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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JD Vance is a historic piece of shit who sold out his family and people to make a buck and gain power. He’s in bed with techno-fascist billionaires and is one of the foremost advocates for a literal fascistic ideology that seeks to take MAGA to the next level of oppression.
It’s bad enough that Vance is such a colossal asshole and that his ideology is literally fascistic, but he is capable of taking the MAGA baton and turning it into a force the likes of which most have yet to even imagine.
Terrible, terrible day for the country.
If our media returns to fawning over Vance because they want to hate poor people, I’m going to lose my everloving mind.
This is serious, serious business. And we all got a whole lot less safe today.
For years MAGA has promoted a culture of violence and oppression.
Now, in the wake of the shooting, calls to lower the temperature disgustingly obscure that fact and also undermine the need to protect millions of Americans from authoritarianism.
This isn’t a “both sides” issue. One side has waged an authoritarian war on democracy predicated on violence. The other has said people deserve safety and dignity and shouldn’t be hunted and systematically erased.
This false equivalency is disgusting. And telling.
The Center in America has now revealed what it truly believes. Fighting authoritarianism is “ugly” and “dangerous.”
It’s much easier and more pleasant to wring hands and welcome the authoritarianism and make nice with it. The media and political class enjoys that privilege.
Absolutely disturbing but unsurprising that they’ve managed to equate a movement’s constant fearmongering and calls for literal violence and murder with people saying, hey, maybe this other side calling for literal violence and murder is dangerous.
I just want people to remember that the reason this environment is so charged is because 1. One group has spent years openly talking about carrying out a bloody, reactionary revolution and 2. There are literal human beings whose lives and fates are on the line.
When you say, “Hey, let’s all take it down a notch,” you’re spitting in the face of women, people of color, immigrants, gay and trans people.
The stakes are actually as high as they can be. But there is one side constantly pushing a bloody resolution.
Trump has used Christianity’s persecution complex and obsession with apocalyptic danger to his advantage, crediting imaginary battles between Good and Evil.
Now, they have a ready-made situation that will inflame those fears and necessitate more extremism.
The ground was prepared for the MAGA Cult when evangelicals merged with the GOP a half century ago. Now, Christian Nationalism and the MAGA Cult are logical evolutions of a religious-backed push for power.
Churches around America today are undoubtedly framing the assassination attempt through Christian ideology, some adhering to dogma and others telling a story that forwards Donald Trump as a messiah figure God personally saved on behalf of Christendom and America.
The response by GOP figures to say God saved Trump will not be isolated. Rhetoric will only become more and more apocalyptic, throwing gas onto an already raging fire of Christian Nationalistic radicalism.
People need to wrestle with this and get familiar with it in a hurry.
We have not been living in a traditional political reality for some time. The Cult of Trump has been building in power and influences for nearly a decade now and growing off the Evangelical Right’s mythologies for nearly a half century. It’s easy to tell where this is going.