Category: Race (Skin Color) Relations in America

Election Meltdown

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The Book of the Week is “Election Meltdown” by Richard L. Hasen, published in 2020.

This short, slightly sloppily-edited volume named names of incompetent or criminal election workers, and unethical, influential political workers, in connection with specific political races of the past couple of decades. The offenders are listed below, in no particular order. The location of their actions, where applicable, is in parentheses.

The incompetent ones included:

  • Brenda Snipes (Florida)
  • Susan Bucher (Florida)

The criminal ones included:

  • Brian Kemp (Georgia)
  • Mark Harris (North Carolina)
  • Mark Anderson (Florida)
  • Leslie McCrae Dowless, Jr. (North Carolina)

The unethical ones who spread disinformation (one or more lies) via social media included:

  • Ken Paxton (Texas)
  • Donald Trump
  • Kris Kobach (Kansas)
  • Hans von Spakovsky (Kansas, Missouri)
  • Jesse Richman (Kansas)
  • J. Christian Adams (Florida)
  • Hillary Clinton
  • Kamala Harris
  • Michael Cohen (Trump’s former New York attorney)
  • Paul Ryan (former Speaker of the House)
  • Kayleigh McEnany
  • Christie McCormick

The author also named elections experts, lawyers and judges who refuted the claims of the above.

The author related that the Clintons argued that the reason for investigating voter suppression is to make sure it doesn’t affect the outcome of the election. But that should not be the most important reason. The most important reason to make sure there is no voter suppression, is to ensure that everyone eligible to vote, has a chance to vote. The reason Americans should vote is to show they believe in the process of free and fair elections.

Democracy requires that a significant number of people believe in it for it to work.

The bottom line is: Democracy is compromised when political workers engage in voter suppression, election crimes, or spreading of disinformation. All of those can result in low voter turnout, which in turn, can end badly. For example, in 1972, low voter turnout resulted in the reelection of the war-criminal Richard Nixon.

Read the book to learn many additional details regarding the above-named individuals’ actions, and about those who called out the liars.

The Fifties

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The Book of the Week is “The Fifties” by David Halberstam, published in 1993. This slightly sloppily edited hodgepodge of a volume consisted of a compilation of the author’s journalism entries. As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. The decade was characterized by alpha males with hubris syndrome, egos pushing and shoving, in all areas of American life.

“He delighted in control of the political apparatus, and he started each day by meeting with a trusted aide from the secret police, who brought him up to date on gossip gathered from wiretaps.”

Actually, the above was written about Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista. For most of the 1950’s, he was the CIA’s friend. Until he wasn’t.

In connection with the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur exhibited “arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory… taking a small war that was already winding down and expanding it” to fight against Communist superpower China, so the war dragged on for two additional years; “he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China…”

Matthew Ridgway helped save a few American soldiers’ lives by personally visiting all of them in South Korea to boost their morale, while MacArthur stayed in Tokyo, thinking of himself as king of the world. MacArthur thought it was Truman who was irrational. As is well known, about twenty years later, president Richard Nixon repaired America’s relationship with China, but prolonged the Vietnam War.

By the mid-1950’s, the evolution of the American labor movement had taken an ironic, hypocritical turn: Unions allowed Wall Street to invest their pension funds in the securities markets on their behalf.

In December 1955, the arrest of Rosa Parks was the last straw– prompting the Montgomery bus boycott. A bunch of factors came together, one thing led to another, spurring great political changes. Just a few included:

  • Parks was so emotionally tired of the oppression she and her fellow dark-skinned people suffered, she felt she had nothing to lose by rebelling.
  • Parks had friends in high places in the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Approximately three-quarters of Montgomery, Alabama public-bus riders were black, and of those, most were women who took buses across town to get to their jobs as servants in the white community.
  • The white community refused to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling.
  • The articulate Martin Luther King, Jr. became the public-relations leader of the Movement, which was nonviolent, and his religious crowd had more money than other groups in the black community.

The blacks outsmarted the whites in an end-run around taking public buses, by carpooling. Donations allowed the purchasing of new vehicles. White Montgomery officials had no clue about how fed up the blacks were with the conditions of apartheid, voter suppression, etc., so they didn’t know what to do when dissatisfaction reached critical mass.

In January 1956, police began arresting carpool drivers. The blacks shed their fears that they themselves would suffer retaliation for protesting, and owned their fighting-back as a point of pride. The Montgomery Advertiser newspaper was used as the local white politicians’ disinformation outlet. Nevertheless, after a while, the whole world was watching, as the boycott story spread like wildfire among hundreds of media outlets– mostly newspapers and TV stations.

The major influencers of the initial incident– Rosa Parks, MLK, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy– continued to behave in a mature manner, so the media sympathized with them. MLK Jr., remained a thorn in the side of the white community because he took a licking and kept on ticking. He was the recipient of a ton of hate mail, doxxing, death threats, fire-bombing of his residence, etc.

Anyway, another pivotal historical event occurred in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Governor Orval Faubus refused to allow segregation of a high school there in order to ensure his reelection. The orgy of hatred he unleashed, taught Southern politicians– George Wallace especially, “how to manipulate the anger with the South, how to divide a state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media.”

Just as legislation is a tool that can be used to spread hatred, technology is a tool that can be used for nefarious purposes, too.

“Do you get the funny sort of sense that, so far, at least, there are no human candidates in this campaign?”

The above was written by Dean Acheson, addressing Harry Truman, about the 1960 presidential race, packaged by consultants. JFK won because he had the nicer-looking TV image. Nowadays, the candidates can be replaced by AI software, created by consultants.

Read the book to learn much more about both disturbing and progressive, seminal historical events, and the people who made them happen.

Fight Back and Win

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The Book of the Week is “Fight Back and Win, My Thirty-Year Fight Against Injustice – and How You Can Win Your Own Battles” by Gloria Allred with Deborah Caulfield Rybak, published in 2006.

Allred, a civil-rights attorney, was born in southwestern Philadelphia in July 1941. She wrote about the lessons she learned from her activities, and tried to inspire readers to stick up for themselves if they had been the victims of discrimination. However, her method of settling disputes through the courts is extremely expensive and emotionally wrenching. It was obviously in her best financial interest to promote the launching of lawsuits.

She recounted some of her most famous court cases, many of which involved tabloid-celebrities. She admitted to staging publicity stunts to get attention, thinking they would help her clients. Some people might think the actions she took were unbecoming an attorney. In the United States– the staging and scripting of media events (or non-events but merely pushing propaganda) is nothing new for people from all walks of life who protest perceived injustices.

Jerry Rubin, a member of the “Chicago Eight” spread disinformation just before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Three TV stations bought his lie and reported on the local news that ten thousand “Yippies” (slang for members of Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party) planned to protest-march in the nude at the Convention. The media had visions of naked demonstrators getting their heads bashed in by law enforcement. Indignant letter-writing to Chicago newspapers ensued. Actually, fully-clothed demonstrators got their heads bashed in, and the idiot box and newspapers still got their sky-high fill of viewers and readers.

Political-front groups are nothing new. They are secretly funded by big-money donors who hire a handful of troublemakers who incite violence at street-demonstrations. Most of the people who attend such events are brainwashed into thinking they’re helping make political change, peacefully. They clearly haven’t read their history. They never learn!

Through the decades, street demonstrations alone have never effected significant political change in America. Not even when people died, as happened at “Kent State” in May 1970. The Vietnam war still dragged on and on.

The major historical events during which street-protests have worked (in other countries) include: the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution in 1918 (as seen in the treatment of the Romanovs) and in Romania in 1989 as seen in the treatment of the Ceausescus. Other instances (with ample help from the United States via the CIA), to name a few, include: the Marcoses in the Philippines, Duvaliers in Haiti, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There is insufficient room here to elaborate on why, in these cases, citizens who took to the streets, were able to oust their country’s leadership.

Anyway, Allred’s political stunts have largely faded from the public’s memory, to be replaced by more recent ones staged and scripted or incited by the biggest publicity hound in American history, Donald Trump. Despite the number of lawsuits Allred has won against powerful people– even politicians– in her decades representing victims of discrimination, it seems the nation has regressed, because it tolerates Trump’s abuses.

In 1992, there was still a double-standard in connection with racism versus sexual harassment in the workplace. “If he [Oregon Republican Senator Bob Packwood] had racially harassed members of his staff, he would have been forced to resign. Why was it acceptable to sexually harass women?” It took three years to bring him to justice.

Read the book to learn additional details, and about lots of other legal fights in which Allred engaged in her decades-long career.

The Playbook

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The Book of the Week is “The Playbook, A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War” by James Shapiro, published in 2024.

In the 1930’s, American president FDR implemented programs to help the unemployed during the Great Depression. One was the Works Progress Administration, a sub-program of which, Federal Theater (hereinafter referred to as “FT”), put thousands of people to work. However, there were numerous complications every time the group wanted to put on a play, because there were a dozen unions with whom to negotiate.

FT produced thought-provoking shows that starkly portrayed the dangers and immorality of fascism, totalitarianism, slavery, racism, etc. It risked having its funding cut for its political correctness. In autumn 1936, FT was able to stage the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here because MGM had decided not to make a movie of it.

FT opened the inflammatory play in eighteen big cities across America. In Seattle the cast was inter-racial. New York City performed the play in Yiddish. The traveling version lasted 133 performances. Fortunately, audiences interpreted the play all different ways politically.

In September 1937, FDR signed affordable-housing (what activists for the downtrodden would call “gentrification”) legislation that was diluted due to fears of:

  • government competition with the private sector;
  • over-regulation;
  • budgetary excesses;
  • and Southern states’ getting short shrift because they were more rural than urban.

In response to the above, in 1938, FT staged One Third of a Nation. That theatrical production demonstrated how stakeholders treated America’s slums, which accounted for where one third of the nation’s population resided, according to FDR, as of early 1937.

The movie version was Hollywoodized– its funders were purchasers of distressed assets and profiteers. They made it a story about poor whites with a romantic subplot involving a “kindly capitalist” (the absentee landlord, or in the real world– a slumlord). A suicidal arsonist prompted the landlord to rebuild the place with trees and a playground. Everyone lived happily ever after.

Anyway, FT’s most vicious enemy turned out to be Martin Dies, a U.S. Congressman from eastern Texas, first elected in 1930. He had the KKK mentality, with xenophobia and misogyny thrown in. In 1935, he got himself on the Rules Committee, the most powerful committee in the House.

Dies also fast-tracked his power accumulation with his endless persistence. In 1938, he finally got himself appointed the head of a special committee that investigated a hot-button political issue; this, by chance, through teaming up with the exact right person who could help him– Samuel Dickstein, a Congressman from New York City who was equally driven to amass power and attention. They secretly allied with vice president John Nance Garner, who was on their side.

By spring 1938, their committee was claiming it was trying to root out subversives, Fascists and Communists, and prevent violence at Nazi rallies in America’s streets. But they had questioned a politically active Nazi who stayed right under their noses, and they failed to investigate him further!

Their real motive was to execute a smear campaign against FDR himself, in addition to his New Deal, and unions. So FT became an easy target, too. Ironically, “He [Dies] envisioned the hearings touring nationally, moving from city to city, beginning on the West coast and ending back East.”

One of Dies’ star investigators, Hazel Huffman, ignorantly equated Progressivism, racial integration, anti-capitalism and anti-fascism with Communism in her testimony. She recited verbatim lines from the FT’s scripts, out of context as evidence of Communist propaganda. Dies backed her up. They were so entertaining– newspapers, magazines and radio broadcasters presented her nasty, biased utterances about the FT, as fact. Dies realized he needed to keeping directing fresh accusations at FT and the WPA to keep the media in his back pocket.

Read the book to learn yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun, in terms of demagogues who use age-old propaganda techniques to amass sufficient power to commit crimes, oppress their fellow citizens, and spread hatred far and wide with total impunity.

No Way But to Fight

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The Book of the Week is “No Way But to Fight, George Foreman and the Business of Boxing” by Andrew R.M. Smith, published in 2020.

Born in 1949 in the Houston, Texas area, Foreman grew up in poverty in a large family. His future looked dim, as his schooling had been scant and his leisure activity had consisted of mugging people on the streets in the middle of the night.

Beginning in the mid-1960’s, president LBJ’s federal job-training program, called the Job Corps, arguably saved Foreman’s life. Various mentors who had acquired diverse life experiences- military veterans, counselors, coaches and teachers– supervised about two thousand troubled teens. Foreman learned about boxing, and won the first tournament he fought, in January 1967.

Foreman’s coach got him excused from the military draft for an undisclosed reason. As is well known, rival boxer Muhammad Ali became religious and resisted the draft. Through the decades, compulsory military service hindered plenty of careers of professional athletes, but they (Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Roger Staubach, to name four) didn’t make a public issue of it. The government wanted to punish Ali on behalf of those athletes– regardless of his ethnicity– because it was unfair to them, that Ali could continue to develop his career while their lives were disrupted or put at risk.

Ali obviously turned this into a civil rights issue, but other people considered him to be “cheating” as he was getting an unfair advantage over his competition. It is interesting to see how, through the decades, the conversation has shifted on how some Americans define “cheating” in professional sports.

Performance-enhancing drugs (regulated in international competitions but not terribly strictly in American professional sports) have quietly disappeared from the discussion in the United States, as a million conspirators have pushed gender-issues to the forefront– as the next form of cheating. That just shows how easily human beings can be brainwashed by propaganda!

Anyway, yet another turning point in Foreman’s career, occurred at the dawn of the 1970’s, when he met Dick Sadler. The boxing promoter was a rare bird– did business on a handshake and wasn’t as greedy as his competition.

Boxing through the 1970’s was a complicated business, considering all the stakeholders involved: the fighters themselves, their entourages, event-venues, event-broadcasting outlets, the various professional groups that organized the matches, and the political entities that regulated and taxed the aforementioned.

In the early years of his career as an amateur, Foreman was criticized for choosing to fight easy opponents. In March 1974, he was also labeled unpatriotic for scheduling a match outside the United States (in Venezuela), even after his tax-avoidance and financial-related divorce troubles had ended. The international media stories arising from that fight, smacked of the poor diplomatic relationship between America and Venezuela (for oil-related reasons).

Read the book to learn much more about the boxers of Foreman’s generation who began their careers in the 1960’s, the history of the industry through the 1990’s, and Foreman’s careers.

American Shield

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The Book of the Week is “American Shield, The Immigrant Sergeant Who Defended Democracy” by Aquilino Gonell and Susan Shapiro, published in 2023.

Born around 1980, Gonell spent his early childhood in the Dominican Republic. When he was twelve, he moved to Brooklyn in New York State. In the late 1990’s, the author’s “green card” allowed him to join the U.S. Army Reserve while also attending college at Long Island University. He had a choice to join the military full-time. But part-time, he could eventually afford a higher education.

That just shows how desperate the U.S government is to get people to join its military, absent a draft. It is taking non-citizens! People who are so grateful to be living in America are more willing to risk their lives, and are willing to work harder and longer than people born here. And, in the event of war, American leadership wouldn’t be as aggrieved at losing fighters whom they don’t actually consider their own, anyway.

Through centuries of wars in the world, other countries have practiced variations on military recruitment methods. They’ve hired mercenaries, but those soldiers are fighting for the money and ego satisfaction. It’s a challenge for them to survive. They feel no obligation to anyone. In past wars, Britain has conscripted soldiers from its colonies in Africa, and India– forget the compensation.

Anyway, the author served in Iraq, and was a Capitol police officer on January 6, 2021, by which time he was a U.S. citizen. He didn’t know he’d be risking his life during what should have been a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next. Yet 140 officers sustained serious injuries to their heads, limbs, backs, internal organs (from bear and pepper spray)– as though they were wounded in a war.

Gonell described in detail: “…fellow officers brazenly beaten with pipes, sticks, and rocks by rioters chanting ‘Fight for Trump’ and ‘USA! USA!’ Trump banners outnumbered American flags, and for a second I froze in fear. I’d seen this kind of unbridled rage in Iraq when the base was under attack, and I knew this was bad.” Gonell himself sustained serious injuries that would plague him the rest of his life.

Americans like to think they don’t live under a dictatorship, but their thinking has changed. Before, during and after the insurrection, Fox News was spouting smears and lies, such as– Antifa plotted the agitation at the Capitol. Very few GOP leaders at that time had the courage to actually condemn the violence. There are still too many people who owe their jobs to the major influencer of the violence to kick him out of office, even though he’s now senile!

AND, theoretically, the American president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, has ultimate authority to decide on military deployment. However, if the president has sole control over the military and it obeys only him, is loyal only to him, including in connection with all top-secret foreign policy matters– THE PRESIDENT IS A DICTATOR.

Be that as it may, Gonell bravely appeared on talk shows to reveal the truth about the Capitol riot, even though he and his family feared doxing and death threats. He felt that a firearm would help him defend his family in his private home, and “The paperwork and background check only took fifteen minutes, and I walked out with a new Glock in its black case.” He mentioned that he had PTSD while he was in Iraq, but apparently, in the United States, traumatized ex-military members can acquire firearms in no time, with no pertinent questions asked.

Read the book to learn much more about Gonell’s life and times. A major change in the American regime will be announced during a slow-news week, so that its messaging will have maximum impact, and the media can make maximum money. Meanwhile, here’s a ditty on the current state of affairs.

STUCK WITH AI

sung to the tune of “Stayin’ Alive” with apologies to the Bee Gees, their estates, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Well, it’s the same old DRECK on the idiot box.

Old clips and deepfakes fill airtime on Fox.

Smearing loud, inciting a storm,

Musk and Trump tooting his horn.

It’s far Right, it’s a sad day.

It’s his way or THE highway.

It’s hard for some to understand,

how the brainWASHing got out of hand.

Whether you’re innocent or guilty as sin,

we’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

See criminals walking and Big Tech stalking.

We’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with A-I-I-I-I.

Oh, criminals walk…

Well, the GOP’s low, and on power they’re high,

and democracy’s crumbling before our eyes.

Job security at an all-time low.

A lying senile leader causing more woe.

It’s far Right. It’s their way.

Fourth Amendment is in shreds today.

It’s hard for some to understand,

how the brainWASHing got out of hand.

Whether you’re innocent or guilty as sin,

we’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

See criminals walking and Big Tech stalking.

We’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with A-I-I-I-I.

Vance needs to step up. Somebody help him. Somebody help him, yeah.

Vance needs to step up. Somebody help him, yeah. Stuck with AI.

Well, it’ the same old DRECK on the idiot box.

Old clips and deepfakes fill airtime on Fox.

Smearing loud, inciting a storm,

Musk and Trump tooting his horn.

It’s far Right, it’s a sad day.

It’s his way or THE highway.

It’s hard for some to understand,

how the brainWASHing got out of hand.

Whether you’re innocent or guilty as sin,

we’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

See criminals walking and Big Tech stalking.

We’re stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with AI, stuck with AI.

new-normal police-state, stuck with A-I-I-I-I. Argh.

Vance needs to step up. Somebody help him. Somebody help him, yeah.

Vance needs to step up. Somebody help him, yeah. We’re stuck with AI…

Evil Geniuses

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The Book of the Week is “Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, A Recent History” by Kurt Andersen, published in 2020. In this large, redundant volume, the author described how wealth inequality in the United States has been increasing at an alarming rate in the last forty years, as evil geniuses– economic royalists and self-made empire-builders (who take advantage of existing resources and infrastructure)– have rigged the system to compound their spoils and re-distribute it among themselves in a self-serving cycle.

Lots of research has shown that financial inequality in society actually hinders economic growth in developed nations. In connection therewith, in 2014, the OECD conducted a United States study that showed a 20% slowdown in economic growth since the 1980’s.

The author argued that the year 1980 was the turning point at which America’s hegemony started to decline. Both the Republican and Democratic parties’ elitists (other evil geniuses in addition to the above-mentioned) actually hurt America’s ability to remain economically dominant in the world. They brainwashed a significant number of ordinary Americans into:

  • believing that government is the enemy;
  • agreeing to tax cuts for the rich (also called “trickle down” economics);
  • favoring excessive deregulation; and
  • bashing unions

because such actions would make everyone wealthy!

The author cited ample evidence that the above actions do NOT make everyone wealthy.

The author contended that conservative Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater paved the way for Ronald Reagan’s wrong-headed economic agenda (described above).

Politics cannot be divorced from economics. This is a simple idea that has been hardly ever EXPLICITLY SAID in historical, political and economic literature read by ordinary Americans, through centuries. The author calls this the “political economy” and former president Bill Clinton had the line, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Politics involves the making, monitoring, changing, and enforcing of society’s laws. The evil geniuses in the legal field who helped perpetrate the insidious brainwashing of the American masses, actually conveyed the following attitude in writing and speaking:

“So if you happen to think it’s a good idea for judicial decisions to also consider fairness or moral justice, or other values or versions of social happiness that can’t be reduced to simple metrics of efficiency,

Law and Economics [a body of legal theory from Robert Bork and his fellow Chicago School libertarians] says you’re a fool.”

That is how the 1980’s saw the American legal system start to focus on efficiency– favoring profiteers. The author argued that old men who are resistant to change are the conspirators of the current state of affairs. Well, SOMEone’s got to be oppressed.

Another indication that Americans’ attitude was becoming even more inclined toward rule-breaking greed and showing off wealth, could be heard in a 1980’s SUV TV commercial, which featured a visual of a white, 40ish male driving. The voice-over says, “It doesn’t just say you’ve arrived; it says you got there any way you darn well pleased.”

The author cited evidence that taxing the rich would be the largest factor in more evenly distributing wealth. The first Trump administration passed a tax cut for the rich that gave rise to the “…largest percentage reduction in tax revenues of any developed country on earth.” This was BEFORE COVID. And “…the federal debt increased by $1.5 trillion more than it had in Obama’s final three years.”

Nonetheless, the most hurtful president ever was George W. Bush, whose unconscionable greed and unmitigated hubris led to the crashing of the American economy and the commencement of two wars that enriched him and his cronies.

LBJ and Nixon were two other war-criminal presidents. Their war policies, too, wasted an excessive amount of taxpayer dollars on needless deaths and ruined lives. At the same time, they tried not to foul their own nest. They attempted to maintain this country’s economic dominance in the world, and salve their own consciences by funding domestic social programs. LBJ did some profiteering, but not nearly as much as Trump.

Trump is an angry, vengeful old president who, at the end of his career, is hurting not only his own political party, but also ordinary Americans. His excessive financial criminality has incalculably hurt society as a whole.

In 2018, Trump said NAFTA was the “worst trade deal ever made.” But in 2025, after all his bluster, the trade deals he’s going to make with Mexico and Canada, are going to be largely similar to NAFTA’s, all over again! And through his spokespeople who draft the words spoken by his deepfake image, he will take full credit for “great, great trade deals.”

His threats are causing a panic that certain sectors of the American economy will crash. Even the threat of a soft economy will deter some illegal immigrants from coming to this country. Given financial cycles, it is likely that some people will be hurting financially in the next few years. Trump is using a scorched earth strategy on his way out of office in order to be able to brag that HE reduced the number of illegal immigrants who are coming here. He will brainwash his base into believing that the economic downturn was all Biden’s fault!

Anyway, the author also commented that the internet changed American culture in accelerating the automation of the exchange of information, obsolescing a humungous number of jobs. Machine-learning is also making the job situation even worse. It could be said that the internet is the “new television” for the Millennial and Z Generations. However, there are major differences in the ways television changed American culture, and the ways the internet has changed it.

Television was a passive entertainment / infotainment / education source that, for most Americans, was consumed at home only, in one’s leisure time; perhaps on average, most students and workers (there were many more of those then than now) watched three to four hours a day, at no extra charge (except for electricity)– for the lifespan of the set. Then came recording of shows, but also cable TV– whose costs are many times higher for shows and sports games that used to be free.

The internet is an interactive source, and can be accessed globally, 24/7. So the younger generations are wasting so, so, so much more time obsessing over politics, than did the older generations. People have been bamboozled into paying big bucks to purchase electronic toys on which to subscribe to the internet, for which they have to pay even more!

So the amounts of time and money most Americans are spending on the internet are infinitely higher than that of television (and movies, and reading books, magazines, and newspapers). The early years of the internet (up to the single-digit 2000’s) brought emotional comfort to Americans. They flocked to websites that featured relatable, entertaining user-contributions with few or no ads that interrupted their viewing pleasure.

Once the entrepreneurial dot-commers mastered monetization and propagandizing, users became victims of their mind-control techniques. Arguably, the cultural transition from television to the internet has been economically and psychologically regressive for most Americans.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the depressing developments in politics, economics and culture that will eventually lead to the collapse of American civilization.