I'm more than sad the USA is rolling towards the precipice of militant nationalism and that half the country enjoyed our previous four year flirtation with fascism.

As my adopted country, I love the US enough to swear an oath and come a citizen. So, I always hoped things would get better. At this point, I'm resigned to wait for history books to define this time as only a misstep or as a permanent dropping another few rungs towards the decline of the American empire.

Flirtation? You might wanna familiarize yourself more with US history.

When did you start feeling it was going downhill?

Probably around the time I stopped believing in god as a 9 year old in the late 80's. I didn't know what it was, but I knew something was wrong. In my teen years I figured out the Electoral College was bullshit and didn't bother with voting but was still ignorant enough to think fighting for your country was a thing. My time in the navy clued me in that one doesn't fight for your country, you fight for your government. Soon after getting out I watched Bush Jr. steal an election and watched the Democrats let them do it, but still had thought of the Dems as the good guys; The "moral high ground" folks.

After 911, I watched both parties go full blown nationalist, saw the creation of the Dept of Homeland Security and literally saw people snatched from their apartment by sheriff officers with not a peep in the papers or the local police blotters, they just disappeared. As all this was going on, I was a hacker that repeatedly saw my profession criminalized and even had politicians call for the death penalty for what I did. I made fun of madpride from time to time, but couldn't help but acknowledge there was an undercurrent of truth to much of their posting regarding christian nationalism running through our government and military.

After the market crash in 2008 I saw Obama fuck the lower classes (though not really getting the concept of class just yet), break his promises regarding healthcare and abortion, and watched as millions of dems around me and on SE ignored all the horrible things he did regarding immigrants, trying to attack or just let damage happen to public programs, rain murder from the sky across the middle east, ignoring the racism of police brutality, and basically just leaving poor people to rot. At this point I had read Howard Zinn's A People's History and James Lowen's Lies My Teacher Told Me and was beginning to see the patterns of the past repeating themselves. The feelings of something wrong with our society began reaching further and further back as I read more of our history and realized that 90% of what I was taught in public school was pure fucking mythology.

2015 rolled around and I finally registered to vote to try and get Bernie elected as, even though his foreign policy was dogshit, I saw there was a minor possibility that he might pull our foot off the accelerator of what was clearly a global disaster in climate change. Around this time I read Listen, Liberal by Thomas Frank, Dark Money by Jane Mayer and an obscene number of other books that really solidified just how horrible our government and the political parties that serve the rich are. you may remember a post I made featuring a handful of them. The New Jim Crow really put the nail in the coffin and as I continued reading more and more history it became apparent that I was living in a predominantly white supremacist capitalist nation filled with people that had no idea just how badly they were being taken for a ride.


Now we're in 2022, I've watched liberals lose their absolute mind for 4 years and never really get it back while they now let Biden get away with advancing 90% of the things they assured me made Trump an absolute fascist monster. I've read even more US history, both domestic and of our foreign affairs, and have come to the conclusion that not only do we live in a white supremacist capitalist country, but fascism won world war 2 and our government has actively been funding, propagandizing, arming, and recruiting for Nazis and their local equivalent all over the freaking world in the name of fighting communism (worker uprisings) ever since. And the increased violence and militarization of our police and society is the inevitable conclusion of an empire that has squeezed all the blood out of the stone and is now full on taking the mask off as our violent foreign policies, that were often only internally directed towards minorities and leftists (not liberals, leftists), are rather hastily being directed inward towards anyone who isn't the upper class.

So if you mean when did I personally feel it was going downhill? 9. If you mean when in history did i feel it started going downhill. 1492.😂

Well my family immigrated here between 1900 and 1950 so the stories I have don't go any further back...

There have always been waves of fascism under the excuse of freedom. Even in the "good times" it's been a gentry class living a comfortable life while cracking down on the undesirables. Then you get parts where things slip through the cracks and give people a chance to say the quiet part loud. Political conflict with the USSR lets McCarthy get high on power and witch-hunts and everyone else is happy to join in (and then pretends they didn't). Civil Rights action across the decades gives cops a "justified" reason to give them the beating they deserve. Evangelical Christians cry that their dogma isn't mandatory and people scramble to "correct" that.

If there's a change lately it's that the attempt to pretend things are "normal" has been cracking. Greater pressure from frustrated new generations (not that there aren't plenty of young fascists as well), avenues of communication that don't depend on getting past the gatekeepers, when somebody does something these days whether for good or evil it can reach people around the world as more than an "in other news" headline in the paper. This is incredibly powerful but also exhausting.

If you want to see how this monument factored into the recent Georgia gubernatorial campaign, Google the name 'Kandiss Taylor.' Be warned, there is mucho craziness here. (For example, her campaign motto: "Jesus Guns Babies.")

dude thats who i was thinking of. john oliver interviewed her I believe. and she actually started a thread about it on a conspiracy webboard i visit, godlike.com

now everyone there thinks the board is gonna get shut down because of this act, hahaha