Sure, the billionaires are the ultimate problem. They are not the office holders.

Those outlets would not publish that propaganda if it did not sell. It’s not that there is no interplay, but the media figures pushing the fascist propaganda have no incentive to stop and cannot be forced to stop without abandoning core principles of our society (freedom of speech)

Executing, exiling, or dispropriating enough billionaires would make a difference, but again, you need fascist tools to stop the decent into fascism. There is a significant segment of our society that wants the violence. Not a majority, but enough that I see no peaceful way through. The violence will come for us eventually.

Hard disagree. The Republican politicians are not leading the masses to dark places, the masses are pulling the politicians to greater extremes and the politicians are holding them back, because they have a greater understanding of the consequences than the average voter.

Ask the average Republican if undocumented I’m immigrants should all be deported, and they will tell you yes. That’s 14 million people, and the only way to accomplish it is to build up ICE to 5 times it’s current size, and do what they are doing in Minneapolis in every city in America. What they want requires fascism.

Ask them if abortion is murder and they will say yes. They don’t care about the women that are dying from pregnancy complications, the children that will be orphaned, the families that have been torn apart because the treatment for many conditions is abortion of the pregnancy and if it’s murder you can get treatment.

Ask them if environmental regulations are too stiff and should be rolled back so the economy can grow, and they will say yes, they don’t care about the ecosystems that will be lost forever, the diseases that people will suffer from pollution, or the rights of communities to avoid those harms.

What holds them back is that individuals don’t all want the same things, so the party pulls in different directions, because some people understand the disaterous implications of a specific policy, so they don’t support that particular cruelty, but they don’t question the wider ideology, and the basic ideology is a death cult.

What you get over time is generational frustration that the corrupt politicians refuse to do what is necessary and support for more and more extreme individuals in office. People that hatch plans like the federalist society, to corrupt the courts, and project 2025, to destroy the administrative state and consolidate power into the executive, and congresspeople who will support the descent into violent fascism, because that’s what is required to give the masses what they demand.

Democracy slows down the process, but the American voters will get the cruelty, suffering, and death they demand eventually.

That’s a calculation each of us has to make personally. If you are white, a citizen, have people that rely on you, and are wealthy enough that they can fight a legal battle for you, maybe don’t resist and hope for the best. If you are none of those, and you think you might get sent to a concentration camp or Africa, maybe defend yourself as best you can.

Good luck to everyone.

The UK and France combined would have a problem if there was a single carrier parked in the North Atlantic. They might have a chance if all the US Carriers and subs were 2000 miles away.

There is nothing anyone except the US can do about a US annexation of Greenland, short of Nuclear weapons.

World leaders are doing things. Europe has committed large sums of money to building out their defense industries, China has been building out it’s military capabilities for decades, Canada has used tarrifs to strategically punish the US for it’s tarrifs on Canadian goods and joined the European defense partnership, presumably to gain access to the aforementioned defense industry build out in Europe. Japan is increasing it’s military spending and moving to amend it’s constitution to remove the restrictions on military force.

Sanctions against the US like those on Iran are possible, but for a country as large and wealthy as the US with such a diversified economy, even if the entire world sanctioned the US it would plunge them into desperate poverty.

It would wreck the US economy, no doubt, but most world leaders are not willing to even suggest their people should endure that level of hardship over Nicolas Maduro. And the US would still have most of the world ability to project military power, so driving us into a corner like that would be incredibly dangerous.

Make no mistake, every world leader and especially every head of state in Latin America is considering the chance that delta Force could pull them out of bed at 3 AM, I imagine Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula in Brazil, have a few new grey hairs and especially Cubas head of state is sweating bullets. They don’t have the power to prevent it.

I am personally reviewing my options for how to protest this action.

Yeah, Israel was able to launch a shit ton of Missiles into Iran, and some of the Iranian Missiles hit Israel, even through the Iron dome, the tightest missile defense system in the world.

Theoretically each candidate can vote however they like for each vote.

The leaders of each party in each house of Congress can do things with committee assignments that increase or decrease a senator/representatives influence. Buck the party line too often and you can be neutered as far as influence over writing laws. Leadership is elected by the lawmakers of their party though, so if they lean too hard or force too many unpopular votes they can be removed from leadership.

In practice they tend to want to work with each other and get along. Inter party fights are embarrassing. Some lawmakers from states outside the norm ideologically can get away with voting against the party by pointing to their constituents and usually leadership takes this into account before deciding whether to hold a vote.

Joe manchin was a Democrat from West Virginia. He famously voted against several of Bidens environmental bills to favor coal mining. John Tester was a Democrat from Montana who neutered parts of the ACA under Obama. In both cases the Democratic president needed every single democratic senator to agree or the vote wouldn’t pass because their was no chance of Republicans crossing the isle.

Republicans allow much less ideological diversity through their primaries, so even a Republican like Scott Brown from Massachusetts was a solid conservative.

That’s definitely where my mind goes.

I thought it was native to wealthy families from Jersey/Virginia/Maryland. People that grew up in Martha’s vineyard.

I wasn’t intending to draw a distinction between intelligence and ignorance. I was just using repition for emphasis.

That’s just one possible suggestion on my part. I was reading a reddit thread yesterday where women were sharing their post partum depression. “I was so anxious that I couldn’t carry my baby through doorways. I thought I would smash their head against the doorframe. When hubby left for work we just stayed in whatever room he left us in. I had to lay my baby down and leave the door open to see them to use the toilette. I only changed him on the floor because I had visions of him falling off the coffee table and smashing his head open on the carpet.”

Like, I can see that kind of psychosis leaving a mark. Changing who you are and what you believe, if you left Fox news on while you were too anxious to walk through doorways and I am sure sleep deprived, maybe thats all it takes. Or your husband starts listening to talk radio and you don’t have the energy to argue.

Or maybe again it’s about money. People get their shit together because now they have a kid and then they have money and start voting to keep it and fuck everyone else.

Not everyone, certainly, not even most, most people don’t change their politics over time. but over time the drift goes to the right.

Sure, under the Soviet Union, or something like it. They weren’t a the arch villains I grew up being told they were, but the USSR had a long list of flaws and broken promises.

That is also horrible. The right’s view of human nature is that people are fundamentally violent, greedy, selfish and cruel. Life before governments was “and endless struggle of man against man for control of women, land, and wealth. It was nasty, brutish, and short.”

Governments provide a check on our natural impulses by centralizing power into a single authority. Capitalism harnesses greed and selfishness into mutually beneficial business deals. If you don’t work, you a deserve to starve. Big you can’t work, you live by the grace of Christian charity.

This is all nonsense of course, justifications post hoc by the powerful so of course they deserve their power. But if they are right… The mind recoils.

That talking tree in lord of the Rings was named Treebeard. He spoke about how the time of the ents was ending because the entwives had left and could not be found.

Focusing on economics is social justice. Black, indigenous, immigrant, LGBT, are all more likely to be poor. Make healthcare more affordable, raise wages, strengthen unions, and all those groups benefit.

Pretending that social justice is at odds with kitchen table economics is a psyop by the right. They want us fighting the culture war instead of making life better for the majority.

You stop paying attention to big things and focus on your child. “Think of the children” starts to work more because you think less about everything else.

Also women who are independent tend to be more liberal than men, but women who are dependant on their husband tend to be more conservative. Have a child, quit your job, adopt your husband’s political opinions because what’s good for him is good for you.

This is the story.

It’s also survivorship bias. Wealthy people live longer, and wealthy people are more conservative. As a cohort ages, the poor liberals die off and the wealthy assholes remain.

Calling our opponents dumb is being polite, or maybe a psychological defense mechanism against the horror of the alternative.

If you are dumb it’s not your fault. You didn’t, know better. If you are ignorant you can learn.

If you are smart and you still made the choices knowing the outcomes, then we have to go to other explanations: greed is the next least bad, and certainly it plays a part, but honestly that doesn’t usually follow. The vast majority of conservative supporters have no chance to benefit from their policies, so we have to go further to find an explanation.

Cruelty. They want the suffering, the death, the destruction of human potential. Or maybe sadism. They enjoy inflicting pain and deprivation.

The mind recoils, so we call them dumb, because the world in which the ignorant masses are being misled by nafarious elites is less soul crushing to contemplate than the world where the masses act out of cruelty and sadism.

And they will never be found because they don’t call themselves “entwives”