What are the key reasons people voted for Trump in the 2024 election?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/What-are-the-key-reasons-people-voted-for-Trump-in-the-2024-election-2

Unfocused rage is likely the most encompassing sound-bite answer to this question.

MAGAts hate struggling in their lives — like everyone does. These days, during our historic levels of income inequality and minimal tax burdens on the wealthy, as they plunder our world into extinction, everyone but the top is struggling.

MAGAts have had their emotions leveraged against them, though, by a steady diet of hatred toward anyone and everyone not responsible for their hardship.

They’ve been taught to hate liberals because the left is a threat to the oligarchs.

They’ve been taught to hate immigrants because they’re an easy target to blame for their misfortunes. It’s a form of manipulated displacement.

They’ve been taught to hate minorities because they have been conditioned to believe minorities, like trans people, are assaulting their way of life simply by existing.

They’ve been taught to hate women because women are easier to victimize when they can be called “baby killers.”

They’re afraid of how quickly the world is changing and feel left behind, and they hate that.

They’re afraid of being unable to keep up and are insecure about their future. Meanwhile, the groups they’ve been taught to hate appear to weather the storm better than they do, and they hate that, too.

They hate a status quo that seems deaf to their pleas, and Trump is a disruptive element in society that echoes their hate. His perceived political outsider status and natural personality of overt indulgence in hatred convince them that he represents their interests.

He validates their hate fantasies and permits them to indulge openly in their hatred while manifesting it in physical reality. They don’t realize how much other people struggle with similar emotions or that they acknowledge how a significant reason why fantasies should remain fantasies is not all fantasies should be acted out because they are too destructive to be made manifest. They are fantasies that should remain fantasies because they function as forms of therapy. Making them real necessitates entirely new levels of treatment.

MAGAts have lived a lie through their belief systems that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that has convinced them to blur distinctions even more, to justify coping with all the pent-up hatred.

They can’t grasp long-term strategies or how distant a consequence can be from an action.

For example, a complaint they expressed was the cost of living, and because their narrow view of the highest authority in the land means that person dictates how everything works, it was easy for them to blame Biden. They didn’t learn to understand how the corporations that feed the media empires with profits would not risk losing those profits by demonizing the price-gouging corporations who butter their bread through advertising revenue.

The Republicans have been leveraging the naivety of their undereducated constituents for decades. States like Kentucky can sink into poverty while their leader overtly grows their wealth and blatantly betrays the entire nation, and they still can’t connect the dots.

All of this is a recipe for wallowing in the kind of hatred that can only escalate dramatically further as the fiscal incompetence of Republicans catches up to them. Their economic mismanagement has now run out of room to blame the Democrats. Trump’s strategy for tariffs and utilizing Elon Musk to be the voice of cutbacks in the trillions while gearing up to make the public accept enduring another round of austerity will begin to crack their support.

His appointments to senior administration roles are already horrifying as an overt pedophile has been appointed Attorney General, his Health and Human Services Secretary is an overt mental health case, and his Secretary of Defense is a television talking head. These three are already a toxic enough recipe for disaster, while the list of notables merely adds orders of magnitude to the levels of concern these already register.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/trump-cabinet-administration-maga-extremism

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/14/trump-cabinet-administration-maga-extremism

Anything innocuous and unpredictable can become the match that sets the entire edifice of plutocrat manipulation over the last half-century into flames. This administration seems poised to ignite public backlash as Trump pushes an economy-killing tariff agenda and insiders like Elon Musk warn of impending cuts at impossibly surreal levels and public adjusting to another round of austerity.

The MAGAt argument, on its surface level of concern for the cost of living, appears rational. However, its sincerity will be tested in ways that challenge national stability at previously unseen familial levels. The cracks in the social contract will dramatically grow at the level of fundamental building blocks for society. 

Once we’ve breached the final veneer of tolerance and the MAGAts realize they’ve been played for fools while hating the wrong people, they will harness all their unfocused rage into a tight focus to enact destruction on orders of magnitude well beyond what they have achieved thus far in society.

Once they reach rock bottom and have their come to Jesus moment, the plutocrats responsible for dividing the people and ripping us all off will have hell to pay.

Why was communism always imposed on countries and never voted for democratically?

Every government imposed on a country has been authoritarian.

Marx’s vision for communism has never been implemented and was never realistically possible to implement in the manner he envisioned.

His view was that socialism (which he often used interchangeably with communism) was an intermediary step to communism. For the people to own the means of production implies a democratic form of ownership, which has never been the case with socialist systems in an authoritarian framework.

His definition of communism was based on the principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” — it is, by definition, a meritocracy (which, in itself, is problematic). The problem, however, is that no system is possible — at least at this stage of human development — without some hierarchy of authority.

Every implementation of what has been popularly viewed as communism has never been communism as Marx envisioned it (while he accurately predicted the flaws in Capitalism would lead to the situation we are suffering from today) and failed precisely because they have been authoritarian systems based upon a centralized authority.

Today’s capitalism can be argued to be an authoritarian system imposed upon the people, entirely consistent with the historical failures of the implementations/impositions of pseudo-communism. (Particularly since the U.S. is on the brink of transforming into a fully-fledged fascist state stripped of its last vestige of Democracy by Drumpf’s promise to end elections. The state of corporatocracy that the U.S. has today has arguably been imposed upon a people without their knowledge or consent. A corporate infrastructure is a totalitarian style of monarchic rule as an operating system of administration… and precisely why corporations are anachronistic holdovers from a medieval era that cannot help but evolve into a threat to democratic governments.)

Marx’s vision of communism can be argued that it was intended to be an organically evolved system, which, by today’s measure, means a form of advanced direct democracy.

To contradict the presumption in this question, Lenin did not impose his brand of communism on the country. He won the support of a majority of the people against the Provisional Government in place at the time. The people who endorsed his program supported his confiscation of land to nationalize it and divide it among the peasants.

This is eerily much like where the U.S. is at with the potential installation of an Orange Nazi Turd who should be rotting behind bars like every other convicted felon instead of roaming about free to campaign on a platform of destroying 243 years of American democracy.

The real problem we have is dialectical and a propensity for oversimplification.

Even authoritative sources like Britannica fail to offer clarity in defining governmental systems. As far as that source is concerned, there are five countries it identifies communism as an “official form of government”: China, North Korea, Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam.

Meanwhile, descriptions of each nation contradict that statement:

Vietnam — The politics of Vietnam is dominated by a single party under an authoritarian system, the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV).

North Korea — A totalitarian dictatorship with a comprehensive cult of personality around the Kim family.

Laos — Lao People’s Democratic Republic (commonly known as Laos) takes place in the framework of a one-party parliamentary socialist republic.

Cuba — Cuba has had a socialist political system since 1961 based on the “one state — one party” principle. Cuba is constitutionally defined as a single-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republic with semi-presidential powers.

China — The Chinese constitution describes China’s system of government as a people’s democratic dictatorship. The CCP has also used other terms to officially describe China’s system of government, including “socialist consultative democracy”, and whole-process people’s democracy.

(This post was an answer to a Question posed on Quora — where all my posts on Medium have originated; hence the personal response indicated within this article. — https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/ )

Are human rights natural rights endowed simply by the virtue of being human?


This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora.

Human rights are essentially an agreement between humans to protect a characteristic or behaviour of all humans within their community.

Human rights exist only by virtue of the agreement itself and the degree of commitment by other humans to protect those rights.

This is a global issue, with human rights being violated all the time and everywhere on the planet. It’s a problem that demands our immediate attention and action. This is why human rights are violated all the time and everywhere on the earth.

We have far too many humans who view rights as scalable according to their essentially misanthropic perceptions of humanity — because we are suffering from a mental health pandemic affecting at least one in five among us. We are only now beginning to realize that we are a species that has been suffering for centuries from generational trauma from our barbaric origins.

The fight for universal human rights is a fundamental building block in a healing process that will require centuries to emerge from.

We are far better off today than we were one century ago simply because of our increased awareness of the issues we are dealing with and an emerging appropriate context from which we interpret our experiences.

Human rights are crucial to preserving the social contract and ensuring systemic stability.

Without human rights as a concept enshrined into law, we descend into barbarism.


After writing this answer and posting it, I realize I’m doing a disservice to the concept by providing such little context.

Human rights have a long and bloody history of development in which their inklings as concepts we should value as a species were responses to centuries of brutal violence characterizing human life.

The earliest examples of human rights enshrined in local laws date back to circa 2350 BC in Asia as the reforms of “Urukagina of Lagash,” which evolved into more well-known examples of legal documentation such as “The Code of Hammurabi” from circa 1780 BC.

Ancient Egypt also supported fundamental human rights through documents such as “The Edicts of Ashoka” (c. 268–232 BC). Other principles of human behaviour emerged during this period, while one such principle has been incorporated throughout most living religions today and is popularly known as “The Golden Rule.”

Fast forward to 622, and “The Constitution of Medina” functioned as a formal agreement between Muhammad and the tribes and families of Yathribe, which included Muslims, Jews, and pagans. This agreement was an early means of uniting all peoples of the land under a common identity referred to as “Ummah” and incorporated several changes to how slavery was defined and limited.

Early Islamic laws from this period incorporated principles of military conduct and the treatment of prisoners of war that became precursors to international humanitarian law.

Moving forward into the Middle Ages, the most influential document establishing the modern basis for human rights was the creation of the “Magna Carta,” itself heavily influenced by early Christian thinkers such as St Hilary of Poitiers, St Ambrose, and St Augustine.

The Magna Carta of 1215 influenced the development of “common law” and several constitutional documents following, all related to human rights, including the (1689) “English Bill of Rights” and the (1789) United States Constitution.

Some may remember from the Iraq War and the establishment of Guantanamo that the Bush administration suspended the writ of “Habeas Corpus” — the right to know what one has been accused of — was a right established in the Magna Carta. This was a fundamental violation of a basic right that set the nation back in time to an era of barbarism — and they hypocritically leveraged that violation to commit war crimes for waterboarding that the U.S. itself forced Japan to face an international tribunal for war crimes over the same behaviour decades earlier.

This is a stain on the American people that will not wash off their conscience while they do nothing to own responsibility for their grotesque violation. This dark moral failing of the nation has become a slippery slope of moral failures permitting the monstrosity of immoral behaviour. We — as in the world- are now on the verge of potentially falling entirely into a pit of immorality because of their “leadership” in this area.

At any rate, I’ll avoid proselytizing further and get to the goods of reading material and a “pretty picture” at the end with a chart of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Human rights — Wikipedia

History of human rights — Wikipedia

A Short History of Human Rights

A brief history of human rights — Amnesty International

Universal Declaration of Human Rights | United Nations

How to Restore, Strengthen and Preserve a Democracy

Democracies are strengthened by the degree of engagement by the people. The more people become informed, engaged with, and involved with their government and its activities, the more secure the democracy.

A disengaged and apathetic citizenry makes a government susceptible to corruption.

Restoring and reinforcing the stability of democracy begins in the classroom with a comprehensive civics-oriented strategy for equipping students with the skills and insights to achieve success in effective governance and their personal lives.

As it turns out, the overlap in skills for effective governance and success in one’s personal life are represented as an almost clean circle in a Venn diagram.

The range of interpersonal skills one can and should develop are core competencies for life. Communication skills, negotiation skills, and conflict resolution skills are all universally valuable skills. Developing competencies in areas like Robert’s Rules of Order and understanding the nature and process of effective legislation (rules to live by) may be more niche but are transferable skills that can be applied in other areas of life, particularly when they’re not considered obscure skills by a majority like they are now.

The more people who know how to declare a point of order, the fewer conflicts could escalate into violence.

Of course, the development of logic and critical thinking skills should be included in the curriculum, if not as courses but as strategies for delivering an existing course load.

Applying critical thinking skills development within a history class, for example, would increase student engagement simply by structuring the information delivery process through a means that challenges one’s thinking skills.

On an entirely different and equally crucial level is the reinforcement of a commitment to the role of the Fourth Estate in society. The profit motive must be removed to protect objectivity in the information delivery process, ensuring the public is adequately informed of relevant news in the most agnostic way possible.

Breaking corporate media into community-based employee co-ops will create a culture of checks and balances that approach the self-regulating effectiveness of the peer review process within the scientific community.

The election process is another area that must be made as agnostic as possible. Removing the undue influence of money in elections and reducing the tribalism of the currently corrosive culture in politics is critical to mitigating ideological bias. First-past-the-post elections should be replaced with proportional representation and ranked-choice voting.

With these measures, an exceptionally stable democracy can emerge on level ground with inbuilt resistance to corruption.

Leon Wieseltier — Quote on Democracy

Why is there so much civil unrest and more expected in the UK?


Civil Unrest and Its Expected Growth

It’s not just the UK. There has been a trend toward increasing civil unrest around the world.

Global Growth Trends in Civil Unrest

Global Protests and Riots Almost Double from 2011 to 2018

Institute for Economics & Peace | Experts in Peace, Conflict and Risk

The Institute for Economics and Peace provides an in-depth analysis of civil unrest in the UK specifically through the .pdf available from the link below:

Note from this quote a clue as to the causes of civil unrest:

The UK has become less peaceful in the last decade. Peacefulness in the UK deteriorated by almost 11 percent in 2022, the most recent year of measurement. This is the eighth deterioration in peacefulness in the last decade and the first since 2020. Fifty-eight Police Force Areas (PFA) deteriorated, while eight improved. This is the largest number of PFAs to deteriorate since 2018.

Of the five UKPI indicators, homicide was the only one to improve, while the remaining four — violent crime, weapons crime, police officers, public disorder — deteriorated

This suggests the aggravating factors for civil unrest do not lie within social dynamics among the population but an overall level of dissatisfaction with systems failing to meet the needs of the people.

Sadly, the propensity for ignoring causes and treating symptoms has exacerbated the problems as police have increasingly adopted militaristic policies for “serving and protecting” the public.

The militarization of the police has made this phenomenon worse, not better and they’ve been allowed to evolve in a counter-productive strategy that fails on every front from inciting civil unrest to increasing incidents of their wrongdoing as police are responsible for up to 40% of all domestic violence incidents.

Police Stress Results in 40% Involved in Personal Domestic Violence Incidents
Police Stress Results in Alcohol Dependency Issues

The strategy of militarization of the police has turned them into a terrorist organization for many citizens. This is a consequence of conservative politics because imposition is the only language they understand.


Here is a summary provided by Chat GPT on social events in which Police catalyzed riots as a consequence of their inept approach to conflict de-escalation (from a U.S. perspective):

Numerous social events throughout history have seen police actions catalyzing riots. Here are some notable instances:

1. 1965 Watts Riots (Los Angeles, California):

Trigger: The arrest of Marquette Frye, a black motorist, by a white California Highway Patrol officer.

Outcome: Six days of rioting, resulting in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and extensive property damage.

2. 1967 Newark Riots (Newark, New Jersey):

Trigger: The arrest and beating of John Smith, a black cab driver, by white police officers.

Outcome: Six days of rioting, 26 deaths, hundreds of injuries, and widespread destruction.

3. 1967 Detroit Riots (Detroit, Michigan):

Trigger: A police raid on an unlicensed bar, or “blind pig,” in a predominantly black neighbourhood.

Outcome: Five days of rioting, 43 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, and significant property damage.

4. 1968 Chicago Riots (Chicago, Illinois):

Trigger: The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., followed by police actions during protests.

Outcome: Several days of rioting, 11 deaths, numerous injuries, and extensive property damage.

5. 1980 Miami Riots (Miami, Florida):

Trigger: The acquittal of four white police officers in the beating death of Arthur McDuffie, a black motorcyclist.

Outcome: Several days of rioting, 18 deaths, numerous injuries, and extensive property damage.

6. 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Los Angeles, California):

Trigger: The acquittal of four LAPD officers in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black motorist.

Outcome: Six days of rioting, 63 deaths, over 2,000 injuries, and widespread destruction.

7. 2001 Cincinnati Riots (Cincinnati, Ohio):

Trigger: The police shooting of Timothy Thomas, an unarmed black teenager.

Outcome: Several days of rioting, resulted in injuries and significant property damage.

8. 2014 Ferguson Unrest (Ferguson, Missouri):

Trigger: The police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer.

Outcome: Weeks of protests and riots, resulting in injuries, arrests, and property damage.

9. 2015 Baltimore Protests (Baltimore, Maryland):

Trigger: The death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

Outcome: Several days of protests and rioting, resulted in injuries, arrests, and property damage.

10. 2020 George Floyd Protests (Nationwide, USA):

Trigger: The police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Outcome: Protests and riots across numerous cities in the U.S., resulting in deaths, injuries, and significant property damage.

These events highlight the recurring issue of police actions triggering significant social unrest, often reflecting deeper systemic issues within society.


Imposition is conflict escalation NOT conflict resolution.

Although the militarization of the police is entirely the wrong way to go in addressing social unrest, they are a symptom of resolvable political problems beginning with the short-sighted views of conservative politicians who interpret every problem as a nail because they have learned only how to wield a hammer.

Nuance escapes them.

The patience required to facilitate peaceful resolutions runs contrary to a profit-oriented mindset that equates time spent with lost dollars.

The core problem is also exacerbated by their sycophantic support of the conditions that led to last century’s Great Depression and were responsible for triggering the Second World War. We are watching those conditions and their consequences replaying themselves right now in real-time with the horrifying implications inherent within the corrupt American system.

No nation is immune to the impact of economic distortions feeding despair among the public.

The core problem catalyzing the increase in civil unrest is economic by nature.

It’s the Economy, Stupid!

The core problem feeding the despair driving otherwise peaceful citizens into extreme action is the economic distortion corroding the basic patience, tolerance, and decency of otherwise peaceful people who want only to live modestly dignified lives but cannot because we have all been robbed of trillions in a class warfare that seeks to resurrect a facsimile of governance resembling a medieval caste system of two classes of people; rulers and serfs.

Middle Class Wealth Vanishing

This trajectory is unsustainable and will continue to feed unrest.

Profit-Driven Corporate Sociopathy

This sociopathic profit motive cannot but lead to chaos.

Global CO2 Emissions by Lifestyle

Making matters worse is that the lifestyles of the wealthy class have put humanity on a trajectory toward its extinction.

No one should be surprised by an increase in public unrest.

Things are going to get MUCH uglier before they get better.

The questions we need to address are:

  1. “How many casualties can we tolerate before we come to our senses?”
  2. How much pain and suffering can we stomach before we lose our shit?
  3. How many millions must die due to preventable causes and the behaviours of sociopaths hellbent on destroying this planet will it take before civilization is a chaotic mess of violent insurrections all around the world?
  4. What will it take for the wealthiest among us to show some leadership and help set this ship of humanity onto a path toward a sustainable future?
JFK — Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

(This post was an answer to a Question posed on Quora — where all my posts on Medium have originated; hence the personal response indicated within this article. — https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/ )

Are we more committed to protecting free speech or cancelling voices that challenge our beliefs?

This post is a response to a question posed on Quora

Upon encountering this question, I thought, “Who is ‘we’?”

My second thought is that this is a typical question by someone who doesn’t understand what “free speech” means.

People often misconstrue “free speech” as a right to say whatever they want wherever they go without suffering the consequences of the content of their speech.

That’s not even remotely close to what “free speech” means.

“Free speech” means only that you will not be hauled off in the middle of the night by your government for saying something that a government authority doesn’t like.

That’s it.

That’s the extent of “free speech” in society.

“Free speech” has never been, nor will it ever be, anything more than a protection against a dictatorial government determining acceptability for the concepts people publicly discuss.

Here’s an example of a violation of the principle of “Free Speech” in society:

This is a politician who has already announced to the world that they are willing to strip fundamental rights from a people based on being personally offended over the presentation of their own words repeated verbatim.

Here is an example of how a self-declared “Free Speech Absolutist” regards “Free Speech.”

This is NOT a “Free Speech” violation because Xitter is a privately owned space, not a government entity. Elon is well within his rights to ban anyone he pleases in the same way you are entitled to kick anyone you don’t like out of your house for no reason you would need to use to justify kicking them out of your house. Your home is yours. You have every right to enforce any rule you like, whether irrational or contradictory.

All Quora answers are the property of all the authors of those answers, and that’s a HUGE draw for people because it means we can delete abusive comments or turn off comments altogether. After all, “freedom of speech,” in practical terms, also means “freedom from speech” — just like “freedom of religion” also means “freedom from religion.”

“Freedom of speech” is NOT an entitlement to be heard. It is a protection from a malicious entity with the power of a government to enforce the homogenization of a public under an autocratic system.

When people reject stupidity barfed up by people they don’t want to hear from, they’re not “cancelling” anything. They’re simply exercising their right to refuse to subject themselves to personally offensive speech.

When it comes down to the notion of being cancelled as a criticism of what happens in society, if one were to create a ven diagram of the people who complain about “cancel society” and the people who endorse banning books, it would be a circle.

Otherwise, the reality of “cancelling a voice” while violating the concept and principle of “free speech” literally means hauling someone off in the dead of night because they offended some government official like Drumpf by repeating their own words to the public in the way that journalism is supposed to in society.

I think the people who complain the most about this issue should spend more time educating themselves on what “Free speech” means. The most impactful lesson one could undergo and never forget is to take a trip to North Korea. Set up a soap box on a street corner. They can then begin criticizing the North Korean government to see exactly what it means to “cancel a voice.”

Otherwise, the tiresome whining about “cancelling voices” on social media is interpreted much like enduring nails on a blackboard.

Should wealth be more evenly distributed?


Robin Hood Statue

No, but yes but no… but yes.

To “distribute wealth more evenly” implies a dictatorial imposition of a narrowly and politically defined sum of what constitutes “evenly.”

There are numerous problems with that strategy that go well beyond not fixing the underlying issues contributing to the corruption of what should be an agnostic system but isn’t due to how it has been corrupted.

This approach not only accomplishes nothing in the way of fixing the underlying issues, which, on that level alone, would create a “rubberband effect” of “snapping economics back to their originally corrupt state,” it would also justify an exacerbation of a centuries-long class warfare that has allowed the corruption of an economic system to take root. IOW. The degree of corruption existing today that has led to historic levels of income injustice would escalate from a cold war into a blazing furnace of vengeance against the little people by the wealthy. Their loss of wealth would be temporary, and they would be motivated by more than greed to rebuild their hoards; they would also be motivated by a desire for retribution.

We should focus instead on adjusting the parameters of a wealth redistribution system like capitalism to ensure wealth flows freely throughout the system rather than collect like plaque in arteries to clog up the entire system with private hoards held by a few whose obscene accruals threaten a system-wide collapse.

We need to establish rules to ensure equitability from a system-wide perspective to make fairness an inherent characteristic of the capitalist system. We need the system to rein in corruption at the top while empowering the middle and enabling the bottom.

If our economic systems were to operate on a holistic and agnostic basis, then success would not be a measure of how much wealth the wealthiest are collecting but how stable the economy is and the degree of economic mobility the system facilitates. We should measure economic success based on how people move out of poverty and into wealth. We should measure economic success on the stability and growth of the middle class. The middle class has always been the engine of the economy, and we must prioritize its health and efficiency to ensure that the entire system is stable.

Grocery store experience of bottom 30% serves as a better gauge of our economy than the stock market performance of the top 1%.

This can be “easily” accomplished (once the political will is established) through a few simple measures. We can begin with the adjustment of tax rates to levels historically proven to spur the greatest economic growth and the greatest growth of a thriving middle class.

Historic Highest Marginal Income Tax Rates

Restoring tax rates to Eisenhower levels incentivizes investments back into companies to hire more staff to minimize a tax burden. It means capital investments into the operation instead of stock buy-backs to boost share value and billionaire hoards.

Restoring tax rates to Eisenhower levels gives the economy a boost of liquidity flowing through the entire system to boost everyone’s well-being while restraining the excesses of greed, which contributes to creating a ruling class through a dynastic acquisition of wealth and political power.

Restoring taxes to sane levels permits the implementation of a universal basic income that mitigates the leverage of wealth in labour negotiations. People will no longer be forced to choose between a depressed wage and basic survival. Since unions are an easy target to attack and disempower, as occurred following Reagan’s example, which led to a strategic initiative by employers to eradicate unions, UBI eliminates that weakness.

Employers in the U.S. spend $340 million per year on “union avoidance” consultants.
Union Busting Bingo

Union-busting: what to expect and how to respond

A Universal Basic Income provides economic stability for a nation because when a corporation contracts, thousands of jobs are lost, not just a few or dozens. The entire economy is impacted by an exaggerated shrinkage that benefits the wealthy at the expense of the working class.

The boom and bust outcome of a trickle-down economy is intentional because it is during a bust that the wealthiest make their greatest gains by leveraging desperation against people to buy out smaller businesses at fire sale prices.

Restoring tax rates to Eisenhower levels eliminates the boom and bust advantage while UBI insulates the vulnerable from the predatory practices of the wealthy.


The above represents two primary initiatives that would restore equity throughout the economy. These alone are temporary measures subject to reversals, putting us back on this same destructive track we are on.

We must cement fairness into our systems on levels greater than the simple vectors of corporate taxes and employee protections.

We must make fundamental changes to a vulnerable political system which allows the worst of our impulses to dominate political discourse while being manipulated through corrupt media enterprises owned by powerful stakeholders.

Electoral reform initiatives to eliminate the toxically competitive first-past-the-post elections and replace them with proportional representation and a ranked-choice voting process will eliminate the hegemony of party politics and allow a public to engage on an issue-resolution basis rather than be reduced to a gaggle of high school cheerleaders caught up in tribalist fervour.

This initiative also mitigates the impact of wealth on the election process because it’s much harder to “create a team of tax and revenue manipulators” when “multiple teams” exist in a multiparty system that more accurately reflects the different views and positions of a diverse voting public.

Eliminating private funding from the election process would also protect the political system from corruption. Both initiatives above would transform the entire political process into an agnostic system of representatives who fully represent the diversity of the people’s will.

First-Past-the-Post-Elections shut out most voices from representation to favour the horse race winner.

First Past the Post Elections do not represent the public.

Democracy is a government that is supposed to represent the will of ALL the people, not just the horse race-winning team.

Proportional Representation versus First-past-the-post
U.K. Election First-Past-the-Post versus Proportional Representation
Sweden use Proportional Representation
Swedish Parliament with Proportional Representation

Finally, the most difficult challenge to implement and arguably the most important initiative to protect our world’s democracies from the greatest villains we have ever fought throughout history is to rein in excesses at the top around the globe.

No one needs one billion dollars.

We should not keep breeding generation after generation of entitled people who assume their wealth equates to superior humanity and the right to shape the world in their image. The wealthy class is not comprised of superior beings but flawed humans. They possess too much power at such a degree of disproportion that they can individually tip the scales of humanity’s future toward extinction or utopia.

Guess where they are collectively leading us all today:

Oxfam — Percentage of Global CO2 Emissions by Lifestyle

Are people poor because they were born to be poor?


This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “What can we say for those people that worked hard but are still poor? Is it because they were born to be poor?”

The first place to begin one’s assessment of another’s fortune is with an honest apprehension of the environment affecting all fortunes by all people who inhabit a (somewhat) closed ecosystem.

To suggest some external source of magical influence like fate to factor in any of this merely distracts from an objective apprehension of the dynamics leading to disparity.

It is precisely this kind of magical thinking that every “Confidence Artist” (“conman,” “swindler,” “scammer,” fraud) throughout human history has relied upon to enrich themselves at the expense of their victims.

Making matters worse for the victims is the belief that they’re responsible for the actions of others who impoverish them.

This thinking epitomizes victim-shaming.

It’s no different than blaming one’s attire for “causing” a rape.

It’s precisely the thinking a homicidal monster utilizes when they claim someone else’s actions forced them to commit murder. They twist the notion of self-defence into a justifiable weapon to dismiss responsibility for their actions.

This perverse thinking permits people like Derek Chauvin to suffocate George Floyd until they stop breathing. It empowers all the evil monsters in our midst to invoke sociopathic rationalizations unrelated to the incident in question to justify the commission of murder.

Inmate who stabbed Derek Chauvin 22 times is charged with attempted murder, prosecutors say

It ignores the causal nature of reality. Even the Bible’s Genesis chapter and “list of begats” acknowledge causality.

Bible, King James Version

People are not poor because of some cosmic assignment handed down to them by an authority, as if it were a justifiable assessment of their character at birth. People are poor because humanity has not learned the lessons of our primitive existence — namely, that we managed to survive our cave-dwelling origins only because we worked together as we hunted in groups. Each contributed to the welfare of the whole in ways that allowed everyone to benefit equally from the collective labours of synergy.

Margaret Mead has most succinctly identified the dawn of human civilization in her example of a knit bone discovered during her anthropological studies.


The worst aspect of all of this is that the evidence is abundant. There is no mystery as to why so many people struggle with poverty today.

In our early history, widespread poverty primarily resulted from natural scarcity due to environmental conditions such as an early frost wiping out an entire harvest or poor land management practices such as those that led to “The Dust Bowl” and the “Dirty Thirties.” Ironically, the magical thinking of “Manifest Destiny” driving an initial bump in prosperity contributed to the impoverished conditions that contributed to “The Great Depression,” which contributed to the stressors driving global aggressions leading to a Second World War only decades after the first global aggression.

Dust Bowl: Causes, Definition & Years | HISTORY

The fuel behind all of the poverty and aggression is the same fuel contributing to an increasing number and degree of violent protests occurring worldwide today — income disparity. We have surpassed the stage of income disparity that triggered our first global aggressions due to the stresses of exacerbated conditions of poverty.

This cycle of class disparity has triggered aggressions throughout human history, and many of our popular stories are based on them.

We should know better by now, but we seem incapable of learning this crucial lesson from history.

What makes matters worse is that in today’s “post-scarcity world,” we produce more than we can consume. We have no excuse for poverty today beyond human failings, as expressed through our politics.

Can we feed the world and ensure no one goes hungry?


None of this is a mystery — or should be a mystery to anyone today. Yet, here we are looking for excuses to victim-shame the vulnerable in society who struggle to feed themselves every day.

The information providing clarity exists in abundance. Few people are ignorant of the fact that eight people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the whole of humanity. No one is oblivious to the magical sound of the designation we venerate of a “centibillionaire.” It’s like a status of godhood on Earth that people seriously believe is a consequence of effort and ingenuity and not a dysfunctional system that impoverishes the vulnerable.

Few people perceive that obscenity in terms of the threat to global stability that it is. Few people perceive that amount of power within the hands of an egotist as a direct threat to their livelihoods — unless, of course, they’re one of the thousands who have been displaced on a whim by a megalomaniac who spent $44 billion to own the world’s most enormous megaphone so that they can capture global attention every day.

Few people look at graphs like these two and become horrified by their implications.

Yet… here we are, sending ourselves on a path in which the logical conclusion of the trajectory summed up by these two graphs is the end of human civilization as we know it. Instead of focusing on how to correct our course, we’re looking for reasons to victim-shame the most vulnerable among us.

It’s entirely disgusting that so many people are so willing to demonize the victims in society that it is mind-boggling how such utterly primitive thinking can exist in modern society.

Centuries from now, if we survive this insanity, this mindset will be viewed as the horrific equivalent of witch trials from our history.

Can a Democrat define their go-to mime: “Threat to democracy”?

This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “We have to be impressed by the Democratic Party’s ability to ‘Fool some of the people ALL of the time.’ Could those in their pocket kindly define their go-to mime: ‘Threat to democracy?’”

After this question, the next question you posted on your profile qualifies as a “threat to democracy,” as does your ideological mindset in which you divide society into an “us versus them” dynamic.

Your understanding of a law intended to protect everyone equally is broken and favours the application of subjective biases that disenfranchise half of the population. Furthermore, you have no respect for that half of the population as you endorse stripping them of rights you take for granted for yourself.

You place all of the onus of responsibility onto that half of the population while perversely ignoring how demeaning the very concept of life is by elevating tissue in development beyond the degree of value you should be placing upon the life and lives affected by that process.

Women are not different in every state, with different needs or rights to protect according to the political whims of zealous religious hypocrites dehumanizing them as incubators for the production of children they can dispose of once they’re produced.

There exists no valid justification for the segregation of fundamental human rights by state because abortion is not a state issue but a human issue.

States’ rights, in this case, erode democracy and reduce critical functions within human lives to commodities serving the vapid whims of political ideologues rather than the universal values of human life in a uniform fashion.

It would be best if you were far more concerned with how “states rights” are intended to address issues affecting localized areas, not universal matters.

It would help if you protected the clear divisions between geographical and universal human concerns.

You don’t do that, though, because you have already indicated your primary concern is to pit citizens and neighbours against each other with your ideological division of society, and that, right there, is the greatest threat to democracy.

It would be best if you fought alongside your neighbours to protect all equally, not against your neighbours, to win an egotistically subjective degree of superiority over them.

While you are busy gloating over what you dismiss as a non-issue, the betrayal of women’s rights and democracy as a whole, you reveal a horrific degree of nation-destroying sociopathy.

The reality is that reversing Roe v. Wade has already had a devastating impact on the lives of fellow citizens you don’t seem to care in the least about.

This is not “nothing.”

It’s a horror show, and you show yourself to be a horrific monster by pretending this doesn’t matter.

In reality, states should stay out of people’s lives and let them live according to their universal right to self-determination.

It’s not a state’s right to overrule universal rights. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy that undermines an entire nation as a fundamental threat to its stability as a democracy.

The worlds of all these people have fallen apart. You have chosen to overlook the pain and suffering your attitude causes them in favour of banging your ideological drum while disparaging your neighbours in the process.

That makes YOU a threat to democracy. YOU are too full of yourself to realize how badly you betray it. YOU are more interested in achieving ideological dominion over your neighbours than in supporting the social contract and working together to resolve common problems.

Why are progressives communist sympathizers?

Upon reading this question, I first thought you had no clue what communism is beyond maybe the bread lines. Even then, I doubt you would know why that happened or how unrelated it was to Marx’s vaguely defined description of communism.

I thought of you as just another Pavlovian dog who’s been programmed to barf up “communism” about everything you hate, like most MAGAts who don’t wash their panties often enough.

As part of my investigation into profiles I block, I often check out their followers because… Why TF do people follow morons? I also frequently get a chuckle over Chucklehead followers while finding many blockworthy candidates. I learned this practice from Billy Flowers because that idiot creates a LOT of profiles that follow each other. I doubt there are ever any real people in their sewing circle.

At any rate, beyond usually finding catfish to block so that I don’t get the typical message on my answers that goes something like this: “Gee. I loooooove your posts but can’t seem to follow you. Pleeeeeze follow meeeee and I promise to like you.”

You didn’t have many of those, but what you have as part of your follower group is quite sad. It makes me think about my latest sub-category of troll:

In this case, however, it’s not quite so funny because it’s a stereotype that’s a huge part of the reason why we have generational trauma running through the whopping majority (70%-80%) of dysfunctional families.

Almost all of your followers have suffered beatings as a child that you interpret in the downplayed term of “corporal punishment.” You seem to be part of that group who interprets the physical abuse you suffered as “normal” and that you “turned out fine” when the reality is that you haven’t.

Your question shows that, but I doubt you would understand why.

The clue is that it’s in the misanthropic nature of your attitude toward “progressives.”

Progressives want to see progress in society because they want a world where kids are disciplined through reason, not violence. There’s no need to be violent with a child. Ever. That’s a lazy parent’s approach to restraining a child’s behaviour when they don’t want to make the time to do it correctly and through words.

They don’t consider how what they’re teaching their children is that violence is acceptable. That’s what you and your followers have learned. That’s why generational trauma exists.

Although I used the term “lazy parent” above, that’s not a correct way to point out the perpetuation of trauma, but it’s a pointed statement done for an emotional effect. It helps to focus attention on a serious issue affecting all of society.

In your case, you’ve been taught that getting what you want through violence is not only acceptable but an effective means of achieving your goal. From the starting point of physical violence in your repertoire of imposing your will onto others, doing that with words becomes second nature.

That’s why you rely on trigger words like “communism” because you’ve been taught to react emotionally to something you don’t understand beyond “It’s bad, m’kay.

Since you can’t go around beating up on people who want to see progress in society, you restrain your angst by using words that can simulate the adrenalin rush you would otherwise get from physicality.

If you succeed in putting your “Idiotological Enemas™” in their place by calling them “commies,” then you’ve achieved your goal of giving them “the ol’ wut fer,” and that’s a win for you… at least an emotional win if they can’t come back with a witty response that shuts you up.

Chances are excellent that more and more of you “anti-commie” types are finding that happen these days. I remember only a few decades ago that it would be an effective conversation terminator that allowed people like you to feel like you’ve “won your debates.” I’ve never understood the value of that no-prize beyond a temporary dopamine high gained through ego-stroking. It was never my drug of choice because I grew up with idiots who couldn’t get enough of it at my expense.

At any rate, that’s the reason why you posted your question.

You have no clue what “communism” is, but you know you can use that word like a hammer.

You have no clue what a “progressive” is or what their goals for society are, nor do you care, even though those goals would benefit you directly and give you a life of dignity. The math is too hard on your hamster to add it up and see a plus to personal benefit on the bottom line. Besides, you’re too busy hating progressives because they drink lattes and eat avocado toast. You’re either jealous of the latte and disgusted by the avocado toast, or you don’t like their fashion sense.

It wouldn’t surprise me that you’ve yelled out, “Get a haircut, you hippy!” at least once in your life, or “Go back to where you came from!” because no one who isn’t a part of the cult you belong to deserves to live in your neighbourhood and get all of the benefits you take for granted.

For the record, “communism” has never really existed in the way that Marx vaguely described it as the next step in an evolution for governance beyond socialism.

Neither has democracy, for that matter.

Both are just concepts that different people define in various ways. While we, the leetul monkeys of society, argue what democracy is in reality among ourselves as we fling bananas and feces around to keep us distracted from the oligarchs pulling all our strings.

They love that you and so many of your tards barf up communism left, right, and centre like it’s your favourite rock song by Dead-Headed Zeppelins.

It’s much easier for them to keep stealing Trillion$ out of our pockets while you’re barking “commie, commie, commie” up and down the streets. That’s why they feed you “Anger Biscuits®” on TV while raking in billions from the morons who glue themselves to their favourite hate-porn channels.

I doubt you have ever watched a documentary in your life, but you think Idiocracy was one without realizing that if it were, you would be the main subject of that flick.

No one “sympathizes with communists” because whatever exists of people who support it are primarily academic in their support. There isn’t any real political movement toward communism, but I think that you would probably disagree while claiming North Korea and China are communist countries — even though they’re not.

As a political system, communism died last century as the authoritarian versions of it that were implemented proved themselves to be utter failures. I know you might think that communism failed, but it didn’t. It was an authoritarian government that failed like every authoritarian government throughout history.

This brings us back full circle to your upbringing because you endorse capital punishment, and that’s precisely the attitude of an authoritarian.

If we are to equate authoritarian governments with communism, then that means YOU have more of an affinity with communism than a progressive.

If anyone were to be described as a “communist sympathizer” based upon the style of communism, you’ve been taught to fear. It would be you and your fellow MAGAtards℠ who rationalize authoritarian approaches to government.

If you have a pipe, now would be the time to pack all of this into that dirty bowl and start smoking.

Cheerioz Numbnutz