Flake News
As the Trump era careens nauseously forward, the latest bout of huffing and puffing is over the Mueller Report.
There was widespread shock and disappointment after its initial release at the Spring Equinox. But whence all this incredulity? We already knew that William Barr, who issued the risibly insufficient summary, was appointed precisely because he was hostile to the whole idea of the report.
As for the next big story, a leakage from members of Mueller’s team divulging that the summary glossed over bits that were damning to Trump, Stephen Colbert said that scoop must have come out in “No Duh Magazine.”
Despite these serial anti-climaxes, a contrived buzz is now building about the latest iteration of the report, due to drop any day now from Bill (Black Pen) Barr.
Innocent or guilty?
Where partisan feeling is concerned, the media never met a non-story it didn’t like. Inflammatory mass reactions 
are its bread and butter. To get our news from conventional reporting is to be bombarded senseless by clusters of dubious news bullets, each hyped within an inch of its life.
The release of the Mueller report was a cash cow for information outlets of every stripe, from the tabloids to the New York Times. Drawn out over many months’ time, the breathless coverage devolved to a binary buzz phrase: Collusion or No collusion?
Politically, it is Team Trump that benefits most from the tactic of whittling everything down to soundbites, treating important issues as if they are FaceBook posts, to be liked or disliked.(1)
But intellectually, 
nobody benefits, and on the level of moral intelligence, we’re all being collectively degraded. It’s impossible to discern patterns of meaning from coverage this dumbed-down.
All mainstream journalism does this. The conventional notion of there being a sharp divide 
between liberal and conservative media is itself a media trope.
Even the late-night comics were riding the bandwagon: Will he or won’t he be indicted?
Elephants in the room
There is plenty of meaningful context to be had, however. We just have to look elsewhere than the mainstream news. Noam Chomsky, for example, can always be counted on to call out the elephants in the room.
When asked about the Mueller investigation, he drily reminded us that nothing Russia, or any other nefarious actor, could 
possibly do to undermine our elections would hold a candle to what US corporations already do. The chipping away of our democratic process by the legalized bribery of the lobby system and campaign financing is highly sophisticated, increasingly successful and hidden in plain sight.
Moreover, it is more than a little ironic, Chomsky says, that Americans are acting so righteous about Russia meddling in our elections, when all the world knows that Washington is the #1 global offender in this department.
Uncle Sam has overthrown sovereign governments in at least 85 countries since 1945 (not counting black-op CIA operations, which are more likely to be glamorized in action movies than condemned by the US public).
It cannot be that media experts and pundits are unaware of these realities. The reason they aren’t part of the public discussion is because they would put shades of grey into the established black-and-white approach — an approach that works just fine for Big Media, a profit-driven industry like any other.
To fit the protocol, news reporting must be framed as Your-side (good) vs. The-other-side (bad). Right now, this means Pro-Trump and Anti-Trump. Not long ago, it meant Pro-USA (patriot) or Pro-USSR (traitor).
Since there’s no room for any information that doesn’t fit this template, any talking head who raised the issue of, for example, Washington’s history of engineering regime changes all over the world would doubtless be accused of being an enemy of the Mueller probe, and/or of condoning the mobster oligarchy in Moscow.
Fear and confusion
Counter to the GOP narrative, of course, the Mueller exoneration (-not) failed to give Trump an approval bump. But 
the fact that the guy can still summon any support at all, let alone that of more than a third of the country, still leaves many of us mind-boggled.
Incredulity, however, is not the response that will get Trumpism exposed and defeated. We need to understand why this larger-than-life con man continues to slip through the karmic net.
His success is often chalked up to an ability to fear-monger, which he practices in two ways: by keeping his supporters attached through their fear of others, and by keeping his detractors attached through their fear of him.
Thus do both sides stay locked in a toxic engagement to the man (his Venus conjoins the US Mercury). Friends and foes alike stay riveted upon each new tweet spewing forth from his tiny digits.
Strategic chaos
But there’s another Trump trick that’s even more insidious. It’s symbolized by his Sun’s relationship to the USA’s Mars-square-Neptune, the planet of confusion and distraction. Through the twisted genius of shadow Gemini (public messaging), he carpet-bombs us with chaos.
Chaos, as the journalist Sophia Tesfaye points out, is used here as a tool to maintain control. Overwhelmed as we are by his avalanche of toxic tripe, kept off-balance by the latest White House trash fire, who has the bandwidth to focus on the real issues?
Inability to respond
The talking heads whose job it is to interpret reality for us will not and cannot put the chaos into perspective. Like Trump himself, they’re in this game for the ratings.
As for the Democratic Establishment, they have been in reactive mode for two years, seemingly unable to seize the initiative. Although they have enough ammunition against Trump to sink a battleship, they continue to allow him to dictate the 
terms of debate.
These career politicians are too deeply mired in the big-money political game to respond imaginatively and effectively. Most of them don’t want to risk alienating their donors, who are apparently more important to them than either their constituents or the judgment of history.
Even in terms of sucking up to the electorate, though, you’d think the Democratic old guard would be trying a little harder to correct where they went so grievously wrong in 2016. For instance, by punching up their deliveries with vocalisms that sound real, or at least fake-real, like G. W. Bush’s redneck affectations.
When Trump’s fans insist that he “tells it like it is,” they aren’t referring to the content of what he says. They’re referring to the way he sounds; i.e. nothing like the patricians and professionals.
The novelty of his vulgarity sends his audiences into ecstasies of anti-elitist rage.
Monopoly
Now the Dems have moved to the left, thanks almost single-handedly to Bernie Sanders, whose last campaign broke the American taboo against commonsense social policies.
But the greater issue here isn’t about left-vs.-right. It’s about the simplistic, echo-chamber nature of our commercial public discourse.
It’s about the fact that, in the absence of a culture of ideas, any given news day in the USA is dominated by how a given pundit, or movie star, or comedian is reacting to whatever Trump said that morning.
Challengers
But challenges are emerging, at last, to Trump’s monopoly of the mass mind. They started last year, when Beto grabbed the spotlight through sheer charisma.
More recently, a few genuine mavericks (e.g. Stacy Abrams, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Pete Buttigieg) have been getting attention not only through style and charm, but by steering the conversation back to actual ideas.
And AOC has been punching back, in a vernacular that a real person her age would use.
But my favorite riposte of all was that of another dubious businessman and fellow showboater, LaVar Ball, in November of 2017. When asked what he thought about the latest insult from Trump, he cheekily replied, “Who?”
Waning cycles
In time, we will get historical distance from this latest chapter of the American tragicomedy. Until then, we need to stay grounded and sane. This requires steering clear of the hive mind. I think we all see that we need not more information, but more 
understanding.
Like other big-picture systems, astrology is great for this. When we consider the critical transits upon the world, overarching themes start to cohere.
We’re at the tail end of multiple planetary cycles. Like an extra-intense Dark of the Moon, this is a time of endings, which are notorious for lack of focus. It’s hard to be certain of anything.
The only certainty is that the past is slipping away.
Anti-futurism
Observing this anxiety in the collective mind has led the journalist Alan Finlayson 
to coin the term anti-futurism.
Seeking to understand the anti-E.U. anger behind the current mess in the U.K., he interviewed a group of Brexiteers. He found, just as we find in Trump Country, a sense of powerlessness, reactionary nativism, climate-change denial and anti-intellectualism.
This group derides sociologists, demographers, and other experts that help predict future social problems and theorize what could solve them. They believe nobody can know the future. There is no such thing as a more or less reasonable judgment of things to come. .. It’s an anti-political politics, organized around resentment at past losses & skepticism about future promises.
When asked about ecosystem collapse or financial meltdown, his respondents voiced opinions similar to those of American evangelicals.
They would rather submit to divine Providence. Ethnic nationalists consider themselves in terms of rebirth: the reclaiming of a land that has been lost.
It’s a point of view that flies in the face of assumptions about social change that have defined the modern era.
The Aquarian Shift
But the astrological milestones coming up, notably the Great Mutation of Jupiter and Saturn,(2) suggest a return to
the notion of “progress.” Notably, this word/concept was all the rage 180 years ago, when the current cycle — now in its last gasp — got its start.
That was during the heyday of the industrial revolution. Back then, people were all excited about modernity: about society moving forward, not back.
Moreover, when the new cycle begins, late next year, it will be in Aquarius: the sign associated with futurity. This is a clear-minded air sign, unsentimental and fact-based. It augurs a social climate antithetical to the emotion-fueled debates upon us now.
Shadow Aquarius
But like all planetary symbols, this one has a dark potential. At its highest, Aquarius is about the pursuit of freedom through human ingenuity. But it also governs less enlightened applications of science and technology.
Finlayson again:
Consider Silicon Valley techno-utopians who, starting about 10 years ago, declared that mass democracy was a hindrance to the exercise of power. (Peter Thiel: “Welfare recipients and women… are “notoriously tough for libertarians.”) His ilk holds that features of old-fashioned democracy, like clumsy old parties, trade unions and newspapers are unnecessary in the age of mass data mining in real-time. …People do not need to know things about themselves: they are the things to be known about.
As for the effects of AI, the consummate Aquarian-age product, we are speeding ahead with these inventions with scant attention paid to how they will impact our humanity. It has been largely left to the writers of science fiction to raise these important questions, and the picture they paint (Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.) is mostly dystopian. (3)
Not fated
Which version of Aquarius will we get, the creative one or the destructive one? This is the first question most of us would want to ask. Certainly it’s the question that would be asked in a TV segment on the subject.
We’re conditioned by the media to reduce all issues, even impossibly existential ones, into dualistic yes-or-no 
questions. But if we believe that the future is created at every moment, it follows that it is up to us how humanity will express the transits upcoming.
They are only symbols, representing potential realities.
It’s our understanding that makes the difference between a dark potential and its enlightened counterpart. When we understand — collectively and individually — the nature of ourselves and our times, we tip the scales towards life-affirming outcomes.
Note
1) Trump’s legal strategy in this case seems to have been to compress The Donald’s numbing array of crimes into one sound bite: one that could be claimed as a win if that isolated charge, collusion, couldn’t be proven.
2) Audio recordings of my lecture on this transit are available through the San Francisco Astrological Society. Email Rasha at president@sfastrologicalsociety.com.
3) As the Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis has written, we need to begin building an ethical infrastructure for the use of this new technology, and fast. Intelligent robots need to be considered as not simply human-made machines, but as “a new class of social actors.”