r/PoliticalOpinions

I’ve been thinking recently about the topic of our party systems, especially after recent elections in states like Florida. Why do we even have the Two-Party System? George Washington himself warned us a country divided by political parties would never stand. I believe we should ditch the Two-Party System. It’s caused politicians to worry about representing their party, race, or group rather than the people. It’s caused division. In places like the House of Representatives, both parties only care about filling seats in order to gain control and power, to further push the power of their party. It tears people apart. Like the assassination on Charlie Kirk. Because someone was apart of another party and had different values, he was killed. Even in other places like Russia, when the Tsar was still in place, the battle between socialists and communists tore the country apart. Abolish the parties. Represent the People, not your party. I may not be super informed on politics, but this is what I believe.

The honest tax, the round trip we can stop making, and the house we hand down

Let me talk with you about the hard one. Taxes. This is the part of the plan where the knives come out, and I'd rather walk into that with you honestly than pretend it's simple. So pull up a chair. Tell me where you think I'm wrong. That's the only way any of this is worth doing.

Steve Forbes was more right than they let him be

Years back, Steve Forbes ran on a flat tax — one rate, everybody the same. He got attacked hard for it, and some of the hardest shots came from people who read his own magazine and trusted his economics. Here's what I'll say about that, plainly: on the fairness of the idea, Forbes was right. Everybody paying by the same rule is not the cruelty people made it out to be. It's the opposite of a rigged game.

Where his plan ran into trouble was not his heart. It was his vantage. Steve Forbes is an economist, and a good one. He looked at the flat tax and saw something fair, and he stopped there — because that's where an economist's road tends to end. I come at it from a different corner. I was raised by a couple of men rooted deep in how money actually works, but I ended up a philosopher who thinks about people first. That's an odd pair of eyes to have, and I don't pretend it makes me smarter than Steve Forbes. It just means I can see one step further down a road he opened. I'm not tearing his idea down. I'm building on it. He helped.

The round trip nobody should be paying for

Here's the step past the flat tax. Even if Forbes's number had worked — and I don't think his number carried the load — a flat tax with no floor does something quietly foolish. It takes money from the working poor, runs it up to Washington, skims an administrative cost off the top, and then hands it back to those same families to pay for the things the whole country already agrees are worth paying for. You taxed them, charged them a fee to process their own money, and returned what was left.

That is a toll on a circle. And you don't need to care about anybody's feelings to see it's wasteful — you just need to be able to count. So we stop making the round trip. Below a floor tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — the District Poverty Level — you pay no federal income tax at all. We don't take it, skim it, and give it back. We just leave it where it is.

You cannot waste money you never collected in the first place.

The one complaint every American shares

In all my years, I have never once heard an American, left or right, say the real problem is that we help people who genuinely need help. That is not the complaint. The complaint — and everybody, and I do mean everybody, shares it — is three words: waste, fraud, and abuse. The government wastes the money. Some people defraud the system. Others abuse it. Fair complaints, all three. So let's answer all three, on the country's own terms.

Waste, we answer here by not collecting the money in the first place — no round trip, no processing fee, nothing to waste. But understand this is one piece of a bigger job. Waste turns up in every department of the government, and we go after it everywhere — the way we lay out in other briefings, department by department. This is not a single clever trick in one column of the budget; it is the same discipline applied wherever the money moves. Fraud and abuse, we answer the way a nation of laws is supposed to: we identify the people who are cheating the system and we exclude them, using the laws already on the books. Notice what that is and is not. We will not punish the family who needs the help to get at the handful who game it. We go after the ones who are actually cheating — by name, under existing law — and we leave the honest people alone.

A dollar is a dollar

Above that floor, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it falls toward about thirty percent as we pay the debt down. And it is the same rate on every kind of income — a paycheck, a dividend, a capital gain, money made overseas — because a dollar is a dollar. The person who earns hers swinging a hammer should not be taxed harder than the person who earns his while he sleeps. That's not envy. That's just the same rule for everybody, which is the thing Forbes had right from the start.

And here's the part that makes the floor more than kindness. When we exempt the lowest earners and kill off the hidden taxes they pay all year — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks — that comes to real money for a family living close to the line. These are rough figures from our own work, meant to start a conversation and not to be carved in stone: a floor somewhere in the range of eleven to fifteen thousand dollars, and hidden taxes eliminated on the order of four thousand dollars a year for those families. Now follow that four thousand. That's four thousand dollars we no longer have to turn around and pay back out in support to offset what we took. We didn't take it, so we don't have to give it back. The kindness and the arithmetic point the same direction.

This is one beam, not the whole house

I need to be honest about something, because a campaign that tells you one policy fixes everything is a campaign that is lying to you. This tax idea isn’t a solution by itself. It can’t be. This campaign started from a hard truth: if you think you've solved a problem, you haven't looked hard enough, because no problem in this country stands alone — every one of them is tied to all the others.

So this beam only holds because the others are going in beside it. That exempted family isn't paying for their health coverage either, because of what we do on health care. The spending gets cleaner, the debt comes down, the floor rises as the country heals. Pull any one of these out and the rest sag. Put them in together and they hold each other up. That is the whole design. It is slower than a slogan and it is built to actually stand.

The house we were born into

Let me close where I mean to close, at the kitchen table, honest. We built this debt over generations. Everyone from the end of the Second World War to yesterday owns a piece of how we got here. And everyone from today to the year twenty sixty is responsible for the repair — not because we did it, but because we were born into a house that needs work. You want to keep the house, you fix the house.

And understand what happens if we don't. A neglected house does not sit politely and wait. It gets worse. Live in it and refuse to repair it, and the thing your children inherit is not the house you got — it's a house that has fallen further down. Nobody comes out ahead. That’s not where I want to live, and I don’t believe it’s where most Americans want to live. We have always wanted better — for ourselves, for our kids, for our grandkids. That wanting is the most American thing there is.

I will tell you the truth about my own place in this. I am not likely to live to see this finished. My wife, younger than me by twelve years, most likely will not either. My children might live to see some of it. It may be my granddaughter who lives inside the better country we start building now — and her children who simply grow up in it, never knowing it was ever any other way. I will not cut a ribbon on this. I am planting a tree I will never sit under. I am at peace with that.

You do not fix a house that's been neglected for a generation in a single week. You start, because starting is the whole job.

Because here is the reward, and it is the honest one — the only one I can actually promise you. A hundred generations from now, let them look back and say the men and women of the Second World War were a great generation. And let them say the ones who took the old house apart and rebuilt it, right at the dawn of the twenty-first century — they were the greatest. That is worth more than seeing it finished. That is worth being the ones willing to begin.

 

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN                                                                                                    

I live in a state that ranks near the bottom nationally in teacher pay and among the bottom five in education outcomes. While I don't believe it would be fair to place all of the blame on No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I do think our current education system deserves serious examination.

I was discussing this with my daughter and sister today as the new school year begins. Three children in our family need aides to assist with varying learning disabilities. The necessary forms were completed last year, yet two of the three still haven't received the assistance they need. The explanation from the school district is simply that there aren't enough aides available.

My oldest grandson, who is in seventh grade, struggles significantly with basic spelling. For example, he recently wrote "moor" instead of "more." His handwriting is impossible to read it looks like a chicken assisted him, he can't read his own work. My second grandson, who is in second grade, has better handwriting but is still unable to read even basic words.

I don't believe it would be fair to place all of the responsibility on my daughter. She has worked hard as a single mother while working in fast food and attending trade school. Her circumstances improved considerably last year, and she is now purchasing additional learning materials for both boys and looking for tutors through a local college.

My sister is a stay-at-home mother, and her husband has a good income. They recently moved back to our home state from a state with significantly more education funding. Two of their younger children are currently waiting for evaluations, while their fourth-grade daughter also struggles with reading, although she has been making progress.

These are firsthand experiences from my own family, not simply things I've read online. At the same time, I recognize that individual experiences don't necessarily represent the entire education system. We've also all seen reports and discussions about students graduating high school without strong reading, writing, or other basic academic skills.

That raises a broader question for me: What should Congress prioritize when addressing education after the midterms? Should federal role in education increase/decrease? Should the Department of Education be reexamined or restructured? Should Congress revisit or replace policies associated with No Child Left Behind? Should there be greater accountability for educational outcomes while also providing schools with the funding, teachers, aides, and resources they need?

Regardless of political party, I think these are questions worth discussing seriously. The goal shouldn't simply be to assign blame. It should be to figure out what is working, what isn't, and what can realistically be done to ensure that children receive the education and support they need to succeed.

The fact is, Trump betrayed Republicans. Not politics on the whole, Trump specifically did this. He roped the whole Republican party into scamming this country. He did it with the biggest, ugliest smile. And now, because folks are upset about that, he's trying to take their rights away so he can win with whatever minority of this country is still willing to vote for him. He never cared about the people or the country. He just wanted them to believe he did so he could get more power. That's it.

So, blue folk: former Trump supporters are voters, and we need their votes. Be nice, quit pretending they're evil, and find common ground. We're all in this dystopia together and it sucks for everyone; former Trump supporters have just been fed lies about how to fix it.

Red folk: Trump's still in office. If democrats pass something you don't like, he'll veto it. I can't guarantee democrats will focus on the important stuff (all politicians are kinda stupid these days), but you already don't like what Trump is doing, so give democrats a chance to put his power back in check. That's it. If you don't like what democrats try to pass (which Trump will veto anyway), you don't have to vote for them next time. It won't change a thing. But you don't have to let Trump remain unchecked in the meantime while he does things you don't like. Let democrats hold him responsible until next election.

So many hate them. Including a decent amount the gay/lesbian/bi community. Then you have centrist Democrats and even more leftist types who don't get it and want the issue to be dropped because they feel it's hurting the party and progressive movement. Some also victim blame and claim overreach and that calling out those against some of the more controversial elements has made people hate them, as if bigotry and prejudice of trans people didn't exist before. Too many people lack nuance and let their inner bigotry come out. Some more than others.

People can and di evolve on social issues. There is plenty of evidence for that. I don't believe trans people should be abandoned. The party and those on the left should be smart about it. I do know that most Dems do not put it front-and-center,

We must always remember that fairness does not necessarily mean giving every person the exact same outcome, opportunity, consequence, or reward. Instead, fairness means judging people according to the same basic standards while considering their individual choices, responsibilities, circumstances, and conduct.

If two people perform the same job with the same level of effort and quality, fairness means they should be evaluated by the same standards. But if one person works harder, takes greater responsibility, or consistently performs better, fairness does not require pretending their contributions are identical.

The same principle applies to accountability. If two people commit the same offense, fairness means applying the law consistently. But if their circumstances, intent, or level of responsibility are substantially different, justice may require different consequences.

Everyone gets the same.

Everyone is judged by a fair standard, and people receive what their actions, contributions, responsibilities, and circumstances warrant.

That is why fairness without accountability becomes favoritism, while equality without judgment can become injustice.

A healthy society should strive for neither privilege nor punishment based on who someone is. It should strive for equal dignity, equal protection under the law, equal opportunity, and individual accountability.

Ultimately, fairness means refusing to confuse treating people equally with treating people identically. Sometimes treating people fairly requires treating them differently because their actions, responsibilities, needs, or circumstances are different.

Give everyone a fair chance. Judge everyone by honest standards. Reward achievement. Correct wrongdoing. And hold every person accountable for their own choices.

​

America is drowning in anger,

while neighbors forget they’re the same.

Politics has become a battlefield,

and hatred has replaced the name.

Red against blue,

brother against brother,

everyone shouting to be heard while no one listens to another.

We’ve forgotten that freedom

was never meant to be won through hate.

It was built by people who stood together,

even when they disagreed at the gate.

Enough of the division.

Enough of the blame.

Enough of turning fellow Americans

into enemies in a political game.

We may disagree on government,

faith, values, or what’s right but we are still Americans, and America is still worth the fight.

Put down the hatred.

Pick up the truth.

Choose courage over anger,

and wisdom over youth.

Because a nation does not fall

when its people disagree.

It falls when they hate each other

more than they love being free.

America doesn't need more enemies.

America needs Americans.

A lot of people who call themselves conservatives are actually reactionaries, not Burkean conservatives

This may be particularly unpopular among the modern American and Latin American right, but I think the word “conservative” has become so broad that it often describes completely different political traditions.

One of the foundational thinkers of modern political conservatism is Edmund Burke. Burkean conservatism is fundamentally concerned with institutions, historical continuity, prudence and gradual reform. It is skeptical of attempts to radically reconstruct society because institutions contain accumulated historical experience.

That is not the same thing as believing that society has morally deteriorated and therefore needs to be returned to some idealized previous social order.

The latter is much closer to reactionary politics.

This distinction matters because today “conservative” is frequently used to describe a package containing religious traditionalism, opposition to progressive social change, economic liberalism, nationalism and support for a particular political movement.

But none of those things necessarily implies the others.

A political conservative can support a welfare state.

An economic liberal can be socially progressive.

A nationalist can support extensive state intervention and industrial policy.

A religious traditionalist can oppose free-market liberalism.

And someone who wants to reverse social changes in order to restore a supposedly superior past can be reactionary without being particularly conservative in the Burkean institutional sense.

The same problem exists when people talk about “the right” as though it were a single ideology.

Center-right liberals, institutional conservatives, national conservatives, libertarians, populist radicals, reactionaries and anarcho-capitalists can all be placed somewhere on the political right while disagreeing profoundly about economics, institutions, religion, nationalism and the role of the state.

Latin America provides an especially interesting example because religious traditionalism has become deeply intertwined with political identity. Brazil historically had Catholic traditionalist and reactionary movements, while Pentecostal and later Neo-Pentecostal movements developed through different religious histories and eventually became increasingly politically influential.

These traditions can now cooperate on moral and electoral issues, but that does not mean they all originated from the same political philosophy.

I therefore think we should stop automatically translating:

religious + traditional values + right-wing = conservative.

Conservatism, religious traditionalism and reaction are overlapping concepts, but they are not synonyms.

And wanting to preserve institutions while allowing gradual reform is fundamentally different from wanting to restore an idealized social order from the past.

The first can reasonably be called conservatism.

The second has another perfectly useful political name: reactionary politics.

There was a time when political disagreements were about how to solve problems not whether reality itself was negotiable. Today, in the Democratic Party common sense has been pushed aside by political ideology, identity politics, and policies that often seems disconnected from the everyday realities facing working Americans.

Common sense begins with a simple principle: reality is reality, regardless of political affiliation.

If something doesn't work, fix it. If a policy creates unintended consequences, admit it. If government spending fuels problems instead of solving them, stop spending. If people break the law, enforce the law. If an idea sounds good in a political speech but fails when applied in the real world, have the courage to say so.

What is troubling is the perception that parts of today's Democratic Party have become so committed to ideological narratives that questioning those narratives can itself be treated as unacceptable.

That isn't progress. That's political dogma.

America doesn't need politicians who believe every government problem can be solved with another program, another regulation, another tax, or another excuse. America needs leaders willing to look at the facts, acknowledge failure, and make decisions based on what actually works.

Common sense doesn't care whether an idea comes from the left or the right. It doesn't care about political slogans, fashionable terminology, or partisan talking points. It asks one question:

Does it work?

And when the answer is no, common sense says: change it.

The American people aren't stupid. They see the cost of groceries. They see the condition of their communities. They see crime, illegal immigration, government waste, political corruption, and bureaucratic dysfunction. They don't need politicians explaining away what they can see with their own eyes.

They need leaders who respect their intelligence.

Political parties can lose elections and recover. They can lose power and regain it. But when a political movement loses its connection to reality, something far more serious happens: it loses the trust of the people it claims to represent.

Common sense isn't Republican. It isn't Democratic. It isn't conservative or liberal.

It's common sense.

And no political party has a monopoly on it.

The day politicians become more afraid of admitting the truth than they are of losing an election is the day politics stops being about serving the American people and becomes nothing more than protecting a political ideology.

America deserves better.

It deserves leaders with the courage to say what is obvious, acknowledge what is broken, reject what doesn't work, and put reality ahead of ideology.

Because when common sense leaves politics, the American people are the ones left paying the price.

I’m sorry but as a 26 year old living in a low income county in Ohio, I see no growth whatsoever in our economy. 50% of gen z lives with their parents because we cannot find employment. College graduates are applying at Walmart, McDonald’s, and any customer service related jobs because there’s no other forms of employment. Around 1/3 of Gen Z has passed away due to burnout and mental health issues. We cannot simply keep living like this, our society along economy is going to get worse if we continue this pattern.
I currently work in Kohl’s and you would think since it’s minimum wage job you would see teenagers. No I see a lot of teachers working second jobs because they do not make enough, and college graduates like myself who can’t find employment. When gas is $4.50 a gallon along with other goods and services, you simply have no choice but to just work wherever.
Media sources always say “entry level jobs” are being taken by AI while the rich get richer and they try to tell us how to manage our money. It’s such bullshit. Every time this man has been president I have seen nothing but disasters. First term, we had a whole pandemic and a terrible economy. He lied to the American people and said “right now we have the greatest economy in the world” seriously?? What for you because you get to be corrupt and get away with it??? This man was guilty on 34 criminal charges and I see little penalty for that. It’s just the whole thing is really bothering me because I can sense it’s getting worse. His first term was already a shit show. He’s taken away so many things from Gen Z. The second term is just as a bad if not worse. I really hope we see change in 2028 because the way things are running now is awful.
Let’s not forget either when Republican journalists on YouTube and TikTok were really pushing Gen Z to vote for Trump. That fucking Brett Cooper, Nick Fuentes bullshit was such propaganda. Same with those Jubilee debates in 2024 🙄 I didn’t fall for that shit because like I said before, trumpism has got to go. Others might say “oh well it doesn’t matter whose president the economy is always bad”, that’s incorrect.

A plain talk about what we owe, what we pay, and how we get out from under it

Let me talk with you the way I'd talk with you at my own kitchen table, because that's where this kind of thing belongs. Not from a podium. Across a table, with the coffee getting cold, about money — yours and the country's. And I mean talk with you, not at you. You get to push back, ask the hard question, tell me where you think I've got it wrong. That's the whole point of sitting down together.

First, the honest part

The debt is real. I'm not going to sit here and tell you it isn't. As of this month the country owes just about thirty-nine point eight trillion dollars all told, and we're knocking on the door of forty trillion — we're expected to cross it before the month is out. Roughly thirty-two trillion of that is money we owe out to the public: people, pension funds, other countries who bought our debt. It's a big number. It's supposed to feel big.

But here's the thing I want you to hear: big is not the same as hopeless. The United States is still the most resilient economy on the face of the earth. What's hurting us is not that we cannot pay. It's that the whole system has been built cloudy on purpose — hidden taxes, moving targets, a tax code you'd need a lawyer to read. The problem is not the mountain. The problem is that nobody has been willing to hand you an honest map of it.

We don't need to fear the debt. We need to defeat it.

What that debt actually costs you

Here's the part that ought to make you a little angry. Just paying the interest on what we already owe — not paying it down, just paying the interest so it doesn't grow — runs over a trillion dollars a year now. Let me do that division right here at the table, out loud, so you can check me. Take that trillion-plus, and spread it across every man, woman, and child in the country — and I'm going to use a bigger population number than the real one, so if anything I'm understating this. It comes to more than three thousand dollars a year for every single person. Around two hundred seventy-three dollars a month. For a family of four, that is over a thousand dollars a month — better than twelve thousand dollars a year — gone, to pay rent on money we already spent. In a lot of places, that is the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. And every dollar of it buys nothing, builds nothing. That has become one of the single biggest things the government spends money on, right up there with the biggest programs we've got.

Think about that at your own table. Right now we are doing the thing everybody knows not to do — paying the minimum on the credit card and watching the balance sit there anyway. Every dollar going to interest is a dollar that is not building a road, not backing up a hospital, not doing one useful thing except paying rent on money we already spent, years ago. I will not pretend that is acceptable. It is not.

How we dig out — and it's not magic

Here's how you get out from under a debt like this, and it's the same way you'd do it at home: you stop the bleeding, you pay it down in a disciplined order, and you don't let anybody raid the progress you make along the way.

When the country runs a surplus — when more comes in than goes out — that surplus goes to work in a set order, not wherever the wind is blowing that year. The large majority of it goes straight at the principal, the actual balance we owe. And here's the quiet miracle of it. The average interest rate on our debt sits around three and a half percent, which means every trillion dollars of principal we pay off saves us somewhere around thirty-three or thirty-four billion dollars a year in interest we never have to pay again. That saved interest becomes next year's surplus, which pays down more, which saves more. It compounds. Here's the part every homeowner already knows in their bones: a debt can work against you or for you, depending on how you carry it. Carry it the way we've been carrying it — minimum payments, interest forever — and it bleeds you like a credit card. Attack the principal early, the way you'd pay down a mortgage, and it turns: every dollar of principal you knock out today is a stack of interest you never pay tomorrow. That is what we are going to do to the national debt.

A smaller share of that surplus goes to seed a national fund — think of it as the country finally opening a savings account. Money set aside in steady, low-risk ways, to steady us in a crisis and to leave something for the folks coming up behind us.

We will stop paying interest to the past, and start earning something for the future.

Now, the taxes — and this is where honesty lives or dies

Everything I just told you only works if the money coming in is honest and steady. So here's the shape of the tax idea, and I'll give it to you straight, no fine print.

Below a certain line, you pay no federal income tax at all. That line is tied to what it actually costs to live where you live — we call it the District Poverty Level, because the cost of getting by in one part of the country is not the cost of getting by in another. When the debt is heavy, that no-tax line sits at one times that local cost-of-living number. As we pay the debt down and the country gets healthier, that line rises — to two times, and capped at three times the local cost of living. More of your money protected, the healthier we get. That is the deal: discipline doesn't just retire the debt, it earns you a bigger tax-free floor.

Above that line, one rate. It opens at forty-five percent, and it's the same rate on every kind of income — a wage, a dividend, money made overseas, all of it — because a dollar is a dollar, and the person who earns it with her hands should not be taxed harder than the person who earns it in his sleep. And as the debt comes down, that rate is written to come down with it, falling toward about thirty percent over time.

And the hidden stuff — the payroll bite, the gas tax, the little nicks you never see — that comes out. Every dollar the government takes, you'll be able to see. I think you have earned the dignity of knowing exactly what you pay, and exactly why.

No more hidden taxes. No more games. Just the plain arithmetic of what we owe and how we're paying it off.

Why I'm telling you this at the table and not from a stage

Because this is not a stunt, and it is not a slogan. It's a structure — one you can check, one that doesn't change every time the politics change. The rate, the floor, the order the surplus gets spent in: written down, predictable, the same from one administration to the next. You should not have to re-learn how your own government takes and spends your money every four years.

And because the real reason to do any of this fits in one sentence. We will not hand our kids a bill they never voted for. We built this debt; it is on us to retire it — so the ones coming up behind us start from zero, and not from behind.

This isn't about paying less tomorrow. It's about clearing the debt today, so our kids start clean.

That's the whole of it. No mystery, no magic — just an honest map, a disciplined climb, and a refusal to pass the bill down the table to people who never got a vote on it. Now tell me where you think I've got it wrong. That's what the table is for.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RNsolutins, instead of complaints, please visit: https://www.presrun2028.net/blog

Policy Papers and Legislation Recommendations Coming Soon.

I'm starting to think that democracy is a doomed system and authoritarianism easily abusable by whomever cares more about being an individual power rather than doing the best for their country.

I see democracy as something that only works when people are made to make decisions after spending countless hours diving into analyzing and comparing the competency of each candidate, you can not expect that from a pool of 100 million random people. If a good government is created by solving an extremely complicated problem, why would you ask millions of people who have no reason to spend any of the time necessary to understand it to choose?

A quasi-authoritarian rule under an idealised competent benevolent party solves many of it's problems but can not be reliably sustained over multiple generations because for every lee kuan yew there will be 5 of donald trump.

I see a divided government as inefficient and impossible to rely on for any sort of long-term vision. If you have to average out every decision to find the point of most total satisfaction for the vote stakeholder, no matter how objectively harmful or genuinely necessary their needs are for what matters outside of them as an individual / for the most benefit for your nation- You might as well use the effect a decision has on the immediate share price of a company as a legitimate source of truth for the long term growth of a company.

When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. The democratic process rewards those who maximize public opinion rather than acting as a system to judge competence without bias; This can be seen through things such as arbitrarily dividing political opposition into "them" and "us" being legitimate strategies for attaining office.

This need to maintain non-analytical, non-rational, averaged public opinion also serves to poison the decision making of leaders into making matching non-rational decisions, you stop being rewarded for thinking about what the country needs and start thinking in terms of what people would vote for, what would keep your approval ratings up, what is going to be least hated by the aggregate sum.

(Note: by Non rational I do not mean irrational. I mean not up to par with the personal investment that an objective researched analysis of what should be done or who should be elected would require if the outcome is to be free of these major side effects.)

Thus I see a single competent benevolent party that comes to be without the influence or selection of these incentives to maintain public opinion as a government as more likely to be able to judge and implement the policy best for the prosperity of a collective than a competitive system like you'd see in the US, precisely because it doesn't have an incentive to prioritize action by what voters would vote for instead of what should be done outside of the leader's personal interests.

(Note: I am not saying that a competent benevolent party is easy to come by, I actually think the opposite. The means to getting to this state consistently is it's own, likely unsolvable problem; And if that is so, then democracy likely minimizes the most risk.)

The second ammendment was part of the first constitution yet that didnt stop the government from opressing blacks, women, lgbt etc and were even told to "protest peacefully" ie not use guns So what's the pro-gun response to that? Why do u think it will somehow prevent future tyranny when history shows it hasnt prevented america's historical oppresion.

Edit: Oh right and how trump literally tried to overturn the 2020 election. All those conservatives who talked about freedom were willing to kill our democracy. I bet most pro-guns people would have celebrated if it was overturned instead of using their guns

Americans aren't stupid due to a lack of education, but rather because of our overconfidence. The idea that because we are Americans we can do whatever we want.

We've taken individualism to a whole new level. People often believe they know everything about various topics, simply because they lack the knowledge to realize they don't.

We tend to follow the loud, charismatic leaders because after working hard all day, we just want to go home and let someone else handle our issues. Even though deep down, we know that overly confident individuals aren't the brightest. Hypocrisy is our specialty.

We understand that nothing is ever truly simple, yet we cling to the comforting illusion that it can be.
Our beliefs aren't just ideas; they're part of our identity. This leaves little room for debate.

Logic is a good friend, but we find ourselves captivated by fantasy.

Scientists can seem dull; we crave entertainment.

We admire the wealthy because they seem to exist outside the bounds of reality. Their complete disregard for responsibility fascinates us, despite their ridiculous ignorance.

We know we're being deceived, yet we keep voting for personalities instead of real substance.

We don’t feel accountable for our leaders' actions. After all, we're all individuals, so if we end up destroying the world, it’s not really our fault.

You know they are splitting us every way possible, splitting us by race, class, split families and the only way out is to do the unthinkable and join forces.

You know that agents of the left plant hate so people think there are these racists among us. People have to start being more smart in what they consume. Our population is so gullible. Ask yourself, who looks to profit politically off racial divide? perhaps the same party that took George Floyd incident (in a liberal community in a liberal state) and used it to rip the country in half so Joe Biden could get elected. When you see people dressing up in nazi gear, or posting nazi propaganda, you are getting played. Now, take that same energy and get real mad at the racist that divide our country and promote racial divide over harmony just for political power. I assure you that they are actively hurting people over color of skin much more than any “Nazi’s” are today. So, if you are genuine in your fight for racial harmony, you will exact the same anger at the puppet masters that will never let racism die. The whole platform is built on perceived racism.

The real fight is the fight against the oligarchs that look to divide and conquer, the closer elections are easy to steal. No matter if you are left or right, the only way for this country to realize its potential is to put our differences a aside, don’t fight over the same bullshit they have divided us over for 40 years. Come together with one goal and that is completely eradicating the uniparty known as republicans and democrats. Then, when forces are not preying on our emotions, we will find that we are much more similar than apart. If you support a republican or democrat you are for more racism, more homophobia, more veiled racist tactics.

Our country has a shitty past. We are evil. From all the wars we’ve started, to meddling in foreign politics, to not acting in our countries best interests. We’ve turned our citizens against each other, we’ve turned families against each other.. all deliberately.

Slavery was incredibly evil. They fucked up tho.. bc w/o slavery imagine what america would be like? Very few black people.. We all know it would suck. We are told we are so racist when we are the least racist country in the world.

If we continue to do business as usual, expect zero progress. This i promise you, but if we oust the forces working to turn us on each other and then really learn to love each other, we could actually turn this country into the most magnificent country and story of love winning over hate. Imagine it.. impossible until we deal with the ultra elite.. however it has to be done, the stakes are worth it. Then we could show the world what America is truly, “We the people” and we could restore the greatness in america that we have the ability to choose our leaders. When shit gets so clearly out of hand, our country is the only country that has the balls to speak truth to power. When this is accomplished, we sit down and figured out differences which is going to be discovered is being more narrow than we think.

just think about it.. it’s been a long time people have been telling us about nazis among us. About how these people hate you, but then it becomes that they are turned into the party of hate. All hate is shitty, just cuz people told you they are nazis doesn’t make it ok to hate them.. Or hate white people because ancestors mistakes (forgetting that many white people died in civil war to free the slaves too). We are being programmed to divide us and hate our country. I don’t think it’s possible, but if we reclaimed control of our country over the ruling oligarchs, We will rise from the ashes and show the world that when everyone comes together, All races and sexes and be brave and unite with our political enemies to pave the only path to a country that does real good for the world and then and only then will we be able to be proud of this country and what is great about it. This will be entirely worth while. There js nothing to be proud of now.

One thing is for sure, if you take part in right vs left or republican vs dems, you may think you are enlightened but in reality you are working against all americans on behalf of the elite,

So tired of post after post of cold takes about how the American people are to blame for what's happening. They aren't. What's happening is the culmination of decades of ideological groundwork that eroded the rights of Americans and stripped away their leverage over the government piece by piece.

The majority are against this administration, but no one knows what to do. The courts signed off, Congress folded, and the American Dream toppled. If it felt like a flimsy fight, you aren't wrong: America was hollowed from the inside out, and by the time any real pressure was applied, there was nothing to stand against it.

So who hollowed it out? Let's have a look.

TIER 1: THE ARCHITECTS

Built the infrastructure over decades. Without them, none of this exists.

• Lewis Powell (d. 1998) — The 1971 memo.
• Paul Weyrich (d. 2008) — Heritage, ALEC, Moral Majority. Said on camera he didn't want everybody to vote.
• Charles Koch (and the late David Koch) — Paid for all of it. Think tanks, university chairs, state legislatures, judges.
• Rupert Murdoch — Started Fox News and built the base; invented outrage politics.
• Roger Ailes (d. 2017) — Turned Fox from a channel into an operation.
• Newt Gingrich — Blew up the norms in Congress and made the other party the enemy.
• Leonard Leo — Runs the Federalist Society pipeline. Engineered five Supreme Court seats.

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TIER 2: THE INSTITUTIONAL DESTROYERS

Weaponized what the architects built. Still doing it.

• Donald Trump — The vessel. Got handed the machine and drove it off a cliff.
• Russell Vought — Wrote in Project 2025 that the goal was to "bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will." Withholds money Congress voted for. Impeachment articles filed this month.
• Stephen Miller — Built the immigration regime. Reportedly ran DHS from the outside.
• Mitch McConnell — Stole Supreme Court seats. Acquitted him twice.
• Steve Bannon — "Flood the zone with shit." Wired the American right to the global one.
• John Roberts — Waved through nearly every expansion of presidential power, mostly on the shadow docket.
• Clarence Thomas — Openly corrupt. Taking apart the regulatory state from the bench.
• Samuel Alito — Dobbs. The immunity ruling.
• JD Vance — The succession plan. The reason this survives Trump.

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TIER 3: THE FUNDERS

• Peter Thiel — Bought Vance a Senate seat, then the vice presidency. Says in print that freedom and democracy no longer go together.
• Elon Musk — Bought the town square X, then ran DOGE. Out of the White House, still owns the megaphone, uses it to divide.
• Robert and Rebekah Mercer — Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, and Bannon himself.
• Miriam Adelson — Biggest GOP donor. Bought a Middle East policy.
• Harlan Crow — Clarence Thomas's private benefactor.
• Timothy Mellon — Largest single Trump donor in 2024.
• Richard Uihlein — Funded election deniers down to county races.

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TIER 4: THE PROPAGANDISTS

• Rush Limbaugh (d. 2021) — Invented right-wing talk radio and poisoned thirty years with it.
• Matt Drudge — Decided what the right covered for two decades.
• Tucker Carlson — Took white nationalism mainstream in primetime.
• Sean Hannity — Nightly propaganda plus an off-the-books White House role.
• Alex Jones — Sandy Hook to January 6.
• Ben Shapiro — The Daily Wire and the funnel around it.
• Charlie Kirk (d. 2025) — Built the campus infrastructure that outlived him.
• Joe Rogan — Breaking with Trump in 2026 doesn't undo ten years as the biggest on-ramp in the country.

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TIER 5: THE ENFORCERS

Running the machinery on the ground.

• Kristi Noem — Ran DHS through the worst of it. Fired in March after her agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis, then handed a special envoy job. Nobody went down for the deaths. She went down for the coverage.
• Markwayne Mullin — Took over DHS in March. Brought in as the competent version. The problem they were solving for was management, not conduct.
• Tom Homan — Border czar. The public face of mass deportation.
• Gregory Bovino — Ran the operations in LA, Chicago, Charlotte, New Orleans, and Minneapolis. Called it "legal, ethical, and moral." Of a man shot while standing there watching: "the victims are the Border Patrol agents." A federal judge found his sworn account not credible. Retired in March, untouched.
• Pam Bondi — Ran DOJ as a weapon against the president's enemies. Fired in April over the Epstein files, not the weaponizing.
• Todd Blanche — Trump's former personal defense lawyer, now acting Attorney General. That's the whole entry.
• Pete Hegseth — Purged the officer corps, fired the military lawyers, blocked promotions for a dozen Black and female officers. Signal leak and all, still there.

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TIER 6: THE POLITICAL ENABLERS

Had the power to stop it and didn't.

• Mike Pence — Went along with all of it until January 6, then got credit forever for the bare minimum once.
• Kevin McCarthy — Flew to Mar-a-Lago weeks after the attack and brought him back from the dead.
• Mike Johnson — Election denier with the Speaker's gavel. Presided over the longest shutdown in American history.
• Ted Cruz — Knows better, which makes it worse.
• Josh Hawley — Fist-pumped the crowd on the way in, ran from them on the way out.
• Ron DeSantis — Florida as the test lab.
• Greg Abbott — The border as a cruelty showcase for the cameras.

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TIER 7: THE INSTITUTIONS THAT BUILT IT

• The Heritage Foundation — Project 2025 stopped being a proposal a while ago. It's the org chart.
• The Federalist Society — The judicial capture pipeline, start to finish.
• The Republican National Committee — Chose to become his party rather than outlast him.
• Facebook / Meta — Radicalization as a business model, worldwide.
• Twitter / X — Musk bought the town square and rebuilt it around himself. The place the discourse happens is owned outright by someone on this list.

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TIER 8: THE INSTITUTIONS THAT FAILED TO STOP IT

• The New York Times — Sanewashing. One of their own twenty-year columnists says so out loud.
• CNN — Billions in free airtime in 2016, still running him town halls years later.
• The corporate Democratic Party — Walked away from working people and never fought like it was real.

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TIER 9: THE COMPLICIT

• Bill Barr — Buried the Mueller report, then wrote a book about how bad Trump is.
• Rudy Giuliani — Torched fifty years of reputation for the election lie.
• Mark Meadows — Chief of Staff on January 6.
• Ginni Thomas — A Supreme Court spouse organizing to overturn an election.
• Michael Flynn — "Lock her up," then QAnon, then martial law in public.
• Roger Stone — Fifty years of dirty tricks, straight line to the Proud Boys.
• Aileen Cannon — Killed the documents case while auditioning for a promotion.
• Anthony Kennedy — Timed his retirement so Trump got the seat.
• James Comey — The October 2016 letter.
• Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — Killed voting rights at the one moment it mattered.

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So no, the guy who works two jobs and doesn't follow politics isn't why we're here. He was the target, not the author. Everyone on that list either built the machine, paid for it, ran it, or had a chance to stop it and decided their career was worth more.

It wasn't one plan, but a ship crossing the sea doesn't plan for every wave. It gets where it's going because someone's hand never leaves the tiller.

Stop blaming three hundred million people. The ones who had their hands on the tiller have names, and they're right up there.

At some point, the modern right appears to have completed a reverse triangular merger in which the entire concept of racism was acquired, transferred to a shell corporation, and redefined as “something liberals accuse us of doing.” Under the new ownership structure, racism can no longer be identified by rhetoric, policy, behavior, or appeals to racial resentment. It is simply an allegation made by the opposing political party.

The current president has been particularly useful to this accounting methodology, demonstrating that there is apparently no rhetorical floor below which a sufficiently committed defender will not say, “Actually, you're the racist for noticing.” Obviously, not everyone on the political right is racist. But a movement can have a serious problem with racial resentment without every individual member being a cartoon Klansman.

If your political ideology requires you to redefine racism so that it can never apply to your own side, congratulations: you didn't defeat the concept. You just acquired it.

Many in the West, especially Americans, view communism as a flawed, failed, and even malicious ideology. But the majority of its detractors seem not to grasp the key features of communism. The goals of communists generally include establishing a classless society, providing equality to all people, ending private ownership of the means of production (factories, farms, etc.), and using revolution to achieve these ends. To most people, these aims should be seen as admirable. But the ruling class is by definition our enemy, and the ruling class rules over the media consumed by the majority in any society. Therefore, the wealthy control the information the workers consume, and influence them to oppose solutions in their own material interest.

The capitalists profit by providing the laborers with a portion of the value of their work as a wage, while keeping the rest for themselves. The ruling class justifies this unfair arrangement by insisting that they organize businesses, provide the means of production, and provide opportunity. But they merely leverage past wealth to control who receives wealth in the future. Such an arrangement is definitionally exploitative, because one class profits from the labor of another. Communism uproots this system of exploitation and is therefore desirable.

Many communists have implemented regimes with repressive, highly centralized governance. This naturally creates a new ruling class, generally consisting of the vanguard party which led the revolution in the first place. Elections should soon follow a revolution, free speech should be permitted, criminals should be tried in court, not extrajudicially imprisoned or executed, and transition into a communist society should be gradual enough not to create economic instability. We should learn from the mistakes of Mao and Stalin, and create a society which provides freedom and equality.

I’m a Democratic Socialist, and I’m partially embarrassed to admit that I really want James Fishback to win the governor primary. I believe the Republican Party has already embraced white grievance rhetoric in their party, so I don’t believe James Fishback is really ideologically different on that matter, just more blunt. However, he is far more anti-corporate than the average republican, and that alone makes me prefer him. He’s also one of the only politicians in America that has specifically tailored his campaign and brand to appeal to my demographic, young white men. I feel like we often get the short hand of the stick in politics, especially from the left. So seeing someone like him actually engaging with us, speaking our language, and taking us seriously as people definitely makes it hard for me to dislike him. I think if he wins he will really push the needle in politics to prioritize us young people more.

Is this a bizarre take? I’m open to changing my mind. Let me know!