The point above are symptoms of the oligarchical capture of a supermajority of the American political system (e.g., legislative, judicial, and executive) and mass media constitute the greatest threat to humanity (within and beyond CONUS borders), future engines of economic prosperity for the 99%, world tranquility, and the standard of life of average people. It's not even a partisan issue except to those who wish to be divided-and-conquered and bark at powerless people they believe are valid scapegoats. I wish this current crisis would end and we could return to arguing about direct memory access or ALE XT-compatible ISA cards.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates...
1. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
2. https://newrepublic.com/article/150646/young-trump-went-russ...
3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15516349/Epsteins-s...
>According to the report, GCHQ began passing information about contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives in late 2015. Agencies from Australia, Germany, Estonia, France, the Netherlands and Poland also passed on information until summer 2016.
https://www.politico.eu/article/british-spies-discovered-tru...
In the long view, there was/is a concerted effort by chaos agents in favor of radical upheaval/destruction/division who share (temporary?) interests, belonging to one or more of the following rough groupings:
- Putin, Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Ellison, Trump, and a litany of other billionaire oligarchs whom have each their individual interests for changing, breaking, or tweaking political and mass media institutions, processes, and leadership to capture more money for them.
- Crazy people who aren't educated or aware enough to understand what's going on and go along with what other fringe people said because they like hurting people who aren't them.
- Crazy people who know what's happening but profit directly from chaos despite the risks.. from bloggers to political consultants to merch sellers.
- Crazy people who know what's happening but have some irrational, ideological guide-star like the second coming of Jesus, "government overthrow", "creative destruction"/accelerationism, civil war, race war/separatism, and/or world war.
And then there's:
- Unknowable ~5-70% (varying by forum and piece of content) of engagement generated by bots and sockpuppet human-based boiler room phony engagement to shift sentiment and manufacture consent towards one or more of the above. In some videos on YT, there's like 80% meme coin spam. And there's a lot of repetitive comments by spammers calling for violence that seem like bots.
- Unknowable % emergent issue advocacy groups covertly or overly formed in service of any of the above.
- People who exhibit cognitive dissonance to reality of the risks and changes but benefit directly or indirectly from the chaos. This is endorsement of the outcome while internally disagreeing with the means, but not enough to take a principled stand.
My bottom line: Defend democracy and don't carry water for the Kremlin by in-fighting amongst the 99.9%. Most of the 0.1% through under-restrained greed are the perpetual enemy of organized civilization, and so the Marcus Licinius Crassuses and separation of power must be vigilantly maintained through countervailing factions, structures, policies, and countermeasures in relative balance in passionate contention short of harmony. Bribery, emoluments, chaos, stupidity, and tranquilizing reform delay has got to go.
You can't pretend the collective will of American voters just isn't a vile, stupid person who wanted Trump and all that entails at this point.