epic gaslighting in American history. We are witnessing a symphonic climax of a narrative the Democrats have been building for years: Republicans as traitorous extremists. …

Tonight’s speech will try to advance those narratives. “MAGA Republicans,” a group that seems to include all of us except Liz Cheney, are a threat to “our democracy,” i.e., a threat to the Democrats’ control of Washington. …

And that is all I need to know about the evenings events. No need to watch such sophomoric silliness. But, since the the puppet president did choose to bring up the subject, I will take this opportunity to highlight a potentially relevant post from my legacy on-line home that did not make it out of the Member Feed into wider readership. From December 15, 2019, here it is in its entirety:

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Cancer of the Soul: Stool Pigeons Then and Now

(I joined Ricochet many years ago with the intent to post on a series of my favorite paragraphs/passage from the real, paper books that I try to spend more time with than this cursed keyboard. I repeat, the site used to seem much more intellectually curious back then…and I’m too stubborn to let that go. Well, anyway, this one was not on that list but was added just yesterday as I was closing in on the end of The Gulag Archipelago Volume 2)

From Merriam Webster:

stool pigeon (noun) – (1) a person acting as a decoy or informer. (2) a pigeon used as a decoy to draw others within a net.

It is the “decoy” portion of that first definition along with the “used to draw others within a net” notion from the second that I tend to focus on these days. And, as a sign of our evolving language in these highly connected times, I don’t seem to find terms like “gaslighting troll” among the synonyms. Very interesting.

With that I will now turn to Solzhenitsyn and the start of a section on Corruption: “In a situation of…betrayal over many years people survive unharmed only in a superficial, bodily sense. And inside…they become corrupt. So may millions of people agreed to become stool pigeons.” So many willing to be gaslighting trolls decoys.

The author tells us a story of one such case:

Cancer of the soul develops secretly too and strikes at the particular part of it where one expects to find gratitude. Fyodor Peregud gave Misha Ivanov food and drink; Ivanov was out of work, and so Peregud got him a job at the Tambov railroad-car repair factory and taught him the trade. He had no place to live, so he let him move in with him, like a relative. And then Mikhail Dmitriyevich Ivanov sent a denunciation to the NKVD accusing Fyodor Peregud of praising German equipment at dinner at home. (You have to know Fyodor Peregud. He was a mechanic, a motor mechanic, a radio operator and repairman, an electrician, a watchmaker, an optician, a foundryman, a modelmaker, a cabinet maker, master of up to twenty different skills. In camp he opened up a shop for precision mechanics. When he lost his leg, he made himself an artificial limb.) And so the police came to take Peregud and took his fourteen-year-old daughter to prison too. And M. D, Ivanov was responsible for all that! He came to the trial looking black. And what that meant was that a rotting soul sometimes emerges in the face. … – Page 643

[Emphasis Added and a super cynical side note in the form of a question: Outside of Ricochet, of course, what portion of the modern American masses ever gets to page 643 of a book?]

The point? The stoolie of the decoy-type is just as corrupt as the one that is an informer…even if the stoolie adopts and maintains a polite demeanor in the communication of the day. Eventually the rot will be impossible to hide (see: Trump, Second Term). Often it is not so much what the stoolie says and how the stoolie says it but what the stoolie does not say that is more indicative of his cancerous soul (most have caught on to this by now). And, maybe more important to the local reader, the corruption of that soul results in droppings that are very corrosive to the neighborhood infested by the stoolie and his ilk. You have been warned…again.

Enjoy the remainder of this wonderful Sunday. It is 62 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny here…

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That post was written with an obvious agenda somewhat different from today…but the ties to the Cancer of the Soul and those who lack any redeemable character still apply. The public Joe Biden has always been a despicable troll. As the nominal president, he has taken the black art of demagoguery to the highest levels of the world stage. And, contrary to the old post repeated above, sometimes it is what what the stoolie reads from the teleprompter. Everything he has spewed for the last year and a half carries the unmistakable putrid stench of the rotting soul of a life-long demagogue.

Make no mistake about it, while it may not be the blackness described by Solzhenitsyn, the cancer of the soul clearly shows on his face for all willing to see. May history record that as the face of the emerging American Totalitarianism here in the twenty-first century. It would be well deserved.

Into the abyss…