It’s almost like corporations took over the internet, monetized it, and deployed every possible tool to convert it into an addicting advertising platform without any regulations or standards, driving up social contention, misinformation and propaganda because the more rage you can instill in the population the more “engagement” everything will get.

Our population largely would willingly choose a long, slow boil in a pot over a sudden change to their way of life.

The comforts that come with living in the wealthiest land in the world are more than addicting, they’re dangerous to a society that’s still under threat of being exploited by men with designs on power and control. It’s so easy to leverage a comfortable population. An uncomfortable population is more likely to move, to get up and change something or resist a new order.

So our best hope right now is that things move fast enough to make enough people uncomfortable that our population starts talking in terms of “general strikes” and other forms of protest that will shut the country down long enough to purge the oligarchs either by sending them off or lopping off their heads.

And as weird as it sounds to say in the year 2025, yes I am on board for a revolution with guillotines at this point. When a ruler harms or kills many people for personal gain, they have forfeited their lives and have forgotten that we want rulers who serve us, not kings who crush us.

I didn’t need Claudia to tell us that Trump folded and didn’t actually make any deals.

But really I’m happy with any taxes on oil and coal.

I’m sure this will lead to a massive investment in renewable and clean energy sources.

Aaaaannnny day now.

Yah, I think we’ll start making progress again in this country when we all realize that most people don’t care about facts, they just want stories.

Donald Trump’s power has nothing to do with anything other than his flagrant disregard for reality and his chronic disorder that makes him just launch into stories about anything and everything. And not just stories, they’re always ridiculous stories like you would tell children. This works because most people are again, children who want stories.

While Trump and his ilk have woven these epic stories of good versus evil and how rotten the enemies are and how great the good guys are, the left and the dems have been trying to quadruple down on being “civil” and producing charts and graphs and data to back their arguments. I get it, I used to think reality mattered to other people, but now I get it, that for the vast majority of humans, nobody really thinks.

I don’t mean that as an “I’m smarter than everyone” statement, but a discovery about a fundamental quality of the human experience, which is people only think they think. What actually goes on for all of us, all day long, is we feel a thing, experience a sensation or emotion, and our brain writes a story to explain it. You believe this story because you tend to never doubt what you come up with in your head, but your brain doesn’t naturally default to facts and logic, just ways to connect feelings and experiences. This is intrinsic to how our minds work and it’s what let us survive ice ages and predators and apocalypses of ancient times. But in a modern, complex world with language and politics and technology, it just makes us more confused and wrong, which is why people tend to cling to people who can successfully create a narrative that weaves everything together in some sensible way. Not actually sensible, it just has to “feel” right and the brain will accept it even if you don’t agree with the person telling the story. This is why there are so many people and institutions that suddenly feel like they’ve turned “pro trump” it’s because we’re monkeys and we follow our leader, especially when they can make enough of us follow a storyline.