I mean, yeah America’s rightward spiral is depressing, especially if you live there. But it’s not exactly an American-exclusive phenomenon. Italy elected a far-right party, France might in their next Presidential election, and even Germany’s far-right party is surging in the polls. Honestly, I’m struggling to think of a country that hasn’t seen a massive rightward surge over the last few years.

What happened was, for the GOP, all their propaganda was made for the plebs. They knew it was all bullshit.

However after a generation you get a bunch of true believers whom were raised on Fox News and AM radio, and this is what happens.

Trump for example was never “in on” the propaganda, he was just a boring asshole that only watched Fox News and underage beauty pageants. So of course he’s a true believer. It’s also the reason why he resonates with his “base” because he literally talks like them on Facebook. Word for word sounded like some of my distant “kinfolk” and one of the reasons why I ditched Facebook. It’s literally “he’s like me frfr” except everything that matters ie rich, coastal elite.

The only way to get his cult to back off would be if he said he was a Democrat now.

There’s a theory that societies experience 40 years of progress followed by 40 years of regression in an endless cycle. I hope the theory is wrong. I can’t take decades of these idiots running things.

And it’s happening in a lot of other countries - here in the UK the political culture is more right-wing than any time since at least the Second World War (and that’s saying something).

It’s Late Stage Capitalism: in order to continue business as usual in the face of all reason and evidence of its devastating effects, capitalists look to authoritarianism and fascism to ensure capitalism’s continuation.

Right cause the US is the only country with racists in power lol

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Trump is a poopee cacca. The GOP is a cacca poopee.

I just watched a video where a woman from Tennessee explained that every resident was required to get a new license plate that year, and that they had the choice between 2 standard options, the only difference being that one said “In God We Trust” and one didn’t. Oh, and the ones that had “In God We Trust” had the numbers come first. So for example, every “Christian” license plate reads 123 ABC, and every “atheist” plate reads ABC 123.

What the fuck?

https://youtu.be/EbhpkB3U7iM

For me it is weirdly entertaining and frightening at the same time.

If you’re from another country just being exposed to American media and not familiar with why that media is the way it is, it may seem like this hate and racism thing wasn’t around as much before and is around more now. Unfortunately, if you are familiar with American history or have spent any time in a predominately conservative area, none of what you mentioned is anything new or even at higher levels than it has ever been. Almost all these hateful bigots have been that way for their entire lives. Politicians are just directly pandering to them now since Trump proved it wouldn’t destroy your political career when you are totally open about demagoguery rather than dogwhistling like right wingers used to think they had to do.

I think our country is going to be openly and unashamedly fascist in less than ten years, personally. The PR people will come up with a better name for it (kind of like how they swapped out ‘white nationalism’ for Nazism) but it’ll be functionally the same.

Biden is supposedly a progressive, but he’s done too little as most of the country contends with a 30% to 50% increase in their cost of living. People aren’t going to care that Trump/DeSantis are fascists if they’re the candidate of change in the next election.

As young people I think it is really easy to feel like our time now is the worst ever, the most difficult that’s ever been, etc. because it’s all we see or expose ourselves to seeing. The truth is far more complex than that and any glance back at world history can tell you that we are experiencing challenges which happened before in history. While it’s true that things like technology make awareness of these issues more easily accessible, the issues themselves are always the same: racism, intolerance, wars, corruption, abuses, injustice, on and on. The fact that this country is still in its infancy as a world power compared to European nations for example, also makes these issues here even more poignant but, humans being what we are, also clearly inevitable. It is sad, but it is also indicative of opportunities we always have right in front of us every day to try and make things better when and where we can.

One of the things that helps me maintain this view is my work with older adults (which I have now been doing for decades). When you sit down for example and have a candid, genuine discussion about life, politics in particular, or world views with a person in their 90s who lived through so much of what we only now read about - it puts a lot of this in perspective very, very fast. It is a shame that in this country we often just set aside our elders and completely devalue them (unless we are talking about Native Americans, who most definitely do NOT do that in my experience), because having access to perspectives outside our own generational bubble is really important.

This was about 35 years ago. It’s an illusion that any of this went away

https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0

starring into the abyss of contempt, chaos, and bigotry… it also makes me sad.

I started experiencing it in 2014 when Cambridge Analytica was building up their pro-Trump stuff. Reddit and Facebook really changed that year, and it’s never gone back.

I really hope that people have a sense of urgency that it took a lot of time to get humanity more towards positive after world war 2, and we could do better, and it really isn’t worth hating each other on this planet.

A world-wide funeral for those we lost in the pandemic would be nice, but it just doesn’t seem to form. Plenty of people with social power who could spread the idea.

There’s other forces fucking with our politicians, both inside and out of the country. Our government politicians basically have a combination of ransomware and no soul.