Quote of the Week...from Frank Sinatra's Character in the The Manchurian Candidate

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

                     --Major Bennett "Ben" Marco, played by Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The above quote is repeated verbatim during the thriller movie The Manchurian Candidate, and from other characters besides Sinatra's Ben Marco, about Raymond Shaw, a staff sergeant during the Korean War whose outfit...in which everyone roundly hated Shaw (and he them)...disappeared for three days.  Upon their reappearance, Marco tells a story of heroic valor on the part of Shaw and the latter is awarded the Medal of Honor.  Various of the soldiers who experienced the disappearance...which in reality was a kidnapping of them by the communists and intensive brainwashing sessions...repeat the same story, along with that above quote.  But deep down inside, Marco knows it's all false, and it's his refusal to accept his own brainwashing that leads him into solving the mystery over the course of the movie.  I bring this up because I sense a different kind of brainwashing...or maybe mass hypnosis...going on in my country whereby people are adamantly claiming that Donald Trump was the greatest president ever...and of course the false narrative that an incredibly elaborate conspiracy on the part of Democrats, election officials and workers, media figures...and even Republicans who have for years been loyal to Trump...robbed him unfairly of the 2020 presidential election and that he really won it "in a landslide".  Looking from the outside in, this at first seems preposterous to me...but I'm sensing something much more ominous and dangerous going on here.  It's as if whole swaths of our population were functioning in a kind of hypnotic trance...how do you reason with people whose sense of reality is so twisted?  You don't, I suppose, and I don't know how this is all going to play out since the focus of their unquestioning adulation, Raymond Shaw Donald Trump, is no longer in office.  It's not a forced brainwashing, but rather a voluntary one as people surround themselves with only the media sources that confirm their own beliefs and suspicions and depend on other like-minded folks in their lives for reinforcement, creating a false sense of consensus among themselves about what is true and what isn't: in other words, an informational feedback loop...