When powers begin to fade they lose the ability to better living conditions, respond to crises, or even provide the basic necessities of life.
They collapse in on themselves and offer nothing but lies about reality and violence to enforce the propaganda.
This path that we’re on, with Trumpism, fascism, and the dying myths of American exceptionalism and white supremacy, is a road to death.
We’re experiencing societal rot right now and this moment should be warning enough that we’d better right our course in a hurry.
Our failure to address the pandemic, economic inequality, the rise of paramilitary extremism, the creep of managed democracies, one natural disaster after another, the existential threat of climate change...these are portents.
This farce with Trump is late-stage Americanism.
I say it every day. Trump isn’t the disease, he’s a symptom.
We’ve been bleeding from white supremacy and hegemonic ambitions for so long now. This moment is us staggering around, grasping and gnashing our teeth.
Something has to change. In a hurry.
As the Soviet Union decayed, all that was left were shows of impotent military force, societal oppression, and corrupt leaders who lied about reality.
When it finally fell, its citizens expressed a strange sentiment of simultaneous shock and inevitability.
This business with Trump’s illness, his shifting condition, the shoddy propaganda, this is late-stage Americanism.
This is a farce and if it continues it’ll either collapse into dust or rage into fascism. We can find something better, more real, more human.
It’s not too late.
An election is a start, but not the end.
Ask yourself what you want. What America should be. What America could be.
Whatever happens with Trump and November, this isn’t over. We have to work toward something else, something better, or else that collapse will find us.
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People are rightfully feeling a ton of anxiety about the election.
We must take these last few days to calm and fortify ourselves, recognize the control we have, replenish ourselves, and decide how we will continue the fight to make the world better.
This podcast tries to provide strategies to overcome election anxiety and ground ourselves in reality and focus on what we can do to combat authoritarianism beyond Tuesday.
We need to take this anxious energy and convert it into actionable things.
Combating authoritarianism is exhausting. It’s systematic, weaponized abuse designed to ground you down.
We have to find the moments of calm to replenish ourselves so we don’t burn out, so we don’t fall into despair the way authoritarians want us to.
One of the biggest issues of the 2024 Election is going largely unreported.
Elon Musk has used his wealth to buy the shambling, decaying corpse of Donald Trump and MAGA in order to seize control over the government without ever appearing on a ballot.
Everyone knows Trump is in decline, and Musk recognizes a prime opportunity to install a puppet who will rubber stamp his agenda while handing him unmatched and unaccountable control over the functions of government.
This is a major, major threat.
Trump as a spectacle soaks up so much attention, but the donors behind him and the oligarchical Musk are pulling the strings with only light scrutiny.
We are watching the co-opting of the presidency in real-time, and if it’s allowed to happen the consequences would be dire.
It’s time for people to understand that Republicans and MAGA aren’t actually interested in curbing immigration.
They want to profit off fearmongering tethered to white paranoia and create an environment of sheer terror in which immigrants are more easily exploited.
The billionaires puppeting the GOP rely on immigrant labor as a means of maximizing profit and circumventing regulation.
What they’re pursuing is a country where immigrants have a huge, brutal system over their heads to keep them from challenging anything.
As resources are more scarce and conditions worsen, the Right will absolutely brutalize immigrants. They have created a subsection of people who are vulnerable and exploitable and expendable.
That’s it. The whole ballgame. And the framing everyone accepts is disastrous.
The episode of The Midnight Kingdom is out and explores our present crisis, including the rise of authoritarianism, attacks on democracy by the wealth class, and what we must do to get out of this mess.
The five part series is now complete. Please share.
The series tracks modern history, explaining how the powerful have used racism, religious mythologies, and weaponized conspiracy theories to control us and expand their power.
It's a reconsideration of where we came from and where we are.
Episode 1 starts with the merging of Christianity with Roman power and dissects how religion was used to create "Western Civilization" and a feudal empire where control was almost total, which is where many Right Wing ideologues want to return to.
Last night JD Vance was allowed to lie and present himself and Trump as moderates.
It was repulsive and dangerous. Winning this election, and defeating MAGA as an authoritarian movement, means breaking this facade and communicating how extreme they are.
It is disgusting how Vance, who has hundreds of hours of available podcasts and videotaped interviews, wasn’t confronted by his antidemocratic, misogynistic, and wildly authoritarian and extreme positions.
Instead, he was allowed to say time and again that he and Walz agreed.
It’s bad enough that CBS dropped the ball in one of the most embarrassing debates we’ve seen in awhile, but Tim Walz had two jobs: communicate how dangerous MAGA is and provide an alternative.
He didn’t do that. And that should serve as a wake up call for the campaign.
There’s a real Roman-Empire-Telling-Britain-They’re-On-Their-Own vibe to everything right now.
Only it’s now this weird, hard for some people to explain caveat of capitalism having fully possessed the US and overtaken its process for the purposes of system operation that just makes everything worse and very difficult to grasp for people who haven’t been taught about it.
Watching what’s happening in Gaza and Lebanon with the backdrop of worsening climate change, infrastructure collapse, austerity, and intentional inequality, leaving people drowning and suffering and roads and bridges and dams collapse is just…awful.