The Lasting Impact of MAGA
Here we are, the week that Trump could potentially be indicted by the Manhattan Prosecutor for — according to the New York Times — “the hush-money payment to the porn star, Stormy Daniels, which was made in the run-up to the 2016 election by Mr. Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen. Mr. Cohen was then reimbursed in installments by the then-president.” While this is happening, high profile Republicans are lining up to defend Trump or use it as a means to claim that the Prosecutor’s office is part of some Woke conspiracy funded by George Soros. I am sure Fox News has a lot to say about it, but I won’t bother to help their website statistics to find out.
All of this has me contemplating what a terrible legacy MAGA has thrust upon this country. What do I mean? Well here is my list:
Politics has become a literal cesspool on both sides. With us electing the worst of the worst because of misguided allegiances to political parties or worse, because we just can’t stand the thought of the other side winning. The completely awful people we keep electing don’t seem to make anyone step back and say, “maybe we need a real change.” Don’t agree with me? Ask George Santos for his take.
Our terrible news outlets that have reduced journalism to 24-hour commercials for real lunacy for the sake of revenue (Fox news, for example) or just quoting what they read on twitter (every other news outlet on the planet). This has had two substantially negative consequences:
First, that poor journalism is drowning out important journalism.
Second, that we have somehow made Elon Musk the arbiter of what’s important for Americans to know and given him power of the media. Mostly because — for reasons I can’t explain — our journalists (some of whom I actually used to have respect for) can’t seem to just delete their Twitter accounts when all signs point to the fact that they are actually contributing to their own degradation.
We have lost all sight of the important role government should be playing in our lives. We need government. As imperfect as it is, Putin in Russia and even Xi in China should be enough to scare the shit out of us into doing everything in our power to maintain and preserve our democracy. Government teaches us the importance of compromise and the importance of hearing other point of views. That has been lost and we are all to blame.
We have actually moved backwards on issues related to individual freedom and human rights. Surprisingly, something that most conservatives SHOULD agree with is that the government should be there to hold up individual freedoms. Instead we have at least two presidential hopefuls (DeSantis and Trump) who think that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is none of our business or something he has a right to do.
Idiots (back to the politicians here) have consumed all the air in the room. We can no longer work together to solve important problems. Our healthcare system sucks (not the healthcare workers, but everything else around it), we clearly need more regulation in our banking sector, technology companies like Facebook are being left alone when we should probably be having a healthy discussion on if it should be shut down entirely, poverty and homelessness is running wild, and, well, the list keeps going. We need smart people working together on these problems. But the idiots won’t let that happen.
MAGA is the first example I can think of that really contributed more negative outcomes to America and then had the nerve to turn around and point to the problems it caused and claim that somehow more of the same will be better. It is gaslighting on a nationwide scale. And goddamn, that should be scary to all of us.
We have created a world where the only people who want to assume leadership roles are narcissistic idiots who see this time in history as “their moment to shine.”
That the solution to every problem is to make up a conspiracy theory and blame that fiction for the problems you don’t want to solve. And when people try to bring that up, you just shout them down. Because you don’t care about anybody else but yourself.
It is a scary reality, this world that we have created. There are actually more items I could put on this list. I stopped out of frustration. The truth is, it just makes me sad. It makes me sad for my children who will inherit this dumpster fire of a world. It makes me sad for the thousands who will die in this country because they can’t afford healthcare, live paycheck to paycheck, or will be the victims of persecution because of what they believe in or who they want to be. This is legacy of MAGA.
If I believed for a minute the true believers of MAGA might change their minds, I might have a different perspective. They won’t. And that’s another gift we have been given. There is no woke mob, that’s just Twitter … ironically the gift of MAGA.
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