It’s been the Koch brothers and the John Birch Society’s dream (amongst others) to propagandize so many people of the “American Dream” and evils of anything other than capitalism. They were ecstatic when the Tea Party movement worked out for them, but they lost control of it with Trump. It’s a monster of their own making.

Exactly - I started noticing prideful ignorance in the early 2010s. People around me made bad choices and would not be corrected. Their ignorance was just as valid as someone else's actual knowledge. That's when, strengthened by their own baseless pride, their shame disappeared. I'm not saying shame is good, but when it's the only thing keeping the deplorables in check, maybe a little of it helps.

It used to be that I'm general, horrible people realised they were horrible and at least went through the motions of being decent. They were like cockroaches scurrying for the shadows when you turned on the light. Now they're like a cat peeing on your bed - they pause long enough to lock eyes with you, then continue peeing.

Speaking optimistically, at least now we know exactly who they are.

Turns out all you need to do is make up some bullshit about “American dreams” and “bootstraps,” make them believe they too can (and probably already should!) be a billionaire, and the one thing stopping that are those goddamn Marxist Democrats and their “progressive taxation,” and “social safety nets for the blacks (please ignore the fact that I’m on disability, it’s different)”.

Well, to generalize your statement a bit, I've had a conflict with people who thought that the only thing preventing them from living in socialist heaven were jerks like me talking about human rights, market economy, transparency, accountability, governments actually changing, putting thieves in jail and getting activists out of jail, legalization of various substances, any consensual sexual activity, privacy, freedom of speech, competitive judicial system, culture of protest, yadda-yadda once a few years ...

They sincerely thought all this prevented life in my country from being good, while themselves being thieving ignorant intriguing insecure shits was normal. You know, the kind of people who contribute clearly negatively to the society, but think life is unjust to them, they should live better and somebody has stolen everything from them.

The GOP have been selling these people hope and magic since Reagan. It’s no longer about hard work for republicans, now all they have to do is destroy cities and kick out everyone they don’t like, and we will return to the magic that never existed in the 1950’s.

It may be the most successful example of indoctrination of parts of the populace of a supposedly developed nation by the ruling class though.

Right, Russia is fucked too

This is lemmy, the goal is always to shit on America.

To this day, I will never know how it didn’t end the moment he made fun of that photographer who had the deformity on his arm.

I'm seriously worried there's going to be a worse turnout than 2020.

2020 had the highest voter turnout in any US election. Donald Trump got more votes in 2020 (more than 74 million) than any other Presidential candidate, winner or loser, in history.... except for Joe Biden in 2020, who got 81 million.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election

Gingrich has been married three times. In 1962, he wed Jacqueline May "Jackie" Battley (February 21, 1936 – August 7, 2013), his former high school geometry teacher, when he was 19 years old and she was 26.

Throughout his congressional campaign in 1974, Gingrich was having an affair with a young volunteer. An aide who worked with Gingrich throughout the 1970s stated that "it was common knowledge that Newt was involved with other women during his marriage to Jackie."

In the spring of 1980, he filed for divorce from Jackie after beginning an affair with Marianne Ginther.

In September 1980, according to friends who knew them both, Newt visited Jackie in the hospital the day after she had undergone surgery to treat her uterine cancer; once there, Newt began talking about the terms of their divorce, at which point Jackie threw him out of the room.

Although Newt's presidential campaign staff continued to insist in 2011 that Jackie had requested the divorce, court documents from Carroll County, Georgia, indicated that she had in fact asked a judge to block the process, stating that although "she has adequate and ample grounds for divorce ... she does not desire one at this time [and] does not admit that this marriage is irretrievably broken."

According to L. H. Carter, Gingrich's campaign treasurer, Gingrich said of Jackie: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer."

Following the divorce, Jackie had to raise money from friends in her congregation to help her and the children make ends meet; she later filed a petition in court stating that Newt had failed to properly provide for his family.[262] Newt submitted a financial statement to the judge, which showed that he had been "providing only $400 a month, plus $40 in allowances for his daughters. He claimed not to be able to afford any more. But in citing his own expenses, he listed $400 just for 'Food / dry cleaning, etc.'—for one person."

In 1981, a judge ordered him to provide considerably more; in 1993, Jackie stated in court that Newt had failed to obey the 1981 order "from the day it was issued."

In 1993, while still married to Marianne, Gingrich began an affair with House of Representatives staffer Callista Bisek, more than two decades his junior.

Gingrich filed for divorce from Marianne in 1999, a few months after she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

On January 19, 2012, Marianne alleged in an interview on ABC's Nightline that she had declined to accept Newt's suggestion of an open marriage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich

It's been a thing for a while. They do a performative squirm and vote for monsters anyways