MAGA Politics

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.

What are the implications of meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you see as the positive and negative of Sen. Chris Van Hollen meeting with “mistakenly” deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia today, 4/17 in El Salvador?”

Both the positive and the negative are that he met with him and provided photographic proof of life.

It’s a positive that he is still alive, and his family, along with the nation, can hang onto some hope that this will be resolved and that he will return home.

For this very same reason, it is a negative because it means Donald Trump’s criminal presidency will have pushed tolerance for the intolerable a little bit more.

Unless he is stopped, he will continue to push boundaries until nothing can stop the floodgates of a citizenry pushed past its breaking point.

He still has almost four years to cause a systemic collapse, enabling him to enact a coup to maintain a permanent lock on power.

Everything he is doing now is the equivalent of a predator (gaslighting), stressing out their prey and pushing them past the point of clarity of reason to manipulate them into a vulnerable enough position to achieve an ineffectually defended subjugation.

He is creating divisions that will oppose one another when it is time to mobilize and strike.

This term in his presidency is dramatically different from his first term because he’s had enough of a break in between to develop a coherent destruction strategy.

Unlike his first term, where he was enamoured by the novelty of power, this time around, he appears very focused on pushing the nation and the globe into an entirely new dynamic.

It’s easy to write him off as being too incompetent to pull off a strategic shift in the global balance of power, but he’s not quite so alone nor quite so surrounded by people who would keep him in line.

This time, the sheer nastiness of his enablers goes well beyond the casual cruelty of his previous support staff.

Comparing Attorney Generals, for example, is the difference between day and night. Bill Barr was a naive loyalist, while Pam Bondi is an incredibly cruel and psychopathic caricature of a human being.

The bull-in-a-china-shop antics of clumsy catering to fleeting whims in his first term have been supplanted by a strategically maximized form of tactical destruction.

After stressing out over whether or not Garcia was still alive and questioning if he was being withheld from public view out of fear that he was no longer among the living, it appears calculated to achieve a maximum stress effect.

The same appears to be the case with the tariffs.

This is what a predator does in an abusive relationship by tweaking emotions to their extremes and burning out their prey by forcing them to exist in a persistent state of fight or flight to normalize an existence of high levels of anxiety.

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.

Does the USA need to exist anymore?

Patrick Henry — Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Does-the-USA-need-to-exist-anymore/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

The U.S. cannot continue to exist as it does, mainly because it currently exists in a form that betrays its founding principles and values.

Patrick Henry Speech: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/patrick.asp

No matter how much power the few corrupt billionaires have or can amass against the people, they cannot kill the dream.

350 million people will stop them and make them pay for their betrayal.

The U.S. cannot continue to betray everything it claims to be without losing everything it has gained as benefits from representing those values.

350 million people love their country so much that they cannot sing “Home of the brave and land of the free” without feeling shame over how cowardly and submissive they have become by the machinations of monsters.

People like Curtis Yarvin will be vilified for decades, if not centuries, while the tech bros with overgrown egos will become cautionary tales for the next century to learn from. The Walton family should be experiencing concern, if not outright fear, for their future. The 50 billionaires who supported Trump’s presidency should be planning to escape to their bunkers. The Heritage Foundation president who threatened bloodshed should now be chowing down on some crow if he’s not too stupid to realize that he is about to reap the whirlwind for his arrogance.

The U.S. will either restructure itself to become more aligned with its professed values or it will destroy itself and destroy global stability in the process. The Find Out stage of the Fuck Around game the billionaires have played with the American people has only just begun.

If they don’t start issuing their mea culpas now, flaming Teslas will appear like quaint bonfires before Trump’s term is done.

The nation’s future lies in the hands of its people, while the rest of the world still holds out faith that the American spirit is not yet completely dead.

We are all hoping the scourge of this century will be overcome by far less bloodshed and destruction than the scourge of the last century.

Will Trump succeed in his identity politics?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”

That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.

It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.

People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.

Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.

In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.

DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.

George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.

Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.

He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.

The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.

The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.

The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.

They will always fall to their doom.

This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.

Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.

It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.

The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.

Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.

Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.

By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.

By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.

The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.

Is there such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Generally, do anti-Trumpers think there is such a thing as Trump derangement syndrome, or do they see it as merely a criticism of them?”

Generally, people who refer to other people as “anti-Trumpers” while behaving as if “TDS” is a legitimate diagnosis are struggling to compensate for their slipping grasp on reality.

“TDS,” for example, is a dialectical device for dismissing uncomfortable information about someone’s object of unconditional worship.

It is “BDS” for a new president. It was first concocted as a way to ignore arguments against the Bush administration and their lies to initiate two wars with two different countries under the auspices of getting revenge on a terrorist attack.

None of the people who hurled the nonsense accusation of “BDS” wanted to believe the Bush administration had lied to them. None of them wanted to acknowledge the family feud origins driving two illegal wars while conducting war crimes when confronted by the facts of the Bin Laden and Bush histories.

None of them wanted to acknowledge the hypocrisy of a president who gave up looking for the terrorist responsible for the attack on 9/11.

At every step of the way and with every criticism of a grossly incompetent and abysmally amoral leadership that treated the soldiers who spilled blood on their behalf like disposable garbage, they cried out, “BDS! You’ve got BDS!” Hoping that would be the end of the resistance to their corruption.

They’re doing the same thing again with “TDS” by repurposing a conversation terminator that can allow them to wriggle away from the consequences of their corrupt behaviours.

They’ve also concocted another means by which they can achieve their divisive betrayal of the nation by reducing the conflict to a team sport where the opposing sides are merely cheerleaders for equal and opposite ideologies.

That’s already a betrayal of the social contract and everything decent about a nation that claims to value freedom and democracy.

These people never shut up about freedoms like freedom of speech, yet every one of their behaviours is the antithesis of what they claim to value.

They are worse than traitors to the nation. They are a toxic disease that represents a threat to human civilization.

They are worse than intransigent children because they cannot reason, will not reason, and will lie and accuse their way out of responsibility for the consequences of their destructive actions.

They are worse than cult members because they are not content with remaining in their space and living their lives in peace while allowing the rest of the world to enjoy the same courtesy.

They are a disease, a scourge that will not stop until they rule the whole of humanity.

They have existed for centuries, and now, they are impossible to ignore. They have become impossible to compartmentalize within geographical boundaries. They have become impossible to allow us to lie to ourselves that we are not all touched on some level by centuries of generational CPTSD.

We cannot ignore that these are not people “over there” but are our families, neighbours, and fellow country people. These are people who represent the one-in-five among us who suffer from severe psychological dysfunctionalities.

We cannot ignore how we cannot win this war through aggression but by changing how we live and how we structure our societies.

We can only survive this war by addressing all the elements contributing to this evil’s metastasis.

We can learn from history, pay attention to the same signs screaming for our attention, and stop creating excuses for why some things we value cannot be questioned.

We must be open-minded enough to acknowledge how much of what we take for granted as acceptable should no longer be tolerated.

We can no longer allow unchecked power to corrupt our systems and destroy their fundamental characteristics, ensuring their survival and capacity to meet our needs.

We must restore trust in ourselves as people living together in a civilized society and the systems we live by. However, we can’t do that by allowing the enemies of society to smear everything with a misanthropic haze of false equivalences.

We must draw lines in the sand when determining what is and isn’t acceptable and hold everyone accountable on an equal footing. We can no longer permit two sets of laws and rules for two classes of people.

Liberty, equality, and fraternity must be true for everyone, or we may as well allow ourselves to descend into the grave of barbarism as we write our final writ to the stars that care not whether we live or die.

Why does the government sometimes support monopolists?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-government-sometimes-support-monopolists/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

Why can a private citizen like Elon Musk address the nation from the Oval Office like he was elected president?

Government representatives support their donors because they owe them — plain and simple. For Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with a $270 million financial boost means he expected something in return. That something just happened to be the keys to the halls of power.

Made even worse by the Citizen’s United Ruling that money equals speech, the entire nation has been converted into a kleptocracy. Anyone with enough money can buy their representative who will institute laws favouring their wealth acquisition goals.

They will use fraudulent arguments like consolidation equals efficiency and lower consumer costs, but that’s just bunk.

The harsh reality is that the nation is no longer a democracy or a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

The U.S. is currently being stripped for parts to be sold to the highest bidder, and the entire world will suffer from its dissolution.

It’s not the government that supports monopolies but the billionaires who buy government representatives who seek to hoard as much of the nation’s wealth as possible and support consolidation while claiming to be capitalists.

Meanwhile, the useful idiots in the crowd conveniently forget how one of the key components of capitalism is competition.

Monopolies not only kill competition, they kill innovation, and they gouge consumers.

For example, anyone who has had to purchase prescription glasses can attest to how badly Luxottica has screwed them over.

Monopolies are cancer for an economy and for society as a whole. Monopolies give rise to dynasties, which push us back to a time of being ruled by monarchs in a two-class society of rulers and serfs.

Democratic governments that have not been corrupted otherwise do not support monopolies and create legislation to break up monopolies.

Sherman Antitrust Act: Definition, History, and What It Does

What Are the Most Famous Monopolies?

Why are GOP voters suddenly alarmed about the stances on H1-B workers?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are GOP voters suddenly alarmed about Ramaswamy’s and Musk’s stances about H1-B workers compared to locally sourced ones? Weren’t they supporting them and voting knowing that these men would be involved in policy-making directly or indirectly?”

None of their supporters were interested in the sausages their leaders intended to make. All of them have been more wrapped up in being enamoured by the superficial trappings of personality politics.

They voted for Trump because they admire him as a human being, even though he is beyond apparent in his overtly abusive and criminal behaviour.

They believed the only people that Trump, Musk, and their entourage of parasitic human slugs were going to victimize were the people in their imagination that they hated.

They shut their eyes, ears, and minds off to the realities of their words and promises.

I doubt even one of them made the slightest effort to peruse Project 2025 as they dismissed complaints about it as fake news and propaganda.

It’s the same intellectual laziness at play that we see when they make vague references to The Constitution that show they’ve never read it themselves.

They operate purely on instinct, and their instincts tell them to hate the world because they are in pain. Meanwhile, the exploitative parasites in our midst that they trust point out to them who they should hate, and they mindlessly go forth hating the people who are fighting on their behalf to make this a better world for everyone, including them.

They are so lost in the throes of their hatred cult that many will not stop hating their fellow citizens even after significant damage has been done to the nation. They will insist on some nefarious entities, conspiracies, and machinations by their political “enemies within” who are responsible for their policy failures.

If kids get hauled off in cages again, they’re going to rationalize that as a public good in the name of national security. If those kids get sold off to wealthy couples for a profit, they will rationalize that as being a better solution for those kids than being raised by their “filthy illegal parents.”

They will destroy families and lives all over again because they operate on instincts tweaked by paranoia over manufactured fear because the things they should fear are just too overwhelming for them to grasp. It’s much easier to fear and hate defenceless people than to hate the powerful, particularly when they’re all focused on developing sycophantic relationships and worshipping the ground they walk on in the hopes that they, too, will be blessed with unfathomable wealth.