Thread by @jcsbimp

(Thread) 1 - The power that politicians had to manipulate our people to bring us to where we are is power they have not always enjoyed: With preachers & media outlets sympathetic to them, their persuasive might is great. The Fairness Doctrine disappeared at the hand of Reagan.

https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1166667458041659393

2 - And it has had a snowballing effect: The persuasion has extended to the courts, with Citizens United, in saying that money = speech and corporations = persons. Campaign finance reform is overdue as well, again highlighting the corrupting effects of money on our politics.

3 - This was done deliberately. There were strategies set into place, and adjusted over the decades. Entities formed, opportunistic ones that sapped people of their power, sometimes even dovetailing religious values with anti-environmental, pro-industry, anti-equality aims.

4 - The Intelligence Community says foreign entities interfered in our election, but the damage has been further, and from the same source, for a much longer time: Vulnerable minds have been shaped by viral online propaganda since the days of email chain letters.

5 - The call to "run government like a business" sounded around the same time, with suited sycophants, less-principled loyalists, enjoying career advancement while whistleblowers were punished harshly... and undeservedly.

6 - @TheDemocrats and @GOP, Top Two political parties here, benefit greatly, albeit unequally, from this corruption. They work hand in hand with Big Oil, the Investor Class, and propagandistic forces like @FoxNews, @WeAreSinclair, @700club, and @CBNNews, maintaining the system.

7 - The lopsided greater amount the @GOP depends on this corrupt state of matters can be seen in it becoming the preferred party of racists, anti-environmentalists, white supremacists, & people against gender and LGBTQ+ equality in the social sphere. The Radical Right made it so.

8 - The rise to power of @realDonaldTrump is a very destructive symptomatic tip of this diseased iceberg. Removing the @GOP from power, a fate they deserve as @LindseyGrahamSC prophesied about a Trump nomination, will be a blessed relief to America but will not solve everything.

9 - These problems, again, have roots in Corporate Personhood and an overdue need for Campaign Finance Reform. But they also have much older roots in a system that justified enslavement, exploitation, & extermination in the name of Manifest Destiny. American Empire is exploiting.

10 - We will have to work very hard to remove centuries-old political practices that have seeped into religion and mass media now and that have very much helped define who we are as a nation. We must change who we are for the better.

11 - And we can no longer afford to deny that certain forces within Church, State, and Commerce (maybe ALL of which should be made separate!) will fight us at every turn if we initiate such radical, needed change.

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