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Comment by sam-cop-vimes | Hacker News Reader

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Too bad the US is not a democracy.

It's interesting to think about how much money is spent on advertising every election cycle, and how much that influences the outcome of the election.

I'd be curious to see analysis of election spend vs outcomes. Bloomberg's failed run comes to mind though...

It is, though.

> What baffles me is why that many Americans hate diversity to have elected a charlatan to the highest office in their land.

It didn't come from nowhere. It's the result of 50 years of targeted and largely unchallenged propaganda funded by the owning class to convince workers to vote against their own interests. It's no coincidence that right-wing billionaires who profit from these policies own all of our social media and most of our journalism institutions. It's been a decades-long, generational coordinated effort to end democracy in America and convert us to a Russian- and Chinese-style oligarchy, and they've finally pulled it off.

Propaganda is telling Americans for 4 years that their president is healthy, brilliant, and sharp, while they themselves see a fading grandpa who can't function on his own. Which leads people to not trust anything else the same media tells them. And then they start wondering about who actually is the president... Is it Jill or someone whose name they don't even recognize? And they get real angry at being taken for a fool, and vote accordingly. The last election was lost by the Dems rather than won by Trump.

This article is yet another example of how this happens.

One common phrase is "cutting off your nose to spite your face", which almost everybody thinks is a bad idea, but here we are anyway.

I think the current president is also a fading grandpa who is showing signs of mental decline.

Do you think he is healthy, brilliant and sharp?

I agree. Most (though not all!) Dems serve as tools of the owning class. That's the "largely unchallenged" part of my post, Dems are paid to be an ineffective opposition. The owning class circles the wagons when a real opposition movement (DSA, BDS, BLM, OWS) starts to poke its head up, and you see Dems, Reps, and the billionaire-owned media all working together to keep it down.

Hear, hear.

Folks on places like HN should also realize that the broader US is not as liberal as the news and internet would make you think. The people who comment and debate online tend to be on the more extreme ends of both sides.

The rest of us (wisely or not) feel like it's typically not worth the energy to get involved.

Until it is.

And yet, the words that come out of Trump's mouth show significant mental decline, but he's given a pass because the words are spoken somewhat energetically, sometimes.

Did you miss the news stories about the Clinton Foundation, or Hunter Biden’s art sales, Ukrainian job fiasco, etc?

There is never a corruption-free choice on the ballot.

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