The United States of America: 1776-2024

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Well.

As I keep saying: God is real and he hates us all.

Either that or as I also said last time, either somebody ginned the election returns like Maduro did in Venezuela or the average American voter is too stupid to find their face in a mirror.

Judging from the US Senate results, I’d say the latter.

And I could say that a country that was too sexist to elect Hillary Clinton is too sexist and racist to elect a woman “of color”, but then why did so many women and Hispanics vote Trump? Even AFTER the Puerto Rico shit? You can bitch all you want about the Electoral College, but again, Republicans won the Senate, fairly clearly. The Electoral College has nothing to do with that. Hell, at the end of all this Trump might have the popular vote.

I think what it comes down to is, once again, the media making this a horse race between an entertainer and a bureaucrat, where the entertainer has a natural advantage. Not only that, the impression was given that the Democrats had a get-out-the-vote operation and the Republicans didn’t.

It’s one thing for Trump to win, since everybody was saying this was a coin flip, but in the next few months before the Ministry of Truth is established, we need to analyze exactly how he won THIS big.

I saw a Vlad Vexler commentary on YouTube in the aftermath of this election, and he was pondering what exactly we need to consider as to how we (the center-liberal people) could have let things come to this. And my response was, what is there to understand? After all we have learned about Trump, after we have seen him visibly deteriorate, after we have seen what is waiting in the wings if he dies in office, we (well, not me) elected him again? Why?? Was it all just “Fuck the Democrats”? I mean, I can kind of understand that. But it’s not enough. Just as the evil and incompetence of the Republicans is independent of the fact that Democrats are inadequate even by leftist standards, the fact that Democrats are inadequate is independent of the fact that Republicans are not only evil but objectively unfit to govern, because as in socialist countries, the evil of their ideology is going to dictate policy that is totally in conflict with reality. And whatever my misgivings with the Democrats, that was the reason I voted for them.

I cannot even say that I am sorry. What is there to be sorry for? I did what I could.

I am mad. Because anybody who claims to care about the world we’re in and voted for the Trump Party anyway made the world worse. We let the Middle East down. We let Ukraine down. We let Taiwan down.

This is a world of consequences. You cannot, say, tell everybody that abortion rights matter, and vote for abortion rights initiatives and then elect a government that is going to make the Dobbs decision nationwide. Contrary to what Trumpniks believe, reality exists and causality exists. And the reality and consequences of their actions WILL come back on them just as they did in 2020. The problem is they will also come back on the rest of us. It will mean that more people, in this country and throughout the world, will die who didn’t have to die. We know those are the stakes because that is what happened.

Seriously, fuck this place. The Republican Party quit being a republican party. The Libertarian Party quit being a libertarian party. And America just quit being America.

The only thing I can say as encouragement for the next four years – or however long this lasts – is that America is, or is supposed to be, a country of individuals. It doesn’t matter if the collective has decided to be stupid and illogical. If you are still an individual – if YOU are still America – then America still exists.

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