The United States we live in today - the one with the Christmas bombs in Nashville, that one - is an intentional construction. Rich people spent a fortune giving Rush Limbaugh millions of kilowatt-hours of airtime, built Focks Noose - the whole thing. It's a product.

The assholes everybody is hating on are product. Yes, the raw material was in excess supply, but they're still product. I was a blue collar guy in Kansas City's communications infrastructure, worked in all kinds of new construction putting in the communications part - with them.

Not "People just like them," but - a lot of these very same individuals. I've watched them change.
You've read about somebody's dad or whatever - I'm that dad's demographic. I've watched it happen with my peers.
It's an advertising campaign, and it worked. It's what America does.

4. Next to the grim truth about the ecosystem collapse, there is no more important or under-discussed fact today than that a few, specific, individual, very rich people, built today's America, in full public view.
Richard Nixon's America was *way* better than this one.

5. Rupert Murdoch. The nation of his birth threw his tired ass out, said, "You can't build that false reality here."
We took him in.
Everybody talks about the little fat guy. Roger Ailes? I will tell you a secret:
ROGER WAS AN EMPLOYEE.
Don't tell anyone.

6. If I could reach through the ether when some talking head says, "Well, the United States is so divided and tribal..."
Yes. You dipshits. We were separated into two teams by the owners. We didn't "become" tribal, we were lied into it.
On purpose.
At great expense.

7. It is commonly said that the media is after ratings, or profit, or some first layer outcome from their choices of output, but they could have gotten profit and ratings in other ways. They already were.
They became what they are on purpose to sell an economic system.

8. Surely by now everyone alive has seen the Powell Memo, right? This isn't some Protocols of... mystic shit, this is a paper written by a guy who would later sit on the Supreme Court and participate in the Buckley v Valeo decision. His own words: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-memo-a-corporate-blueprint-to-dominate-democracy/

9. If we don't get control of the lie machine there is no way to fix America.
You can't address this at the result stage.
There people have, on purpose, at great expense, created armed mobs attacking state government buildings in force which law enforcement fears or is with.

10. The news - owned, strangely, by the very people I am discussing - does not talk about causes. At least ten times a week somebody on MSNBC say, "... but the United States is so divided..." And reports about the armed mobs - government buildings...
BREAK GLASS! BREAK THE DAMN

11. I basically pay no attention whatsoever to what the various assholes do every day. I'm scared shitless, but the squares on the monopoly board don't matter.
A handful of really rich people have taken control of all the sources of information for everyone. They have built this.

12. The things I think would address that are officially formally unthinkable and undiscussable in America, so - I've got no other suggestions. But it's important. If we want our republic back, shitty though it was, it's the most important thing.
--later