SATURDAY MORNING CONFUSION ABOUT TRUMP:

If there ever was...or is... confusion about what other people think about the United States of America... then this 'looooong' letter will put it all into "Perspective!" (God, I love that word!) 

- From Quora!

Q: We all know the USA is the greatest country on Earth & no other country comes even close, let alone be comparable to the USA... but still... would Americans be willing to allow Canada to become a part of the USA... if the Canadian people wanted it?

***

A: (By S.D. Hargreaves!) I tried really, really hard to pretend I didn’t see or read this incredibly offensive, delusional and stupid question, ...but there was no unreading it, no unseeing it 

Even if it’s just a troll, I feel the need to answer these kinds of stupid questions, just so Americans reading it know that Canadians have a backbone and we refuse to be bullied. 

You don’t have to like Canadians! 

But you will respect Canadians! 

***

I’d like to know who exactly ‘we’ is? 

I’d also like to know who calls the USA the greatest country on earth (besides overly loud, arrogant Americans) because from what I’ve seen, every other country on the face of the earth begs to differ! 

Let’s call out the ‘we’ for who they really are in this case...  MAGA! (And the remaining Americans who actually believe this type of utter bullshit!) 

You see, if you actually did live in the greatest country on earth, you wouldn’t feel compelled to run around arrogantly proclaiming it to everyone who will listen... because they would already know that you are! 

***

Not once, in my entire 50 years on this planet, have I ever thought of the U.S. as great. 

"It sounds to me like there are a whole lot of Americans on Quora trying to convince themselves that their country is anything but the horrific, morally rotten, dystopian hellscape it's becoming under the dick-tatorship of the felon, Donald J. fucking Trump."

What does it say about the MAGA morons who elected a vile, morally bankrupt, serial lying, racist, rapist, two-bit grifter and multiple-time convicted felon, Trump, as their president? 

It says you believe in the same ‘ideals’ as him, and you celebrate it!

You’re nothing more than an evil, twisted cult, comprised of sociopaths and sycophants, where idiocy and ignorance reign supreme. 

You mirror your sick president’s morally reprehensible qualities and beliefs... and vice versa! 

When anyone calls you out on it, you respond by blaming everyone else and resorting to bullying tactics. 

There is nothing remarkable about that! (You’re spineless cowards!) 

MAGA [including the pimple on the ass of humanity, Trump] should be ashamed of themselves... but you’d have to have a conscience to feel shame! 

Do the other half of Americans, who don’t support Trump and his authoritarian regime, need to lynch him and all the other republicans for treason? (Hang him from one of his new flag poles that he loves so much!) 

When will you dipshits finally see the snake-oil salesman for what he truly is? All we hear from toxic MAGA is more hateful rhetoric, more false propaganda and more pathetic denial!

There is nothing great about the U.S. right now! 

It’s a predatory country... deeply divided by hate, derision, intolerance, racism and corruption!

Your demented, orange, grease-painted clown of a president - and MAGA as a whole - is a plague on Americans who don’t support or condone his evil actions, policies, and his desire to "spread the faith...!" 

And that’s the crux of the matter for Canadians!

"Your commander and thief just had to go and drag Canada into this clusterfuck by stabbing us in the back and entering into an illegal trade war with us... designed to weaken our economy and leave us vulnerable to further attacks!" 

Trump’s baseless slandering of Canada doesn’t project strength; it makes him look weak and desperate. 

The U.S. has managed to make enemies out of your peaceful, quiet, unassuming neighbours... and former allies! 

And for what? 

What is your justification? 

It’s pure jealousy and resentment! 

Jealousy that Canada actually is a great country... and is generally loved and well-regarded by other countries around the world! 

Resentment that even though we share a continent, it’s Canadians who are consistently enjoying a better quality of life! (Whereas Canada routinely ranks among the top ten countries to live in... the U.S. doesn't even crack the top twenty on a good year!) 

Kind of delivers a death punch to the U.S. notion of being the greatest country on earth... eh? 

These are tangible facts, not the fabricated numbers, polls, studies and opinions that the Trump administration jams down your throats... meaning he couldn’t give a rat's ass if you choke on his constant barrage of bargain bin lies!

MAGA has been conned, brainwashed and gaslit by a fraud with a room temperature I.Q. (72?)

What truly boggles the mind is that you’re all proud of it! (A gleeful group of legitimately clueless idiots, half-wits and morons who would jump off a cliff if Trump told them to!) 

I don’t speak for all Canadians, but this Canadian would be extremely happy to shove all you MAGA assholes off a cliff. 

That’s the very least that you deserve! 

You should have left Canada out of your bullshit... we don’t take kindly to your disrespect and various threats against our sovereignty. 

Despite what your superiority complex would have you believe... Canada doesn’t answer to the U.S. 

We owe you nothing... You don’t subsidize us in any way, shape, or form... we don’t need your ‘protection’ ...we don’t want to be like you, we don’t want to be associated with you... and we damn sure don’t want to join you! 

Take your 51st state delusions and shove them up your ass! 

The spread of the filthy MAGA plague stops abruptly at the northern border! 

All of you retarded red-hat Nazi’s are not welcome in Canada! Step one foot in our country in an aggressive manner ...and you’ll immediately regret it! 

In other words... fuck off! 

Having said all of this, there are positive takeaways for Canada, one of which is that Canada has been forced to search for alternative, more trustworthy trade relationships around the world, thereby diminishing our reliance on the U.S. 

Another being the uniting of Canadians... and a renewed, fierce sense of patriotism in the face of the external threat posed by the U.S. 

‘Elbows Up’ and ‘Canada is not for sale’ movements are alive and gaining ever more strength all across Canada!

Our boycott of U.S. goods and travel to the U.S., [which are things that contribute to the U.S. economy] has cost your country billions so far... and it will cost you billions more! 

Canadians are realizing we don’t always have to be friendly and polite... we can be angry if we want, and we can play dirty if needed!

We can use diversionary tactics against the U.S. with much more success than you, because the U.S. is run by dangerously stupid, wildly inexperienced, disgraced TV personalities, traitors, douchebags and certifiable lunatics! (For example, Jewish space lasers and cyborg Biden clones that don’t exist!) 

Nobody but those dipshits is going to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America... wind turbine noise doesn’t cause cancer... and injecting yourself with bleach doesn’t cure Covid! 

Unfortunately, the majority of you lunatics are also anti-vaccers... but then again... if ya gotta "thin the herd" ...this is a good way to do it!

MAGA is worse than scientologists... and they're batshit crazy!

I could write a book just on the topic of how the U.S. is not great... filled with truth, fun facts, actual history and pictures... but for now... I’ll answer the odd, ignorant question such as this one, because let’s face it, bashing MAGA Americans is not only cathartic... it’s fun! 

I’m tired of Quora’s hypocrisy in deleting my answers and comments made in response to these questions, while not only allowing the original question to remain posted... but also allowing dozens of new, similar questions to be posted daily, which I find maddening! 

I’m sure I’m not the only Canadian experiencing this, so I encourage you to do the same as I am! 

MAGA, trolls... Russian bots... it matters not to me... delete them all! 

I’m not asking you... or telling you to do so... I'm strictly encouraging you to do so... with all due respect and unwavering support.

S.D. Hargreaves:

The Impolite Canadian!

(P.S. I read Quora a lot... and I have also come to the conclusion that a significant percentage of the American population... are complete and utter idiots! -ed.)

Anyone in MAGA must be two people... because no one person could be that stupid!!!!

THIS... is why the United States got it wrong!

The answer is simple folks...!

As it currently stands, the Government of the good ol' U.S. of A. is a "triumvirate" of three elements... or branches:

A government consisting of a (1) Legislative Branch, and (2) Executive Branch, and a (3) Judicial branch!

￬

B U T !!!

The way they SHOULD have set it up is with:

1.  Business!          2. Government!         3. Unions!

I know it's easy being an armchair critic, kids... but it's worth a bit of thought! 

(Yes, I know all three figures are men... but those are the pictures I managed to find for these three groups... and if that's an issue for you... too bad!)

DRUMPF!

 Well kids... Drumpf hasn't even been sworn in yet... and already, he's arranged for the Government of the U.S.A. to run out of money and be shut down... less than a week before Christmas!

TO ALL YOU ASSHOLES THAT VOTED FOR "THE DONALD"  ...this is a small taste of what you have coming for the next four years... kids!!!!!

Common Sense!

 

HOW TO SOLVE THE TWO PARTY PROBLEM IN THE STATES!

 It's all very simple really..., and it's also very necessary!

This Republicans and Democrats thing with a handful of Independents is not working and something needs to be done!

The best solution is to get a bunch of billionaires together and form a third party on the Federal, State and local levels before the next election.

That's it folks, plain and simple!

(You're welcome!)

There's something rotten going on!

 Dear Friends: As an unbiased Canadian observer (and last honest broker) I have noticed more and more articles exposing the corruption of morals and common decency within the Republican party at all levels of American society.

There might not be something rotten in Denmark..., but there certainly is in the United States of America:

Guest post by R Muse:

If there was any doubt that Republicans are fascists working fervently behind the scenes to establish a one-party rule, an “incendiary” article in an ultra-right-wing publication should dispel any misconception that conservatives support America or its increasingly fragile democracy.

The right-wing publication “American Mind” is the product of the Claremont Institute that is described as “an influential conservative think tank.” A more apt description is a fascist organization intent on decimating America’s democracy and replacing it with an ultra-far-right political movement.

In fact, the “incendiary essay” mentioned above argues that “America has been destroyed by internal enemies” who “do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions and ideas that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people.” 

Of course, the essay’s author, Glenn Ellmers, is referring to what he labels as most people living in America who “are non-Americans." (NON-WHITE!) 

Ellmers is talking about anyone who opposes the GOP’s undemocratic machinations and a crusade to establish a fascist one-party rule.

As Zack Beauchamp over at Vox noted:

“Up until recently, the right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through ‘tricky changes to election law’ without a full-throated acknowledgment of what [GOP] lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips – and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.”

The essay in American Mind is openly informing Americans “what’s really going on,” and it is very telling that everything horrible many Americans were warning was in the offing with the rise of Trumpism is absolutely true.

It isn’t that Republicans started doing anything new with Trump’s rise, but everything contrary to maintaining a strong democratic society became part and parcel of the official GOP movement and its now-flagrant drive towards fascism: particularly the demonization of anything resembling opposition to the radical conservative movement.

According to Ellmers, the conservative brand doesn’t really capture what the new, fascist American right should be about. In his mind “conservatism implies preserving or protecting something already in place,” but he claims that there is next to nothing worth saving.

Echoing Trump, Ellmers writes:

“The US Constitution no longer works. What is actually required now is a recovery, or a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.” (author bold)

Ellmers doesn’t even attempt to conceal the fact that it is a “minority of citizens” who should control  and protect America from “most of America” he claims are “non-Americans or alien Americans.” And it is noteworthy that he did not mean cultural minorities; he meant Americans who support democracy. And if that MAGA minority has to destroy democracy to implement their fascist rule, then so be it. He writes:

“Our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed. It has been like this for a while—and the MAGA voters knew it.In almost every case, the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile to both liberty and virtue.”

This divisive demonization of any American who fails to support the fascism Ellmers is pontificating about is pure Trump, with valuable aid from his fascist supporters in Congress.

They have taken the “them against us” mindset to a dangerous level in claiming “real Americans must recognize the nefarious forces destroying America; the progressive, or woke, or ‘antiracist’ agenda that now corrupts our republic.” 

That is pure fascist rhetoric and while it was always subtle prior to Trump, it is now mainstream.

Prior to sending his seditious insurrectionists to overthrow the legal government on January 6, Trump implied their America’s existence was at stake saying:

“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

In 2019, Republican Senator Josh Hawley warned real Americans:

“We have come again to one of the great turning points in our national history, when the fate of our republican government is at issue.”

And in 2020, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy stated:

“Democrats want to defund, destroy, and dismantle our country.”

Creating an enemy of the people is a purely fascist machination to garner support for destroying democracy necessary to create a fascist one-party rule. Republicans in the states are doing their part by passing voter suppression legislation that has nothing whatsoever to do with election security.  In fact, Georgia’s fascist governor admitted as much on tape saying the Republican legislation disenfranchising democratic voters “has nothing to do with potential fraud, it is dealing with the mechanics of the election.”

He is right, creating an election mechanism that suppresses minority votes is not about fraud; it is ultimately about guaranteeing that one party rule will reach fruition

Many Americans were aware that the rise of Trump was a serious threat to democracy. And they knew that coupled with Republican attempts to suppress votes that did not support Trump’s aspirations to be a fascist dictator represented an existential threat to democracy.

However, until now they most likely never expected any Republican or conservative organization to openly reject democracy leading one to wonder if “most Americans” will comprehend that there really is such an existential threat to the nation’s fragile democracy that Republican fascism is no longer a conspiratorial threat because it is already here. 

P.S. Some supporters of Donald Trump had a rude awakening after realizing they were donating more money than they intended to the former president’s failed reelection campaign. The Trump campaign had been deceptively making supporters file for recurring donations rather than one-time payments, according to a report in the New York Times. (Trump has to give back $122 MILLION!)

The Conservative movement is rejecting America

 A recent essay in a prominent right-wing outlet gives an unusually clear window into the modern right’s anti-democratic worldview.

Guest Post by Zack Beauchamp:

The right-wing rebellion against American democracy is often subtle, expressing itself through tricky changes to election law without a full-throated acknowledgment of what lawmakers are actually doing. But sometimes, the mask slips — and someone in the conservative movement openly tells you what’s really going on.

One such slippage took place last week when the American Mind — a publication of the Claremont Institute, an influential conservative think tank based in California — published an incendiary essay arguing that the country has already been destroyed by internal enemies.

“Most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term,” Glenn Ellmers, the essay’s author, writes. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

These seditious citizens are opposed, according to Ellmers, by “the 75 million people who voted in the last election against the senile figurehead of a party that stands for mob violence, ruthless censorship, and racial grievances, not to mention bureaucratic despotism.”

If Trump voters and conservatives do not band together and fight “a sort of counter-revolution,” then “the victory of progressive tyranny will be assured. See you in the gulag.”

What exactly this counter-revolution entails is unclear, but Ellmers has some tips. “Learn some useful skills, stay healthy, and get strong,” he writes. “One of my favorite weightlifting coaches likes to say, ‘Strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally.’”

Ellmers’s essay has been widely discussed in American media and intellectual circles, due to its bracing honesty about the modern right’s worldview and the prominence of the outlet that published it. Claremont is an influential institution of the right; one of its publications, the Claremont Review of Books, published the notorious “Flight 93” essay arguing that the 2016 election was a choice between Trump and national extinction. (“2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die,” that essay declared in its opening line.)

In the post-Trump era, the type of hard-right politics preached in Claremont publications “is simply conservatism writ large,” as Jane Coaston writes in a Vox essay on the California right. They’ve become the intellectual organ of Trumpist conservatism — an organization whose mission looks more and more like manufacturing an intellectual justification for the GOP’s right-wing populist.

The rhetoric of national emergency and decline that you hear in Claremont publications permeates mainstream GOP rhetoric. Minutes before the January 6 assault on Capitol Hill, former President Donald Trump told his assembled supporters that “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” In a 2019 speech, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned that “we have come again to one of the great turning points in our national history, when the fate of our republican government is at issue.” In a 2020 Facebook post, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy declared that “Democrats want to defund, destroy, and dismantle our country.”

As absurd as it may seem, Ellmers’s essay should be taken seriously because it makes the anti-democratic subtext of this kind of conservative discourse into clearly legible text. And it is a clear articulation of what the movement has been telling us through its actions, like Georgia’s new voting law: It sees democracy not as a principle to respect, but as a barrier to be overcome in pursuit of permanent power.

The right against “conservatism”

Inasmuch as there is a central argument in Ellmers’s piece, it is this: The label “conservative” no longer accurately captures what the American right should be about. This is because “conservatism” implies preserving or protecting something already in place, when in fact America is so hopelessly corrupted that there’s little worth saving.

“The US Constitution no longer works,” Ellmers writes. “What is actually required now is a recovery, or even a refounding, of America as it was long and originally understood but which now exists only in the hearts and minds of a minority of citizens.”

Many traditional conservatives, in his mind, are blind to this fact. Trump’s victory represented the true people rising up against an establishment that was unwilling to openly state how precarious the country’s situation is:

The great majority of establishment conservatives who were alarmed and repelled by Trump’s rough manner and disregard for “norms” are almost totally clueless about a basic fact: Our norms are now hopelessly corrupt and need to be destroyed. It has been like this for a while—and the MAGA voters knew it, while most of the policy wonks and magazine scribblers did not… and still don’t. In almost every case, the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile to both liberty and virtue. On top of that, the mainline churches, universities, popular culture, and the corporate world are rotten to the core. What exactly are we trying to conserve?

Trump’s main failing, on Ellmers’s telling, is not that he was destructive — but that he was too ignorant and poorly advised to attack the right targets.

“As if coming upon a man convulsing from an obvious poison, Trump at least attempted in his own inelegant way to expel the toxin,” Ellmers writes. “By contrast, the conservative establishment, or much of it, has been unwilling to recognize that our body politic is dying from these noxious ‘norms.’”

Ellmers is not all that interested in the mechanisms of how and why the country has become so broken. He doesn’t really explain in any detail the nature of the nefarious forces that have polluted most American minds; he rails against “the progressive, or woke, or ‘antiracist’ agenda that now corrupts our republic” and takes it as a given that his audience will agree that this threat is apocalyptic.

He is more interested, instead, in rallying the forces of Real America against enemies he describes in strikingly dehumanizing terms.

“If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity, then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman,” Ellmers writes. “Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.”

Ellmers is hardly the only person on the right to see the opposition in a starkly negative light. A February poll found that a solid majority of Republicans, 57 percent, preferred to describe Democrats as “enemies” rather than as the “political opposition.” One of the central attitudes underpinning democracy — that sometimes the other side wins, and that’s okay — is buckling on the right.

“Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when reason fails,” Ellmers writes. “We must fervently hope that things will change before they become violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.”

Freedom against democracy

If the extremism of Ellmers’s essay strikes you as similar to what you’ve heard from authoritarian political movements of the past, you’re not alone.

John Ganz, a perceptive critic of American conservatism, recently wrote that Ellmers’s essay should properly be termed “fascist.” Excommunicating a large percentage of the population from the body politic, describing once-idyllic society hopelessly corrupted by the forces of change, describing one’s enemies as animals or diseases, invoking the threat of physical force in a political context — these are all historically hallmarks of fascist rhetoric.

This analysis holds despite the fact that Ellmers speaks in a democratic idiom, portraying himself as a defender of the American democratic tradition against its enemies. Ganz notes that calls to restore “freedom,” “liberty,” and even “democracy” were used by fascist intellectuals and movements in interwar Germany, France, and Italy because they were culturally powerful — a way of recruiting the people to one’s way of thinking by speaking their language.

“In the US context it also makes sense that the reactionary mind would inevitably mythologize a ‘truer’ version of our republican and democratic traditions as the author does in this piece, because those are the basic symbols of our political tradition,” he writes. “In the French context, many fascist and para-fascist groups declared fealty to the ‘republican’ tradition, which is as nearly predominant in that country as it is in our own.”

One does not need to go to Europe to see political oppression defended in democratic terms. In 1963, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered an inaugural address in Montgomery, casting the South’s long tradition of oppression of African Americans as integral to southern freedom:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom- loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Ellmers’s essay is in line with this tradition, identifying freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves. Those outside of it, either because they come from the wrong background or think the wrong way, have no just claim on our political system. When they wield power, it is by definition oppression.

In some ways, this is the central animating idea of the broader conservative movement in America. Ellmers is a radical who sees himself as opposed to “establishment” conservatism, but in reality, many on the broader right share a more attenuated version of his worldview — and pursue the disempowerment of their political opponents.

The implications of Ellmers’s worldview are chilling. In a January 2020 essay, he predicted — more in sorrow than in anger, of course — that a civil war is coming.

Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, and the attendant talk of a coalition of minorities and young voters creating a “permanent Democratic majority,” helped spread anxieties about declining electoral power on the political right. After the 2010 midterm elections, which swept Republicans into power in statehouses across the country, they acted — drawing gerrymandered maps and passing laws, like voter ID, seemingly designed to suppress Democratic-leaning constituencies.

The state-level Republican lawmakers were often quite honest about their aim of locking Democrats out of office.

“I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” former North Carolina Rep. David Lewis, who chaired the state’s recent redistricting committee, once said. “So I drew this map in a way to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

The January 6 attack on the Capitol was a pure expression of Ellmers-ism, a violent lashing out against a system that conservatives believe to be fraudulent and corrupt. The new round of voter suppression bills represents the more subtle 2010 variant of Republican anti-democratic attitudes: that the system can be rigged such that the Democratic threat is locked out of power for good.

There are at least eight proposals from Republican lawmakers in state legislatures around the country to seize partisan control over electoral administration. One of the most egregious examples, in Georgia, was passed into law last week. More broadly, there are over 250 state bills under consideration that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.

That these proposals are justified in the language of “restoring confidence” in elections and “preventing fraud” does not make them actually defensible in democratic terms — anymore than Ellmers’s thinly-veiled pining for a civil war is “democratic” because he wants to wage it in defence of a warped conception of liberty.

In a sense, Ellmers is right that America’s political system no longer works. He’s just wrong about who broke it — and why.