International Relations

Hope for a Cure to the Cult of MAGA

This post is a response to a question posed on Quora in its complete format: “Whats is it called when Democrats are saying things just to get something from the other people, Like saying maggots or it’s a cult or playing rubbery glue but they never ever have valid arguments and just defend the wrongness they represent?”
Please note the Addendum at the end for an explanation of why I chose to expand its publishing venues beyond its original venue on Quora.

Saying “something to get something from someone else” is pretty broad. In your case, with your question, you at least defined “the other people” as Democrats, which is already a tacit admission of being an ideologue with an “anti-Democrat” bias. It could mean you’re a somewhat moderate Republican, but confidence levels in that conclusion dramatically drop because ideologues are not moderates. It’s extremist thinking, which indicates a high likelihood of being a MAGA Republican or a right-wing extremist who is further right than “staunch Republican.”

Since these categories are not part of popular discourse and are somewhat subjectively supported by my bias, I’ll explain how these work.

From this Canuck’s biased perspective, a “moderate Republican is someone like Hillary Clinton, who has essentially embraced the Neo-Liberal version of Conservativism, which endorses the view that industry is the priority in establishing economic strategy, which then leads to social development.

(To be clear, I’m not “picking on” Hillary; I’m just using her as an example because she and her politics are well known. I would consider both Joe Biden and Barack Obama as milder versions of Neo-Liberal, which is what I facetiously refer to as “Conservativism in drag.” For comparison, I would describe Bernie Sanders as slightly left of center because he also endorses, to some extent, the central role of industry in social development. These are also not entirely “my views,” or views I’ve concocted on my own in a vacuum. These are positions that can be found on the Political Compass website, which is considered an authoritative source for political orientation along a spectrum defined by political science theories developed by Herbert Kitschelt. The website address is: The Political Compass, so that you can see for yourself.

John McCain was someone I would describe as a “staunch Republican” (he was a generally decent human being with a conscience who would have been a better Republican president than every Republican president since Eisenhower). He would have acknowledged the value of human life during his presidency more than any President after Eisenhower. It’s quite possible that he would have implemented Romneycare without it being subjected to perpetual attacks by Republicans over the last few decades, like was the case with Obama (and sadly, because of reasons ALL Americans should be embarrassed by).

I write these provocative words precisely to trigger the MAGAts in the crowd who might read this, including the querent. I also am using this as a setup for identifying what is meant by a right-wing extremist Conservative Republican, or a (fascist) MAGAt. I see no point in delving deeply into defining a MAGAt because this constitutes a group of highly entrenched ideologues who put their tribal identity over and above the peaceful process of social development for what is now ironically named the “United” States OF America. (MAGAts have endlessly blamed their divisiveness on Democrats, and particularly Obama, because they know that national divisiveness is harmful and considered “bad.”)

These are all characteristics of a cult mentality. Here is a comprehensive summary of a cult mentality.

Here are a few articles that elaborate on the AI summary above:

What Makes a Cult, and How Do Cult Leaders Control Their Followers?

What Is a Cult? 10 Warning Signs

Signs You’re In A Cult: Understanding the Psychology of Undue Influence — The Truism Center

Understanding The Manipulative Tactics Of Cults — Davenport Psychology

Understanding Cults: The Basics

https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-behavior.html

Reverend Jim Jones and the People’s Temple

Part of the problem in dealing with the cult mentality is what it implies to those who are cult members. They can instinctively understand that it’s bad, or acknowledge how a cult mentality suggests a loss of agency, and possibly even know how they may have lost touch with their own identity. This last one may be the most difficult to grasp because they still hold a series of memories in which they see themselves at the centre of the images that come to mind when they recall.

Being indoctrinated into a cult mentality is made especially more difficult to break from because their old identity has been reshaped into a new one built around their tribal affiliation. Being surrounded by people who validate one’s feelings is a powerful motivator, like slipping into a warm, welcoming bath. The freedom to “be oneself” or indulge in self-serving views that disparage others is a far easier path than introspection. Instead of being confronted by tears, one is free to indulge in rage-fueled dopamine highs.

The most significant reason for rejecting the notion that one has been indoctrinated into a cult has been permanently stamped onto our collective social consciousness through the extreme consequences of cult behaviour. Cults have been associated with extremist behaviour for good reason, because the most horrifying of human behaviours have been common to cult outcomes.

Charles Manson’s smallish cult of personality resulted in the nation’s most horrifying serial murders to that date. Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple took that cult/horror association to another and more extreme level through the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. The photos from that era are stark and unforgettable. One cannot see these photos and not see a cult as a “bad thing,” no matter how entrenched they may be in their tribal association. No one wants to believe they could be convinced into committing mass murder and suicide on the suggestion of a powerful personality, yet that’s what we have in Donald Trump.

This statement that Donald Trump made on January 23, 2016, should have ended his campaign, as many other egregious behaviours should have long before. Instead, his outrageous behaviours became fuel for motivating his supporters.

Instead of becoming a limit to egregiousness to restrain his future behaviour, it became a bar for a shock jock to surpass, and surpass it he did. His entire political career has been an escalation of atrocious behaviour from scandalous to heinous, as his supporters have taken every grotesque step along with him while cheering his validation of their basest emotions.

Trump has been playing his base like a fiddle, or a puppet master, or a cult leader, and he took that role to an extreme when he set himself up as a fraudulent near-martyr to secure his second term.

It was bad enough that he managed to incite an insurrection by making an obvious accusation of a stolen election. The wholly fraudulent B-grade movie nature of his staged assassination attempt should have ended his political career. Instead, it further cemented the naive loyalty of his base in ways that made their cult nature impossible for the rest of the world to ignore.

As easy as it can be for a psychologically healthy human being to be horrified by the scope of the Jonestown massacre, a total of only 918 people died.

Donald J Trump well exceeded that total during his first term, with 1,228,289 confirmed deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although he cannot be held accountable for all those deaths, a significant proportion of that number was due entirely to his dismissive reaction to the severity of the crisis, and his parasitically opportunistic prioritization of profiting from a catastrophic event over the survival needs of the population.

A report published by The Lancet, a leading medical journal that was founded in England in 1823, determined in an independent study that about 40% of those deaths are directly attributable to Trump’s hostile responses to medical authorities during the crisis. Those deaths of Trump’s first massive death toll, exceeding well over 400,000 victims that would still be alive today, have gone almost entirely ignored by the media and most especially by his base, who essentially believe the pandemic was a hoax, according to his wholly ignorant disregard for human life.

Making matters horrifically worse is that this death toll has been merely the beginning of a final total that is already expected to exceed 14 million when combined with the 600,000 and growing number of deaths of mostly children due to the cancellation of the USAID program. By 2030, Donald J. Trump’s death toll will be in the ballpark of Hitler’s 17 million dead.

His supporters not only ignore the surreal horrors occurring entirely due to his actions, but they also justify it as happening to people who are not “of their tribe.”

As much as they and this querent may wish to dismiss the gravity of a phenomenon that sane people cannot ignore as a cult of personality, that is entirely how history will record this travesty in our period. This is assuming we survive an escalation where we can contain his rampant destruction as he concocts new and creative ways to engage in hostilities through war crimes and interventions into the sovereignty of nations outside U.S. boundaries.

In retrospect, all the signs are impossible to ignore; however, never in my life did I ever consider how the United States would become the enemy of the world’s people. I had always envisioned, even as a child, while considering superstitiously concocted scenarios (cuz I was a naive, ignorant, and easily fooled child given to fantasies such as Nostradamus’ predictions), that the U.S. always wore the white hats and would come to the world’s rescue in any future worldwide aggressions by megalomaniacal dictators.

Never did I imagine, within the worst of scenarios, while practicing our duck and cover drills in school, to protect ourselves from fallout by a potential nuclear holocaust, that the U.S. would be wearing the black hats. This shows me how effective the propaganda has been while we have all been fooled by the oligarchs who have repeatedly pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.

I had always feared the leader of the fascist army. I should instead have been far more concerned about the wholly conditioned footsoldiers who pollute public discourse with toxic and hypocritical presumptions and disingenuous deflections of responsibility for their evil behaviour, such as evidenced by this querent’s expression.

ADDENDUM:

This answer was originally posted to the group “Done With the Bullshit” on Quora. I submitted this answer for approval and went to bed. I discovered, when I awoke this morning, that it had been accepted by the group and made public. I then checked to see if it was posted and found it had been deleted, not by a moderator in the group, but by Quora’s moderation team.

This indicated to me that the original querent reacted strongly enough to my answer to report it on Quora, and Quora’s algorithm responded accordingly, without any human judgment.

Link to MAGAt Profile to Block: Kyle Jacobs

I have enjoyed the content on “Done With the Bullshit,” and I have had the good fortune to have a few of my answers reach a broad audience and receive a lot of support through upvotes, comments, and, most of all, fulfilling dialogues that my content has encouraged.

This entire process of social media content production is, after all, a means of encouraging public dialogue on issues that would otherwise go unaddressed, allowing problems to metastasize and grow into malignant forces in society.

The rapidity of the response by “Kyle Jacobs” (likely not this person’s real name) to have this answer removed indicates to me that this has been a very effective answer in addressing a severe condition of widespread dysphoria affecting society.

As you can see, I’ve reposted this answer at the top level of Quora’s question hierarchy, where it will be less visible due to the numerous other answers. There are over 200 answers to this troll question; almost all of them are challenges to the fundamentally flawed character of a question intended more to smear an enemy than to seek knowledge or insight into a subject of interest. Quora is rife with such questions by trolls attempting to shift focus away from their corrupt states of mind and onto their ideological enemies.

The deflection character of the “question,” and the aggressive removal of information deemed offensive to the MAGAt sensibility, is a large part of the reason why the cult mentality is so resistant to the requisite introspection they must all undergo to cure ourselves of this scourge before it escalates to such a degree that we experience catastrophic losses far beyond what we have already been forced to endure as a consequence of this mental health pandemic.

I am encouraged by the efficacy of my answer and will make it available to a broader audience beyond Quora. I will also publish it on several social media platforms through my Medium account and on my WordPress blog at kree8r.com.

I want to thank you, “Kyle Jacobs,” for your swift response, because I would otherwise have likely let this answer languish in relative obscurity, where it would remain just another of my well over 22 thousand answers.

I hope you have an excellent New Year’s celebration, and I hope this is enough encouragement for you and your fellow MAGAts to take to heart just how severe your mental health condition is. Please, for the sake of those you care for in your lives, if such people exist, get some help from a professional because the trajectory you have put us all on may not be recoverable. I doubt many of you wish to be responsible for contributing to the end of human civilization.

Please take some time to consider your loved ones and ask yourself if all the hatred consuming you is worth losing everything.

Temet Nosce

What do you expect America to be like after Trump’s full 4 years?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “After seeing what Trump has done in less than a year, what do you expect America to be like after his full 4 years?”

The problem we are overlooking with this question isn’t what America will be like, but what the world will be like.

America is the epicentre of a sociopolitical earthquake that will fundamentally change the global geopolitical landscape forever.

Whether that results in the further democratization of a multipolar world or in the establishment of continental empires is entirely contingent on the degree of public engagement today.

Whether we like it or not, the recent release of the American National Security Strategy , alternatively referred to as a revisionist version of the “Monroe Doctrine,” which they arrogantly and narcissistically refer to as the “Donroe Doctrine,” is a declaration of war. (citations below)

We have been witnessing their strategy play out throughout the last year with antics ranging from a cleansing of bureaucratic staffing throughout the entire government apparatus, to tariff wars, annexation threats, ICE expansion and citizen round-ups to be shipped off to concentration camps, to testing the waters of a Venezuelan aggression through the commission of war crimes to see how far they can push to trigger resistance.

All of it has appeared to be a random series of events intended to sow chaos without a guiding strategy to culminate in the long-term achievement of objectives. It’s been easy to find ourselves misdirected by an imbecile who stares at an eclipse as if immune to blindness or rambles incoherently into fractured thoughts strung together only by the mouth in which a babbling stream of consciousness flows.

It’s not randomly generated chaos, however. It is a carefully orchestrated stream of chaos that Steve Bannon conceived of as a “flood the zone” strategy. The goal is and always has been misdirection because that’s how grifters play their marks, and the marks in this case are not solely the American people, but the entire global network of interconnected enterprises and competing foreign powers.

For an in-depth review of the Trump administration’s plan, Ben Norton from The Geopolitical Economy Report presents a one-hour, chapter-by-chapter interpretation and analysis of the scope and severity of the global upheaval planned in the video linked below. The intention is for the entire globe to be reconfigured into continental trading blocks, with the U.S. at the centre of a global power dynamic following the consolidation of the Americas (North and South) under U.S. control.

(Citations are below for those who may be unfamiliar with Ben Norton’s credentials as an Investigative Journalist. – Transparency on this source is provided for those whose personal political views might be triggered by Ben’s. Whether you align yourself with them or not isn’t relevant to the issue of an objective analysis of his analysis of the gravity of the issues he examines in a globally transformative initiative spearheaded by the Trump administration.)

Like all things Trump, he’s not intelligent enough to have contributed significantly to the goals and strategies outlined in this document, even as he provided little more than his name as a brand for the Project 2025 initiative. Trump’s M.O. has always been to have other people do the groundwork while he brands and sells the product to a gullible public.

Trump is a spokesperson for a movement that has essentially operated outside the spotlight and occasionally lets slip the quiet part of its plans.

You may remember the election campaign when the president of the Heritage Foundation threatened violence if people did not willingly submit to their restructuring of a New World Order conceived of by a White Supremacist ethos.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/04/leader-of-the-pro-trump-project-2025-suggests-there-will-be-a-new-american-revolution-00166583

This is not “political business as usual,” where issues are bandied about like a table tennis match, and points are awarded for each winning strike the opposition fails to return as fans cheer their favourites from the bleachers. Changes or initiatives implemented by opposing parties in the past may have affected people’s lives, but they have never fundamentally transformed civilian life as this current administration seeks to do.

We have been hearing cries that the U.S. is at the precipice of full-blown fascism (and, in the interests of complete transparency, I have also been contributing to that noise), but this is the next stage in a dramatic battle for global control involving machinations in which we, the little people, are pawns in a massive game of power between the few who have no loyalty to any nation and who treat the world like a chessboard, as they position their dynasties for shaping tomorrow’s brave new world order.

We are passively watching the pieces of last century’s attempt at global dominion reassemble like a reborn T-1 Terminator. They have reinvented the Hakenkreuz symbol as a red beanie, and their little people’s army sings “Sieg Heil” in a country twang. Their base of disgruntled citizens, marginalized by society, sincerely view themselves as “patriots” who commit treason against their nation and wage war against their neighbours with righteous indignation.

Since 22 states are already in a recession and recent job reports have been terrible, the odds are excellent that the economy as a whole will be underwater by the midterm election. As much hardship as that will cause, the sad fact is that not enough truly understand what’s at stake. Many are still deluded by the shortsighted, self-serving thinking they’ve been led to believe is a patriotic fight against the evil forces that have been making their lives more difficult by the year.

A recession means they won’t be able to continue lying to themselves about who is genuinely responsible for their hardships. The polls and the recent elections show a distinct swing away from supporting the party of the plutocrats. However, the DNC is still struggling to accept that the opposition has long since lost sight of its responsibility to provide good-faith representation.

People like Chuck Schumer refer to the current situation as a fever he hopes will break, and that’s the thinking that a parent demonstrates when they’re holding out hope that their addicted child will eventually see reason in time to return to sanity. Decades of working with the same people have glossed over his perceptions with unwarranted sentiment. It is an incredibly tone deaf mistake because he’s prioritizing his relationships with his political peers rather than accepting the deadly threat they pose to a nation struggling to survive a dystopic shithole.

Whatever happens between now and the midterms, the public will need to see hope on the horizon as the economy careens headlong toward what could conceivably become a full-on depression. Without that alarm bell ringing loudly in their ears and motivating them to the polls, they may not cleanse the halls of government enough to slow down the strategic assault against the nation, its people, and the rest of the world. At the same time, the increasing consolidation of power among the plutocratic class continues their machinations and maneuvers the country into armed conflict with Venezuela.

An open war seems like a likely strategy to mobilize their base to vote for them, and, depending on how they massage the optics, they may convince a few Democrats to support them enough to hold onto enough seats to continue their agenda.

The DNC must stop resisting public sentiment, and the old guard must step aside to make way for new leadership and convince people that the two parties are not the same. The DNC has done a terrible job on their messaging, and that turns off potential support while convincing people that the entire edifice of government must be torn down. However else Trump may be perceived, he still represents the chaos they innately trust more than a government that has turned its back on them for the last 50 years.

If the DNC loses the support they’re getting now, “for free,” they’ll be stuck with tepid government shutdown strategies that will turn the public further away from a do-nothing administration.

They still don’t understand the hardships people are enduring.
People like Schumer and the “old guard” are living in a disconnected reality, like it’s 1983.

The people are angry, and they have to feel that anger themselves if they want to leverage it for change.

If the DNC succeeds in winning back enough control to turn Trump into a lame duck for the remainder of his term, and even possibly initiate another impeachment process (although after two prior impeachments that accomplished nothing tangible enough to be visible to the public, that could backfire on them). The nation might have some hope of at least mitigating the economic downturn, while the entire country will be in turmoil.

Economic hardship otherwise seems unavoidable, and particularly so when destabilization becomes an international strategy for containing the expansionist MAGAt hunger for dominion.

Making matters worse, the people behind Project 2025 and the “Donroe Doctrine” will continue to push their agenda by ramping up their disinformation campaigns. They’re not going to rest while their crown falls closer within their reach. They will likely do what they can to kneecap the DNC or enough members to hamper efforts to stop them, or at least minimize their investment losses.

Results from the mid-term elections will dramatically affect the trajectory of the remaining half of Trump’s term in office. Even if Trump’s power and influence wane, the architects of Project 2025 and the U.S. National Security Strategy will have contingency plans to sow discord, escalate disinformation, and likely inflame conflicts between nations, thereby furthering their agenda.

For example, I’d been thinking the $80 billion transfer to Argentina was to cover Trump’s escape plan, should things go south and he finds himself facing insurmountable legal battles. That money, however, could also serve as a means by which they can destabilize Venezuela’s politics enough to justify American aggression.

Keep in mind that their endgame is a North and South America economic bloc that they can control.

It seems quite possible that Trump could deliberately sabotage a renegotiation of CUSMA to pressure Canada and Mexico into falling in line. He seems to be taking steps in that direction by imposing punitive tariffs on Canadian potash and proactively minimizing the impact on farmers by handing out money to quell their growing anger and disappointment with the results of his actions so far.

Moving too fast or too hard in that direction, however, risks global retaliation, such as a massive sell-off of U.S. Treasury securities, which could further destabilize the nation and the world. This would be a “nuclear option” to avoid a perceived worse outcome that would further impact global trade and exacerbate a U.S. recession into a worldwide depression, but that’s a nightmare scenario which seems least likely.

At any rate, at the end of Trump’s four-year term, the least dramatic outcome would be for Trump to voluntarily step down (as he should – but won’t without at least hurling a choice collection of his favourite words of petty spite), and the nation is left hobbling through a deep recession that would require both austerity on behalf of the little people will be so enraged by this point that the plutcrats they will demand restitution from will either begrudgingly commit to long resisted initiatives like a universal healthcare option, and quite possibly a minimum guaranteed income.

Whatever else may be the case, if the architects of this madness fail in their quest to reshape the globe into a manifestation of their “Dark Enlightenment agenda,” then the days of the U.S. as a dominant superpower are rapidly ending.

America will be in chaos at the end of Trump’s second and final term, but it will at least represent a state of turmoil with some hope shining through the end of a long and dark tunnel.

CITATIONS:

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/trump-strategy-document-revives-monroe-doctrine-slams-europe-2025-12-05/

What is the Monroe Doctrine, and why does Trump want to ‘reassert’ it? – National | Globalnews.ca

Click to access 2025-National-Security-Strategy.pdf

Ben Norton – AI Summary:

Ben Norton is an American investigative journalist, political analyst, and founder of the Geopolitical Economy Report, known for his anti-imperialist reporting on U.S. foreign policy, Latin America (where he lived for years), and China, now based in Beijing, studying at Tsinghua University to blend journalism with academic research on global development and finance. He previously worked for Salon, AlterNet, and The Real News Network, focusing on economic justice and critical media analysis.

Ben Norton

Why do MAGAts refer to people as ‘the radical left’?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do MAGAts and so called ‘conservatives’ refer to sane people as ‘the radical left?’ Why don’t they just call them ‘radical centrists’ who rely on logic and facts?”

Hyperbole is a core part of the strategy applied to extremist dialectics. Referring to the left as “radical” allows them to position themselves as rational and puts the left into a defensive position where they are forced to justify themselves. Meanwhile, the extremist right continues its rage-farming activities to enlist more people to push the left to justify its existence.

As the momentum against the left grows, they are forced into justifying rational positions like universal healthcare, which benefits everyone, including the most vulnerable in society. Universal healthcare is increasingly viewed as radical, while the beneficiaries of a privatized system are increasingly positioned as victims of a dastardly socialist agenda.

All of it is based on empty slogans that the illiterati ignore because they’re more interested in feeding their addiction to rage than they are in thinking things through.

Thinking about issues in depth forces people to set aside their addictive emotions and calm themselves down enough to develop a comprehensive enough understanding of the conflicting positions and eventually prompts them to abandon their rage addiction.

The billionaires feeding the culture wars don’t want this to happen because they will lose their cash cows.

The ownership class has cultivated the extreme divisions we live with today to distract the public from their wealth-chasing priorities. The MAGAt movement could not otherwise sustain itself without the economic desperation created by the historic levels of economic inequity existing today, which fuel their rage-fests.

MAGAts are justifiably angry. Everyone has a justifiable reason to be angry today: the economic stability we once enjoyed has been stolen. The main problems with the MAGAts are not only that they are angry at the wrong people, but they are also defending the people they should be angry with.

MAGAts should be out on the streets today demanding DonOld’s head on a platter, and they would if they could get past the blinders of their hatred enough to understand how humanity can survive only when we unite in a common cause and not divide ourselves into warring camps.

Our enemies are the same people they have been throughout history and the dawn of human civilization. We have been at this crossroads many times throughout our history. Yet, here we are again as if human history were pointless stories we tell each other for entertainment, not lessons in survival for our species.

It is time again for us all to stand up and say, “I am Spartacus!”

It is time again to dethrone those who dare to be kings among us.

It is time to be radical with the few who have stolen so much from the many.

It is time to stop asking nicely for them to restore economic justice and start taking it by force if they insist on it as a survival necessity.

From 1932

Bonus Comment (A Response to a Related Comment from Another Thread): “I’m starting to see a second shift in MAGA responses. It’s a far more conciliatory tone.”

To borrow from a boxing strategy, don’t look at the opponent’s eyes, but their chest. Their eyes will misdirect your attention, while the chest cannot help but move in the same direction as the body.

If this were an eleven-dimensional chess game, they would not have needed to use a “flood-the-zone” strategy because the nation has been desperate for positive change… even the MAGAt army is angry because their needs have been overlooked.

Bernie Sanders has been the only prominent authentic leader pointing to a horizon with a better future for all. It’s not that there aren’t others in the offing, just that the DNC has been so polluted with conservadroids for so long that they can’t find their way to recognize how appeasing the right is the wrong strategy.

They need to strengthen their spines and be provocative right back while directly challenging the MAGAt shit. They still have too many spineless and ethically challenged NeoLiberals leading them. This may be primarily a war of words and legal jargon. However, it is still a war… until the Reich gets dialectically hammered into submission, they will continue to use whatever ruse they can to throw their enemies off guard, including feigning sincerity.

They won’t stop until they rule the roost with an iron hand. They have proven that time and again and for decades.

This is a real-life game of thrones, not a board game that resets after the match is won. If they succeed, America’s character will be defined by the defeat of democracy for well over a century afterwards.

Compassion is ultimately a human strength, but they have none and will use that against you. Reserve it for when they’ve been so defeated that they’ve given up fighting for dominion and are just begging to hang onto survival.

They’re addicted to power and, like all addicts, they’re manipulative on the most heinous of levels.

Conciliatory tones can’t be trusted until they’ve been demolished and defanged… and that won’t happen unless they lose every seat for at least the next two election cycles.

Wouldn’t a corporate income tax system be better than tariffs?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Wouldn’t a better option than tariffs be to have a corporate income tax system that would create incentives for companies that hire domestically and penalize them for hiring in other countries?”

A “better option” is an alternative strategy for accomplishing what tariffs are intended to achieve. Tariffs protect local businesses and industries that can be overwhelmed out of business by foreign exports, which would otherwise dominate market niches to evolve into monopolies without constraints.

Tariffs are not helpful for much of anything else. The way Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating strategy would be the equivalent of using a scalpel to carve up a side of beef. Inevitably, that scalpel becomes dull and easily broken. People unfamiliar with scalpels would at first marvel at how clean it would cut, then become frustrated with scalpels altogether from misuse.

That’s what’s happened with tariffs.

Trump has misused tariffs as a club for negotiations and, consequently, has created a misperception of their function in a reasonable trade deal that would otherwise be used to protect local industry. He has lied about tariffs stimulating manufacturing, or is so incompetent that he sincerely believes his nonsense.

What this question suggests was already in play during the Eisenhower years, when corporate taxes were high. See the chart below:

The tax rates highlighted by the red outline comprise the years in which the economy was most stable and grew steadily, while the middle class flourished.

The higher tax rates on the upper end incentivized corporations to reinvest in their operations by increasing their hiring to reduce their tax burden. (Other laws were also in place to support this economic growth, such as prohibiting stock buybacks to increase dividends, which were eliminated along with several protections throughout these last decades.)

This stable dynamic changed because the wealthy class wasn’t satisfied with being the richest. They wanted more and continue to want more, such that we have repeated the economic disparity that has repeatedly destroyed stable societies throughout history.

The problems we are struggling with are made incredibly easy to understand once one adjusts their perceptions to realize our struggles are the consequence of a centuries-long class warfare against the people by those who seek dominion in this world.

We will experience a correction in one of two ways:

1. Through a reasonable form of relenting by the wealthy class, who collectively restrain the twenty percent of them who comprise a psychopathic psychological dysfunctionality, and re-establish the rich and influential among us as ethical leaders for humanity, or

2. By continuing to allow the corruption to influence public policy in the way that has encouraged fascism to grow out of control and repress economies while stripping people of their rights, until a tipping point occurs and societies collapse upon themselves in such a dramatic fashion that chaos rules the day. At which point, the people will reassert their power over the powerful in the traditional manner established throughout history by violently deposing the corrupt among us.

We are very close to widespread chaos ruling the day around the globe, while the Canadian election has provided us with a slim glimmer of hope. Meanwhile, the corruption that has fueled this fascist resurgence continues to corrupt the best of humanity.

MAGA is the public face of organizations like the IDU, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and an ideological movement self-described as a “Dark Enlightenment” which feed the economic distortions that threaten the integrity of democratic societies worldwide by favouring corporate power and fascist governance through targeted disinformation to manipulate election outcomes based on negative campaigning.

Our best option today is to mitigate the corruptive power of these hatemongering groups and of the psychopaths within the one percent who seek to reestablish a two-class society of rulers and serfs.

Corporations are allowed to exist to serve the people, not rule them. We have eliminated kingdoms from our societies because they are toxic and destructive, limiting our potential as a species. We can restructure corporations into democratic institutions, and we must because the trajectory they are taking us all on is inviting us to repeat a blood-soaked history.

We are again at a crossroads that we have repeatedly visited throughout history because the corrupt among us have little to no respect for humanity. We now have the benefits of a long history and an established pattern, while the changes we need to make to rid society of this corruptive scourge once and for all are within our grasp. This will be our last time at this crossroads if we unite as a people and assert our power as individuals within a shared community that refuses to bend our knees to incompetent and cruel rulers.

What should Americans know about Canada?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What are things that Americans should know about Canada, so that they better understand why Canada is so resolutely against being annexed to the USA?”

This Canadian’s view is that any American who needs an explanation to understand how obnoxiously offensive their confusion is over this matter is precisely the delusional arrogance that has made America the dysfunctional dystopia that it is today.

It’s like the bullying asshole who steals candy from a baby, being incapable of understanding how that’s precisely what qualifies them as a bullying asshole.

We see precisely this behaviour being played out when Musk claims social security is a Ponzi scheme, but can’t understand why the people who depend on it to stay alive are so angry with him for taking it away.

Elon Musk embodies precisely what is wrong with America today.

He deliberately provokes the entire world with a Nazi salute and, when criticized for it, doubles down with childish stupidity to mock people over it and then starts complaining about being hated for being a Nazi while scratching his head over what he thinks is wrong with other people.

There is no self-awareness on his behalf, nor empathy or compassion demonstrated toward others, but he expects sympathy to be expressed toward him.

Elon IS America with this behaviour and attitude.

America made 9/11 happen, then stood tall and declared the 9/11 responders to be heroes whose sacrifices should never be forgotten but then tossed them out like yesterday’s garbage to suffer.

Americans routinely declare how much they value those who shed blood on behalf of defending the nation and its values but then show them what those values actually are by treating their veterans like yesterday’s dogshit.

Then you wonder why people hate you.

That’s the core of what is wrong with America.

You people are sick, and you need help.

You must admit, like every AA member does, that you can’t go it alone. You need to open up to a world that is more than willing to help you get better.

You have to stop stealing their stuff and bullying your way through their lives while treating people like dogshit.

You can’t spread democracy by the point of a gun. You can only show people an example of how it makes your lives better. Right now, however, you’re showing the world how easily corrupted your democracy can become when you don’t restrain the individuals within your nation who have too much power.

You have forgotten how the greatness of a nation is found within how it treats its most vulnerable.

Admit that you need help.

That’s the first step every addict must take to get on the road to their recovery.

Why are counter tariffs a good idea?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If tariffs make things more expensive for the other party, why is putting counter tariffs a good idea?”

Let’s first begin by dropping the notion that throwing counter-punches is a “good thing.”

A vast difference exists between a “good thing” and a “necessary thing.”

“Good things” result in mutual progress and shared benefit of growth.

A “necessary thing” is a strategy for mitigating loss and facilitating the reversal of destruction.

Punching someone back after they have punched you isn’t a “good thing,” but a “necessary thing” because they will continue to beat on you until you can do nothing but submit like a broken animal to their assaults until they decide to stop or until you’re dead.

Tariffs are often used in negotiations to achieve balanced results between two parties.

Tariffs can be a means of securing a stable trade relationship.

Tariffs can also be used punitively to attack a negotiating partner, precisely how bullies like Trump approach their negotiations. He championed this strategy of overwhelming negotiating partners with force in his “Art of the Deal” piece of provocative garbage. Bullying is his life pattern.

Trump has always been a bully and his behaviours have destroyed people’s lives.

The only way to deal with a bully that tries to overpower you is to debilitate them.

This approach is precisely how Putin has resolved his conflicts. He has never stopped at just pushing someone back. He has always taken his conflicts to an extreme resolution to eliminate any shred of threat as a message to anyone else who might threaten him. None of his political opponents were beaten to live their lives in a reclusive or marginalized state. They were all murdered to ensure they could no longer pose a threat against him.

Being assaulted by someone like Trump with a long history of behaving in a consistently bullying manner and whose commitments aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on — and who is backed by a psychopath like Putin whose goal is the total eradication of resistance means the necessary option of overpowering Trump and his strategy to such a degree that he is beaten to the ground like a rabid dog is a survival necessity.

Until he has been so broken and defanged that he can do nothing more than gum his way through future assaults, he will always be an existential threat to human civilization. Preventing him from throwing punches isn’t enough. He must have every single weapon of his broken beyond repair so that he lives in a state of total impotence like the swamp slug he is.

This is not a “good thing” by any stretch of the imagination. This is a horrifyingly “necessary thing,” if we want to see something resembling sanity return to society that can allow some form of stability to emerge.

How do Canadians and Americans feel about each other?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “How do Canadians and Americans really feel about each other?”

This Canadian thinks of Americans in ways not too dissimilar from how I think of fellow Canadians. Most are decent human beings at heart. Many are misguided and gravely misunderstand the nature of today’s dysfunctionality in society. A few — or more than just a few, but a minority nonetheless, are toxically stupid to the point of being beyond redemption.

All but the third group are reasonable and amenable to working together to identify the best solutions which meet the broadest range of needs of the citizenry. Our cultures are similar but unique, while, as a whole, Canadians appear to have more insight and respect for the values declared by Americans as being core to their identity.

Much of the discord in America, for example, in the value of freedom, lies in the difference between Canadians being more community-oriented. Americans tend to breed an isolationist degree of individualism. The resulting perception of freedom between the two nations is that Canadians regard freedom as derived from our community, and Americans appear to interpret freedom as the ability for an individual to do whatever they please whenever they please.

If we were to track this difference through Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, we can see a distinction in the degree of moral evolution this represents.

Caveat: Like all models, this is not a universal prescription defining all people in any culture, and so this may generally describe some fundamental cultural differences, the overlap between cultures exists in the developmental differences between individuals.

Canada has no shortage of people who fail to grow beyond the pre-conventional stage. We do have our flavour of Maple MAGAts — the toxic form of extremist conservativism plaguing the planet. It is certainly more prevalent in the U.S., but that’s entirely due to economics.

The U.S. has always had a much larger budget that has always been more attractive to society’s predators. IOW. The economic success of the U.S. has been its most fundamental weakness.

It is in the best interests of those seeking power to ensure the populace is developmentally stunted. Keeping people on the level of pre-conventional development makes them more malleable and amenable to influence from authorities. Teaching them to fear punishment keeps them in line and converts them into sycophants addicted to chasing their self-interests.

This works for most of the population, which functions as workhorses to keep the machinery of society operational. Still, the next level of conventional morality is also necessary to function as an administrative body to keep the rabble in line.

All nations leverage this developmental dynamic through intrinsic and extrinsic punishment and reward systems. Canada and the U.S. are no different in this regard because this is a dynamic cultivated by power structures.

The causes of the distinctions between nations begin at the third and uppermost level of development, in the post-conventional stage. This is where philosophies and ideologies live that define the visions guiding all citizens in their perceptions of themselves and as members of a community.

This is where the distinction between “melting pot” and “multicultural mosaic” lives and flows throughout society to form a cultural identity.

It appears ironic that a nation that values individuality is adamant about conformity, but that’s explained in the differences between these two perceptions of national identity. One cannot truly value individuality when their culture homogenizes its citizens through a melting pot. (Many) Americans consider Canada a “socialist” country, but we value individuality, and freedom, by extension, more than Americans because we embrace and celebrate diversity as core to our cultural heritage.

I am proud to have Quebec as a part of Canada precisely because their contrast has kept Canada from falling into the same self-serving traps of insular arrogance that Americans have. They’ve been regarded as pains for many westerners, but so have westerners been regarded in similarly disparaging ways by our French-speaking members of our family. However, the dynamic between divergent cultures characterizing Canada makes us strong and coherent as a nation, which values its people above those who would rule us.

Americans would do well to learn from our dynamic and begin to treat their Spanish-speaking population with the same respect. It would help you grow as a nation with something more nuanced as a culture beyond the bombast of commercial ostentatiousness and avoid being viewed as the meth lab we live above.

Will the next President be able to reverse the current destruction of the government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “”https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/Will-the-next-President-be-able-to-reverse-the-current-destruction-of-the-government-3“

No.

The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of free fall, but the destruction will be permanent.

The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.

The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.

The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.

The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.

Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.

The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.

This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.

The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.

The numbers don’t lie.

The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.

No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.

We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.

We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.

We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.

Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.

More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.

The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.

The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.

There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.

If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.