This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Should we conclude that the only way America can be first is by making everyone else weaker and second including American citizens?”
If that’s considered a valid conclusion, it is derived from a mindset that fails to comprehend how strength arises from unity, not division. Such a conclusion is a recipe for weakening all parties, especially the U.S.
I would argue that it is this insular and protectionist mindset that has produced a Trump presidency that will end U.S. dominance as a global power.
The best way to think about this is to remember Clinton’s words: “The world is more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”
Playing at being the toughest on the block in a childish King of the Hill game is an invitation to be knocked off one’s throne — and that’s precisely what Putin will leave behind as his legacy when he gets “retired” by one of his insiders.
Since the U.S. wants to be viewed as worthy of leadership, it faces the daunting task of making up for severely grievous misjudgments. Electing Trump for a second term is merely the final straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.
The U.S. still needs to put Bush and Cheney in front of an international tribunal to face war crimes.
That’s how far off the mark this question is.
You are in for seriously rough times ahead, and it would be easy to write you off to face your self-fulfilling prophecies alone. Still, you’re going to disrupt the entire world’s economy during your downfall, and that truly sucks big time.
The consequences of being a global leader mean having to live up to being a leader, and you’ve just proven to the world that was utter horseshit… utterly dangerous horseshit.
Your days as a global power are numbered. You’re going to become the United Kingdom for the next century. You may as well start practicing your “sorries” now.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is the defeat of the democrats an example of what Stephen Fry call the spectacular failure of the left?”
No. It’s a stark warning to the people of how utterly corrupt the corporatocracy is.
Fifty years ago, a menace like Trump would have been laughed off the stage long ago. He would not have made it past the primaries in his first election.
“Grab ’em by the pussy.” would have been the end of his political career precisely because the Fourth Estate took their responsibility to inform the people seriously enough to challenge him on his policies, his character, and his platform.
They gave him a pass on every ugly thing he said and did while demonstrating double standards applied to every candidate he ran against in all three elections he campaigned for.
They complained about Harris’ complete platform and well-thought-out policy initiatives as being too vague while Donald Trump talked about another man’s penis.
They overlooked Project 2025 and let Trump run roughshod over everyone and everything without so much as a peep. A few talking heads indulged in performative outrage at most, but all those people were marginal media entities. No one who was a significant personality challenged Trump’s horrendous behaviour in any substantive way.
This election and every election that Trump participated in is a scathing indictment of the corporate-owned media and a solid argument to break up the media monopoly that’s responsible for massaging the citizenry’s perceptions into a stupor that will set the world on fire.
He’s not fit to be president, but the people who refuse to see are incapable of exercising their judgment with any form of objective clarity because they’re all members of a cult that has been conditioned to perceive this atrocity as a win. They will need to experience the shocking effect of hitting rock bottom, like every addict, before they can awaken to the horror of their blind choices.
Every Republican woman who gets raped will learn to understand hatred on levels far beyond their current imagination.
Every Republican voter who finds themselves facing medical bankruptcy or the loss of a family member due to being denied healthcare will now have reason to regret their choice on a supremely visceral level.
Every single one of these people will become a ticking time bomb.
School shootings will continue and likely escalate.
Violence will escalate, and the media will benefit from it.
People will turn to the government for support, and they’ll find it’s been wholly repopulated with Trump sycophants, and they’ll get the bird they flipped against the “librulz” they’ve been taught to hate so much.
This era will become even more significant to American history than the McCarthy era in terms of a nationwide fervour that tears it apart.
Unfocused rage is likely the most encompassing sound-bite answer to this question.
MAGAts hate struggling in their lives — like everyone does. These days, during our historic levels of income inequality and minimal tax burdens on the wealthy, as they plunder our world into extinction, everyone but the top is struggling.
MAGAts have had their emotions leveraged against them, though, by a steady diet of hatred toward anyone and everyone not responsible for their hardship.
They’ve been taught to hate liberals because the left is a threat to the oligarchs.
They’ve been taught to hate immigrants because they’re an easy target to blame for their misfortunes. It’s a form of manipulated displacement.
They’ve been taught to hate minorities because they have been conditioned to believe minorities, like trans people, are assaulting their way of life simply by existing.
They’ve been taught to hate women because women are easier to victimize when they can be called “baby killers.”
They’re afraid of how quickly the world is changing and feel left behind, and they hate that.
They’re afraid of being unable to keep up and are insecure about their future. Meanwhile, the groups they’ve been taught to hate appear to weather the storm better than they do, and they hate that, too.
They hate a status quo that seems deaf to their pleas, and Trump is a disruptive element in society that echoes their hate. His perceived political outsider status and natural personality of overt indulgence in hatred convince them that he represents their interests.
He validates their hate fantasies and permits them to indulge openly in their hatred while manifesting it in physical reality. They don’t realize how much other people struggle with similar emotions or that they acknowledge how a significant reason why fantasies should remain fantasies is not all fantasies should be acted out because they are too destructive to be made manifest. They are fantasies that should remain fantasies because they function as forms of therapy. Making them real necessitates entirely new levels of treatment.
MAGAts have lived a lie through their belief systems that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that has convinced them to blur distinctions even more, to justify coping with all the pent-up hatred.
They can’t grasp long-term strategies or how distant a consequence can be from an action.
For example, a complaint they expressed was the cost of living, and because their narrow view of the highest authority in the land means that person dictates how everything works, it was easy for them to blame Biden. They didn’t learn to understand how the corporations that feed the media empires with profits would not risk losing those profits by demonizing the price-gouging corporations who butter their bread through advertising revenue.
The Republicans have been leveraging the naivety of their undereducated constituents for decades. States like Kentucky can sink into poverty while their leader overtly grows their wealth and blatantly betrays the entire nation, and they still can’t connect the dots.
All of this is a recipe for wallowing in the kind of hatred that can only escalate dramatically further as the fiscal incompetence of Republicans catches up to them. Their economic mismanagement has now run out of room to blame the Democrats. Trump’s strategy for tariffs and utilizing Elon Musk to be the voice of cutbacks in the trillions while gearing up to make the public accept enduring another round of austerity will begin to crack their support.
His appointments to senior administration roles are already horrifying as an overt pedophile has been appointed Attorney General, his Health and Human Services Secretary is an overt mental health case, and his Secretary of Defense is a television talking head. These three are already a toxic enough recipe for disaster, while the list of notables merely adds orders of magnitude to the levels of concern these already register.
Anything innocuous and unpredictable can become the match that sets the entire edifice of plutocrat manipulation over the last half-century into flames. This administration seems poised to ignite public backlash as Trump pushes an economy-killing tariff agenda and insiders like Elon Musk warn of impending cuts at impossibly surreal levels and public adjusting to another round of austerity.
The MAGAt argument, on its surface level of concern for the cost of living, appears rational. However, its sincerity will be tested in ways that challenge national stability at previously unseen familial levels. The cracks in the social contract will dramatically grow at the level of fundamental building blocks for society.
Once we’ve breached the final veneer of tolerance and the MAGAts realize they’ve been played for fools while hating the wrong people, they will harness all their unfocused rage into a tight focus to enact destruction on orders of magnitude well beyond what they have achieved thus far in society.
Once they reach rock bottom and have their come to Jesus moment, the plutocrats responsible for dividing the people and ripping us all off will have hell to pay.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How did the US fall so far? This isn’t an Anti-Trump question. I really want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for. At what point did things go so wrong? See comments for further context.”
RE: “I sincerely want to know how it became okay to hate someone or even attack them because of who they voted for.”
If you sincerely want to know, you must go further than this recent election.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen over just one election.
This is an entirely predictable outcome of over 50 years of demonization of the left by the right.
Things have been going wrong for a long time, and they went overboard when the right began treating their “honourable opposition” as enemy combatants.
The demonization has just been getting worse over time, and electing Trump was the final straw.
You must understand that the hatred isn’t about “who they voted for” as much as the values they voted for.
They voted for an evil monster — convicted of 34 felony counts, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American citizens, has caused the wanton destruction of countless lives throughout his entire life, and he gloats about doing that. He laughs at the people who worked for them and has refused to pay them for their work. He’s caused people to go bankrupt because of that, and he cares less about that than about the hamburger he ate last month. He’s an admitted sexual predator — he bragged about it, and he’s been accused of rape. He was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked in underage sex slaves. He’s a pedophile who has openly lusted after his daughter.
He’s an overt racist who tried to have five innocent men killed to satisfy his murderous lust. The man is so much scum of the Earth that the entire state he called home and has done business in most of his life has run him out of it. He instigated a treasonous coup against the nation when he lost the last election.
People aren’t so much pissed at him but at the state of affairs where millions of people chose his brand of hatred to define the nation they love.
People are dying right now because of their hatred.
Children were hauled away from their families in cages and sold for a profit the last time he was president.
That’s what people hate.
More of that evil is returning, and millions don’t care.
That’s why families are being torn apart.
That’s why people are shutting the door on people who welcome that evil back into an acceptable standard of living for the nation.
School kids have been dying from unhinged freaks with guns on an almost daily basis throughout the nation, and instead of wanting to do something to save lives, those people voted for more of that.
That kind of evil cannot be tolerated without giving up something important about one’s integrity and self-respect.
The U.S. fell because it’s been falling at the behest of the misanthropic plutocrats who regard average citizens as disposable chattels.
The U.S. has been falling for decades, and it got worse, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s demonization of government, betrayal of unions, tossing out mental health patients onto the streets, massive upward wealth transfers to impoverish the working class and sowing distrust between citizens.
Eliminating the protections ensuring the citizens were informed correctly by the Fourth Estate opened the door for a corrupt monster like Rupert Murdoch to steadily drip hatred into uncritical minds who got ever more desperate with rising costs and vanishing incomes to arrive at a state of general insanity.
We are here today because of a visible mental health pandemic affecting one in five citizens.
We are here today, repeating history from 100 years ago to almost the day when the Nazis threatened global domination under their jackbooted heel.
They’re back again, which means everyone who supported a return to an evil regime dominating humanity is an enemy of decent society, whether they are blood relatives or not.
This is the beginning of the next major war the world is facing, and people need to wake TF up because it will only get uglier now and result in chaos until people realize we need each other to survive our challenges as a species.
That means all the people who want to demonize and hate those who are unlike them are enemies of humanity.
That’s why families are fracturing into warring pieces.
They chose hatred, and that just can’t be tolerated any longer because hatred is a fire that will consume everyone and everything we value.
Fifty years of this means they finally got what they wanted.
thotbag 