The Fiji mermaid (also Feejee mermaid) was an object composed of the torso and head of a juvenile monkey sewn to the back half of a fish. It was a common feature of sideshows where it was presented as the mummified body of a creature that was supposedly half mammal and half fish, a version of a mermaid. Wikipedia. When people paid to see the mermaid in the poster they didn’t expect to see this.

While not too many people believe mermaids and mermen are real, a lot of people believe a child sex ring frequented by Hilary Clinton operated out of the basement of the Comet pizza shop (which never had a basement) phony image below.

Click to enlarge images above.

This brings me to P.T. Barnum.

The UN estimates that around 385,000 babies are born each day around the world which adds up to 140 million a year (reference). This is a person being born approximately every 8.08 seconds

It has been disputed that P.T. Barnum said that there’s a sucker born every minute. It hardly matters whether or not he did. His sideshows lured customers to shell out a dime (more or less) to see a real mermaid.

However, considering that there are 1,440 minutes in a day considering that it we define sucker as someone who is easily sucked into believing something that is obviously a – to use the HUFFPOST title word – loopy – there are lot more of them than merely one being born a minute.

This story about Elon Musk and Pizzagate has been in the news for over a week but percolated up to make the main story on HUFFPOST where I saw it for the first time today with the word “loopy” in the title on the opening page of the website (illustration below) with the artilce itself titled as follows (link)

As Advertisers Flee, Elon Musk Doubles Down On … Pizzagate

The post is the second Pizzagate-related missive in a little over a week from the X chairman.

… on The Washington Post website it looked like this:

As you can see with a Google News search here he X’d (is this the new word for tweeted?) something boosting the Pizzagate conspiracy notion eight days ago…

… but then boosted it five more times in two weeks. The orginal so-called theory now has been embellished by the bogus claim described in The Washington Post as follows:

The meme itself is based on a fabricated headline that suggests Pizzagate was debunked by one person, the disgraced former ABC reporter James Gordon Meek, who pleaded guilty last year to possessing child sexual abuse images and was sentenced to six years in federal prison.

It’s beyond the scope I intend for today’s blog to delve into the psychological reasons why so many people, even those who are highly intelligent, believe things that defy logic.

It cannot be understated that we currently face a national crisis where the next election will, if Trump runs, determine the fate of our democracy. If only people who want a fascist autocracy of the kind Trump promises vote I think, while it will be close, Biden will win. If you add to these numbers those who base their votes on believing that Democrats are devils and child predators who also want to foceably take their guns away and allow brown-skinned drug dealers, terrorists, and rapists to cross the southern border this could swing the election and the 47th president would be Donald Trump.

This why Democratic Party strategists must address theories like Pizzagate aggressively.

Addendum: In2017 Steven Mihm wrote “No, Trump Is Not P.T. Barnum”.

Mihm reminds readers that Barnum was once a “casual racist” with some of his sideshow exhibits playing off racial stereotype but later in life He voted for Lincoln in 1860 and later ran for the Connecticut State Legislature.He took office in 1865 and gave an impassioned speech calling for the extension of voting rights to blacks.

The article begins:

Donald Trump has often been described as the second coming of P. T. Barnum, the legendary 19th-century showman. Biographers, academics and journalists have embraced this idea, as have members of Mr. Trump’s family. “He is P. T. Barnum,” his sister once said. With a movie opening on Wednesday that is loosely inspired by Barnum’s life — “The Greatest Showman,” starring Hugh Jackman — we’re likely to hear these comparisons again.

Please: Barnum would be appalled by Mr. Trump. While they share some superficial similarities, it’s the differences that stand out.

It concludes:

Barnum would have recoiled from Mr. Trump, especially from his cynicism about principles and truth. In a widely read exposé of swindles, quack medicines and other “humbugs,” Barnum declared that the “greatest humbug of all” was the individual “who believes — or pretends to believe — that everything and everybody are humbugs.” This person, Barnum observed, “professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true; and that the only way to decide which is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case.”

Barnum was a consummate American: a fast talker, a self-promoter and a relentless striver. He also exemplified many of the qualities that have long made America great in the eyes of the world: generosity, humor, optimism and a willingness, in the end, to do the right thing.

Mr. Trump represents something different. Indeed, if Barnum were alive today, he might be interested in exhibiting Mr. Trump: not as a paragon of business acumen, political prowess or any of the other main attractions in the circus of contemporary life, but as an extreme embodiment of humbug — worthy of a sideshow, perhaps, but nothing more.