I've seen people mention elsewhere that the next president is already decided, and all this is just to distract the masses

Sometimes that might be true. Not this time though.

What we are looking at here is something brand new, something that has never happened before in American politics--at least not since 1854 when the Whig Party dissolved. No one is sure how the Republican Party pulls itself together after this election. Republican elders and operatives released a document after the 2012 election that basically made the case that if the GOP was going to remain electorally viable in the coming decades they needed to do much better with two main groups: Hispanic voters and women.

It seems kinda funny now......

It just so happens that I'm currently taking a class at my university taught by one of our Congressmen. He does this thing where he flies back from DC on Monday and he teaches a college course in the morning and then in the afternoon does a tour of all the local media and local government offices--you know, stuff like talking to the local NPR and PBS stations, checking in with his district, that sort of thing. Anyway, if I have learned anything from going to his lectures every week its that the Washington elite are if anything WAY MORE SCARED than any of us. It seems that none of them have any idea what's going on, and they've all been completely wrong, and at this point they're all in emergency crash landing mode.

And that is the truth. No conspiracies, no spin, no machiavellian tactics. Our country really is as off the rails as it seems.

...So, you know, good luck sleeping tonight.

Today I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine who has been going to grad school in Halifax, Nova Scotia (Canada). She told me that nearly everyone she meets asks her to explain Trump.

Turned out, a lot of the questions people were asking her were about stuff we've been discussing in this thread. Just more proof that the entire world is as freaked out about this as we are...

Also, there's a new documentary series on Netflix (from CNN) about the sixties. It's been interesting and kind of horrifying. There are a lot of similarities between what's happening now and the turbulence of the sixties...

There are a lot of similarities in terms of cultural conflict. In the sixties, and today, American society was starkly divided along cultural lines as people who had power tried to protect it and people without power fought to get equal opportunities. In many ways, movements like Black Lives Matter are a direct continuation of the civil rights movement--including but not limited to the fact that BLM activists (and other left activist movements, such as Occupy, Democracy Spring, etc.) are being trained and advised by elders from Civil Rights Movement. So from an activist, grass-roots perspective there is direct continuity from the things that really began in the 60s--civil rights for racial and ethnic minorities, the beginning of gender equality, the beginning of the fight for LGBTQA+ rights--and the movements being carried out today, which are...well, basically all the exact same thing.

In the 60s there were terrible incidences of violence motivated by racism, and of racists winning and maintaining political power. This was why the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was put into law.

The same Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in 2013. Which in turn allowed places like Maricopa County, Arizona--Arizona being a state with a long history of electoral violations, racism, and disenfranchisement--to change their election rules without getting permission from the federal government. Which in turn led to Maricopa County closing over half their polling stations, which meant a lot of people (mostly poor people and minorities) were not able to vote. And when I say a lot, I mean millions. The county is being investigated by the Justice Department.

Then there's the fact that Vietnam began as a proxy war with Russia before dissolving into an inescapable quagmire of doom from which there was no escape. And JFK knew it would turn out exactly like that, but then he was assaisinated and LBJ loved the military and truly believed them when they told him they could "import democracy" through force. Which was exactly the rationale for invading Iraq which destabilized the entire region, dissolved into an inescapable quagmire of doom and then spread to Syria which then became kind of a proxy war with Russia. See, you can't "import" democracy. That has never worked in the history of time and it's not going to start working any time soon. But people just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Mostly, I think it comes down to a long-awaited moment of conflict between the racists in American society and everyone else. The question is, can the "everyone else" pull it together enough to actually win this fight?

Personally, I think we can. But it'll be hard...

✯I don't know anything with certainty,

A lot of what I know are things I've learned recently, just trying to figure out what's happening now. Once you start pulling threads, you end up in a lot of corners of history that you weren't expecting.

Like the fact that one of Trump's mentors was one of Joseph McCarthy's closest aides. Senator McCarthy was a fearmonger and a demagogue, just like Trump. He was also infamous for waging war on the press, just like Trump. And he also went down in history as one of the worst monsters to ever rise in American politics, just as Trump inevitably will.