Declining America
tbray.org
tbray.org
Whether you agree or disagree with non-US citizens coming to America to engage in the advancement of technology, the important thing is to have discourse on the topic. That is in line with aims and goals of this site. This story is much less politics and much more about the impact of social policy on technologists.
As a non-US citizen myself but who has lived there for some time, I find that having and expressing an opinion on things like this is difficult due to the danger of such retaliation mentioned during border crossings and my daily life.
First watching the tearing up of the societal contract in the US over the past decades turned this into a country that feels like it is on the brink of a collapse. No longer can regular Americans rely that working hard will give them a good or even decent life. This means intense pressures are at work with some very desperate people, bringing out the ugliest (but also sometimes the most beautiful) bits of humanity, all while you have richer folks at the top who act like how their country operates at large is none of their business as long as there is a cut in it for them. Why should I care about the US if you guys don't even care about it yourselves?
Second the US is highly unreliable. Laws, democracy, human rights, treaties, consumer rights — all are treated as negotiable, optional things that you use against your enemies and ignore when it affects your own. With enough money everything can be bent around. There are no principles at work that one could rely on and that is no foundation to build a life on unless you are literally ready to join the ranks of people acting like cartoon villains — something only people do who have no self-respect for their limited time on earth.
Yeah, I don't see myself even visiting the US in my lifetime.
Hehe, reminds me about a video I saw some years ago.
They asked ordinary citizens what a reasonable distribution of wealth should be. Like the share of overall wealth owned by the richest 10% (or 1% or whatever), vs wealth owned by the rest of the population. Let's call this ratio "X".
Then those citizens were asked what they thought the wealth distribution was actually like (let's call that "Y"). No surprise: people thought wealth was much more UNevenly distributed than it should be.
Then they showed what the distribution was like in reality (let's call that "Z"): way more extreme.
So, wealth distributed way more uneven than people thought, and that in turn way more uneven than what people thought it should be.
That alone explains a lot of what's wrong with the US imho: broken/corrupt politics, outsized influence of tech bros (including outside US), a health problem bankrupting people, people turning to drugs, a militarized police force, incarceration ratios, homeless epidemic, etc etc.
Especially in a highly developed country where total wealth is enough to have everybody live comfortably & care-free.
As opposed to some poor war-torn country where wealth is also unevenly distributed, but it's obvious and everybody knows it. And overall wealth is a lot less to begin with (so people being desperate isn't surprising).
US' downfall turning it into a banana republic, its erosion of democratic institutions, human rights etc, is a logical result from the above. I'm not expecting that to improve sadly :-(. Things will probably get worse & there will be blood in the streets.
A vouch option for Flagged submissions would be appreciated. I wonder if it used to be there but was removed.
Some sort of meta-moderation system to prevent abuse of flagging would be welcome.
It's not perfect, but it ain't nothing
this is one that would actually invite curious discussion if some people weren't clutching onto their "God Bless America (We're #1!)" pearls quite so tightly
There was a time where I was quite interested in listening to people from America talk about their fascinating and crazy sounding country, but as time goes on I find that to be much more repetitive and not insightful.
Now I'm more interested in what people from other countries have to say about America, and I find it fascinating how Americans online find this unsettling and sometimes get snippy about it really weird ways.
Sometimes I wonder what political threads on HN would be like if Americans weren't allowed to participate in them. For the people in the crowd who take things more literally in know this isn't possible, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
Would that result in more 'creative' conversation?
Maybe for a while until new patterns/tropes/memes were built up by the users that could comment on them. Maybe the issue with the political discussions that too often the people talking about them are too close to them, too immersed in them?
AFAIK, upvoting a flagged submission cancels out the flagging to some extent. I don’t know the internals of how this process works. I’ve upvoted the submission in an effort to get it unflagged (it still may not get to the front page or may rapidly drop down though).
THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR.
But also, I tire of the nationalist rhetoric wherever I see it. I'm tired of this idea that countries are anything more than a shared historical hallucination, and that we're all somehow different from one another. Or as my father often put it, "we all bleed red and we all shit brown." I never chose to be born here, and because I am sick (through no fault of my own) so called tolerant countries wouldn't have me. So I am stuck here.
Regardless, I get why you didn't come, I can't say I blame you, but I also am sick of these damn countries ruining things. Perhaps we should abandon the idea entirely and replace it with the spirit of brotherhood and respect for one's fellow human.
In an ideal world we could celebrate each other's differences. But trying to get rid of conflict by getting rid of national borders is naive. Why are the borders where they are? Generally because those are ethno-cultural boundaries. Nations that encompass multiple ethno-cultural groups tend to be somewhat unstable: for instance, Yugoslavia broke up violently, and Iraq has conflict between the Kurds and the rest.
This is not a support of nationalism (although I encourage patriotism, which is different), but "countries are [nothing] more than a shared historical hallucination" is just incorrect.
The US has been remarkably stable for a nation that encompasses multiple ethno-cultural groups. It may not continue to be so, but historically it has been a counterexample.
i’m english and i have no idea what you’re on about there mate.
are you talking about having basic tolerance for other people? that’s a pretty universal skill not exclusive to england.
> but "countries are [nothing] more than a shared historical hallucination" is just incorrect.
countries are mostly lines drawn on a map.
cultures, which i think is what you’re trying to get at in your post generally, differ everywhere to varying degrees.
dundee (where i currently am) has a different culture to glasgow, which has a different culture to edinburgh, which has a different culture to york, which has a different culture to liverpool, which has a different culture to manchester, which has a different culture to leeds leeds leeds, which has a different culture to oxford, which has a different culture to reading, which has …
the lines are imaginary.
(although yes i live on a massive island so there is a non-imaginary physical boundary where you have to get on a boat or a plane or a train to travel to here).
You'd be surprised how it's not the case in most of the world. Heck, India has a caste system that Indians have now exported to areas where they're in numbers like California. Arabs have a tribal system that makes them suspicious of anyone not from the in-group. Russian Muscovites treat all of their fellow non-Muscovite countrymen like shit.
What you listed isn't "most of the world". And the exceptions do not make a rule.
Thats the very opposite of parochialism, xenophobia, suspicion or inward societal thinking (however one wants to describe it)
Amidst the destruction of all that SHARED history, and the arbitrary Sykes-Picot jigsaw imposed on "the Arab world", falling back to more local structures is an obvious, and in the grand scheme of things, temporary, defensive mechanism.
The very fact that despite 100 years of Western imposed Sykes-Picot madness, West Asia is still an intricate mosaic of multiple groups - that shows that traditionally the Arabs are WELL CAPABLE of working with those not in their, as you put it, "in group".
The Indian caste system, aka apartheid on steroids, is a horrid example which makes your point. You should have stopped there
Though I am not an expert in Arabic history, Arab culture spreat through colonialism, had an extensive slave system, denied basic rights to religious minorities and the Islam religion feels superior to non - Islamic religion and atheism.
Many Arabs dont want to admit these problems which IMHO is the reason for their long term decline.
As evidenced by how many different Christian denominations (more than in Europe) still existed throughout West Asia, under direct Arab Muslim rule, for over a MILLENIA.
Denied basic rights? Basic rights to minority Christian, Jewish & Zoroastrian groups was ENSHRINED in the very makeup of these states. Leaders of these communities had official roles & responsibilities reserved for them.
You simply don't know what you're talking about. You're taking a modern day story about "Arabs" & "Muslims", which is predominantly the result of 100 years of subjugation & being broken up by the West (& having Western vassals & elites imposed as ruling classes), added to the need to create unsavory impressions of them amongst Western populations in order to justify that.
And you're taking this mess & overlaying it over the previous 1300 years, without a single regard for the truth. Seriously, go get a genuine history book, or talk to a history professor who knows about the Arab & Muslim world, and then curl up in embarrassment...
"Denied basic rights? Basic rights to minority Christian, Jewish & Zoroastrian groups "
Maybe you just talked to Iranian Christians, Iranian Jewish or Atheist from Arabic countries. They might give a different clue.
" 100 years of subjugation & being broken up by the West (& having Western vassals & elites imposed as ruling classes),"
That's an excuse. No Western power force the Mullah regime to be so Islamist or the Islamic state to genocide Kurdish people. It stilled happened.
"you're taking this mess & overlaying it over the previous 1300 years, without a single regard for the truth. Seriously, go get a genuine history book, or talk to a history professor who knows about the Arab & Muslim world, and then curl up in embarrassment..."
Living in Berlin the city is fueled with people escaping from Islamic States. I take their word genuine.
But thank for the insight. In my opinion you can see a declining area how to react to critism. Many Americans deny their homes problem. So you do about the problems in Islam. But you what? There is a growing secular and anti islam movement in the Arabic world. Looks some people are smarter than you.
I know by intuition the place is of course way more complicated.
It's just a growing frustration based on Wikipedia pages, the homophobia made by Muslim refugees, talking with Atheist by these areas...
I guess the fact that Islam sees itself as a purer version and successor religion of Christianity doesn't help inner self criticism.
By the way we can see the same behaviour of Americans.
I'd like to know more.
Countries are bullshit and the belief that people are that intrinsically different is silly. Go back to 1940 with that noise.
why are you misrepresenting what he says?
Culture shock is a real phenomenon.
Things don't have to be this way, we choose them to and I'm getting awful tired of people keeping making the same choices over and over again because they think an imaginary line is somehow sacrosanct.
It's all made up. Even culture.
Or even from urban to rural areas.
> It's just some old timey 1940s "we gotta keep these different cultures separated" nonsense.
That's a huge mistake right there. Those who want to keep their culture should be free to do so, as long as they don't try to force theirs on others - that's a common and traditional American value which is now being attacked by both extremist segregationists and extremist pot-melters.
> It's nationalism and racism (though it purports to be otherwise).
You should learn what these words mean and stop purporting they mean something else.
> It's all made up. Even culture.
Bro, not only culture, the entire human civilization is made up. The issue is to make it good, not bad, but you seem to be all confused about it.
Almost always. It's always the same thing. Fear of the outsiders and disdain for change. I'm not going to debate you on it, I'm just tired of hearing it.
Good luck with your revolution. :)
It's too bad so few people can say "My country, if right to be supported, if wrong to be corrected."
Do you think they are trying to do a Trump voice as a joke? I can't even tell anymore.
On Hacker News? I can. I'm surprised it got unflagged.
> As a USer, it is the letter I would advise anyone outside the US to write. It is the only rational response.
Seconded.
I'm a US citizen and fully support any person of any country that protests the Trump administration in any form.
The best thing for the States to do at this point would be to hold a Constitutional Convention and dissolve the government of the United States as unfit for any purpose, after which their citizens can decide how they wish to proceed.
The anti democratic and heavily corrup republicam goverment is product of right wing bubble. It has little to do with left.
They try a little more maybe, but are still completely insulated from and out of touch with average citizens. But they don't care because they have money and most US problems are only problems for people without money to spare.
The American left is not center. Open borders, DEI/wokeism, etc. is not a center party platform. Do you have any study that states otherwise?
Going back to the drawing board after watching some major issues break the country is how we got this constitution in the first (second) place. The founders clearly suggested this as an intentional pressure valve to avoid the terrible catastrophe that is civil war or the dissolution of the union.
When values diverge in such extreme ways (values, not politics or preferences) it is very hard to continue to see each other as fellow citizens working toward some shared future. Mix in severe inequality and a broken, corrupt justice system and there is a very real sense of impending escalation. With the failure of the judicial and legislative branches to control corruption, we might be risking everything by NOT trying to find new middle ground.
There was a pew research poll in March [0] showing half of Americans think people in the opposing political party are morally bad people, not just people with different views or priorities. People openly tell each other they are "ruining the country" over things like "should the US spend tax money helping illegal immigrants in any way" or "should trans people have the same rights as they were born with" or "should the government protect known pedophiles from consequences" or "should women have to put their life on the line carrying a rape pregnancy to full term" or "should there be investigations when protesters are shot and killed by immigration agents" or "should the president be above the law". Both sides think their take on these questions is the only reasonable one and anyone on the other side is either delusional or downright evil.
Last time values diverged until the breaking point was because a huge chunk of people were willing to die in order to keep owning other people and another huge chunk of people were willing to die to prevent it. The resulting war caused more American deaths than all the others combined. Despite this, plenty of people still proudly fly the rebel flag today.
Another continental Congress to reauthor (renegotiate?) the Union is a monumental undertaking that is extremely dangerous for the stability of the country so it shouldn't be considered lightly. Civil war is far worse though so hopefully we can collectively navigate our way back to calmer waters.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2026/03/05/in-25-countr...
But what I am questioning is if, and if so, why, you think that a reboot would somehow produce an outcome that is closer to the values you seem to align with?
I really don't think that a "New Constitution" is going to come back and be kinder in the ways you are thinking. Most of the issues you touch on are things that have benefited from a liberal minority having an outsized representation in government. The majority of the US doesn't really share your views and the people that DO care about those issues are more politically active. Assuming something as major as a new constitution would get more people involved I just don't think it would go the way you are hoping.
>Last time values diverged until the breaking point was because a huge chunk of people were willing to die in order to keep owning other people and another huge chunk of people were willing to die to prevent it. The resulting war caused more American deaths than all the others combined. Despite this, plenty of people still proudly fly the rebel flag today.
This is also a wildly uninformed mischaracterization. The huge majority of the people that died, did not do so willingly, and had no interest in either maintaining or the abolition of slavery. Most people in the South had no slaves and most people in the North were not opposed to slavery in the South.
Do you assume the average soldier in the Vietnam war had a preseeded disdain for the NVA before being told to head off into the jungle?
People openly tell each other they are "ruining the country" over things like "should the US import millions of illegal immigrants and provide for them over it's own citizens" or "should I be forced to deny biological realities around trans people" or "should the government protect known criminal illegals from consequences" or "should men have to put their life on the line for a country that hates them" or "should there be investigations when protesters are violently disrupting ICE operations" or "should we ignore SCOTUS rulings we don't like". Both sides think their take on these questions is the only reasonable one and anyone on the other side is either delusional or downright evil.
I agree that we likely need a few Constitutional amendments, but that is a far cry from dissolution.
The amendments I believe we need:
1. Ranked Pairs voting to break out of this lesser of two evils race to the bottom. Get rid of the Electoral College merely because it's straightforward rather than quibbling about out how it could work with non-plurality voting.
2. Independent executive agencies chartered by Congress. Heads of which are independent executives elected just like the President.
3. Triple the number of senators (reducing this effect of moribund "senior" senators that benfit their state due to pull). National elections run every year (we shouldn't have to wait until "midterms" to course correct, and would also diminish the stark divide between "election promises" and "results")
4. Repudiation of Citizens United, and this general nonsense that corpos possess the natural rights of individuals. (something similar might happen at the state level, as states are actually the governments that charter corpos to exist/operate in the first place)
5. Repudiation of Wickard v Filburn and followup decisions that have allowed the federal government to characterize everything as interstate commerce. The federal government should only be able to get involved when states have a disagreement.
The first two are the critical foundation. Note that the overall effect is for an individual's vote to be more than a single bit of information. The last three might not be strictly necessary, but relieve the pressure from the path dependence of where we're at.
It sounds like the point here is "all we need is an honest and earnest legislative branch" and, yes, I agree that would help us get on the right track. Similarly, a judicial branch change of heart in the same way would really help relieve the anger and hopelessness people are feeling.
If you have ideas for how to actually make either of those happen they would be worth sharing and pushing forward.
The same problem applies to picking drafters/representatives/etc for any Constitutional amendments. But I'd hope with the utter breakdown we're facing, there might be enough political will, plus amendments have to be short, plus making the issues meta enough that entrenched interests can't straightforwardly lobby loopholes into them, that maybe the barriers could be overcome.
My point is that we don't need to be talking about a wholesale dissolution of the government and rewrite of the Constitution when we can focus on some powerful meta-issues that have led us to this place. In fact I'd expect such a process to be much more beholden to the sway of corpo lobbyists as making a new system from whole cloth would have much more complexity for such things to hide.
Honestly, the worst case scenario I see is Grump becomes a lame duck after midterms, leaves office in Jan 2029, and then the entrenched Democrats go back to uninspired milquetoast business as usual.
But in countries where participation is mandatory, at least you can say that most of the (national) negatively affected people got what they voted for.
For improper "democratic" countries where elections are rigged or participation is biased towards some population sectors in a way or another, they are not really elections by the population.
I think it is deeper, that these actions were taken at the top and a sizable amount of the people sided with them, that sends the message that the US cannot be trusted long term, it has become cultural. I get that it isnt a majority of people but it is big enough that it cannot be ignored.
Not trusting the Americans was a French thing ever since De Gaulle. It just took the rest of the Europeans 50 years after his death to pick up on it.
He might not have the best domestic moves but when it comes to Geopolitics, he is all over it.
You're assuming that 1) the elections will actually occur on Nov 6, 2) the elections will be fair, and 3) that the winners of said elections would take action and actually enforce the rule of law.
I'm not confident in any of those.
Hopefully a lot of the fears don't pan out but we won't know until it gets closer.
I'm not saying that there aren't better options but both major parties are complicit in how the system is organised. The US electoral system gets ever more distorted with every minor adjustment in the hopes of swinging various seats in their favour and now it just looks ridiculous.
Germany seems to have recovered quite a lot of trust following World War 2, to provide an extreme example of bad foreign policy.
> Do you think there will be a deep national reckoning about what happened?
About half of the people I know who voted for Trump this past election have deep regrets.
Trump's second term should be the end of the Republican party. But if Bush II is an indication, the pattern was that while people gradually came around to seeing what a bad idea the Iraq War was and whatnot, they merely cooled off for a few years but then were right back at it getting fooled again a slightly different way. How much of the support for Trump was basically recycled criticism of the Iraq War (ie of the Republican establishment) ? And yet here we are now, with a nice shiny new quagmire (assuming it isn't an outright loss).
fwiw I'm a libertarian so while I actually agree with much of the criticism, it galls me even more how people can start with very individual-liberty-centric criticisms, but then somehow gleefully jump behind supporting authoritarianism when it can be their turn at the trough.
Innocent people, including children, are dead. Republicans have done irreparable harm to this country on every imaginable level: civil liberties, trade, global power, economics. Open and naked corruption is so off the charts it can only be described with comparisons to the post-Soviet era.
"Regret" is, quite frankly, insulting.
L-fucking-O-L
What did they expect?
Or do they just regret that they were fooled by this guy, specifically? That he's not accomplishing his stated goals, whether or not he is taking his promised actions? If it's this one, then it's only a matter of time before another charlatan does the same thing better.
The Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) was staffed by many ex SS officers.
Nuremberg Trails are continuously trotted out as an example of a system that works, but 200k people are estimated to have participated in crimes against humanity, of which only around 6700 were convicted, or 3.3%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_Saevecke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dickopf
https://www.waz.de/politik/article4512500/die-braunen-jahre-...
https://www.warrelics.eu/forum/history-research-third-reich-...
https://www.jvl.levit.dev/the-prosecution-of-war-criminals
https://us.cnn.com/2018/12/14/europe/germany-nazi-war-trials...
It took two generations and a new constitution for Germans to regain trust again.
You cannot trust the current generation of U.S. Americans, and the U.S. Constitution certainly does not alleviate that concern. They elect a god-king like president who seemingly has unlimited authority. Why would you trust such a country for more than four years?
Edit:
> but after, I'm not even sure what exactly
Killing people outside the USA left and right without due process? Starting a war and thinking that it is fun while the whole world is suffering because of that war? Kidnapping a head of state? Cosying up to the enemy of your allies during a war? Threatening allies? Declaring parts of an allied country as your own? Supporting Nazis in allied countries? Supporting separatism in a province of your neighbor (and until recently your closest ally)? Proudly telling the world what country the USA will assault next? ...
This story is that of Netflix' Chaos Monkey attacking the state most rhetorically aligned/proud of The Rule Of Law and showing in myriad ways how absolutely hollow that pride was and how vulnerable The Law is.
Are these bugs that get fixed or...if that was The Last Election, maybe not.
Well, most people, obviously.
dont mean to offend, just didnt realize things were this rabid over the big pond
Not that US borders were predictable before that men came into office. But when I enter the EU or Japan for example I have fundamental trust in the fact that even if I was not a citizen, my rights would be clear and not violated by some lunatic border officer that had a bad day. Being expected to disclose your social media accounts while them potentially holding you for weeks without any reason? Nah thanks.
When I was traveling on the Balkans a decade ago I also had weird border encounters, with Serbian officers expecting bribes. I felt safer there than the expectation of crossing into the US makes me feel. Don't eant people with half a brain coming over? Then we don't. Your choice.
I grew up in a very conservative household, and until the tea party/Trumpian alliance would have called myself a small-l libertarian.
Now? I won’t vote republican for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that it rhymes with the worst parts of the political parties we destroyed in world wars.
There’s something new almost every day that should, in a sane culture, cause folks to abandon the Republican Party en masse. Today’s example? The 1.776 Billion “anti-weaponization” fund that is a slush fund for Trump and his allies, including folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The grift of this administration is shocking, but the fact that rank-and-file conservatives aren’t abandoning it by the millions gives away the game. It isn’t about principles, it’s about one party winning, no matter what.
We used to fight for what’s right, but we have become the villain. Tim is right about the declination of America (realizing his title is a double-entendre), and I can’t help but wonder if there is even a line that Trump could cross to the modern “Republican” party.
As a former right winger, now recovering conservative, I'm inclined to agree. The greater issue for me is the right became every single thing they accused the left of (being easily hurt, mandated viewpoints, group think).
It's all the natural progression of the animosity campaigns Newt Gingrich launched a generation ago. ref: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/662/where-there-is-a-will/a...
And there's so much of it that it's almost become the norm. It's shocking that anyone -- no matter their political views -- can continue to support that.
We literally went from "drain the swamp" to "fill the swamp"
I honestly do not want my kids to grow up in this country. Which is too bad because it has a lot going for it otherwise. I'm actively looking for an exit strategy.
Some may think supporting their own party no matter what is a smart move that will let them win, but the only thing it achieves is that the party can now stop representing your interest. One of the few levers you have as a voter is the threat of not voting for a party or even voting against them. By swearing blind loyalty no matter what, you're giving up that single lever you had. The power of a voter isn't to vote people into office, it is to vote them out of it.
Trump has seen time and time again that he can promise X and then get away with doing the polar opposite of X, just because Republican representatives and voters think towing the line is more important than everything else.
In an actual democracy the politicians are afraid of the voters, not the other way around.
It was very definitely better than the centuries of militaristic monarchic feudalism Europe waded through from medieval times until the mid-1900s. It is very definitely worse than modern pluralistic coalition-based democracies with proportional representation, which offer a wider range of choices to voters, and make it possible to launch competing parties / movements to counter institutional stagnation.
Until recently, the one counterargument I would hear to this second assertion is "but coalition governments have a hard time getting anything done". Now that we see a prime example of a government that alternates between a) not getting anything done and b) getting things done that belong somewhere in a timeframe from the 1890s to the 1940s, I no longer hear people making that counterargument.
Re: constitutional structure, one Irish friend I have made an interesting point: in his lifetime, there have been many changes and amendments to the Irish constitution. This is next to impossible in the US system, both because of the party loyalty dynamic mentioned above _and_ because of the incredibly high procedural bar to doing so. (And not least because of the current predominance of originalist thinking in the judicial branch, as though the constitution were an infallible document handed down from gods among men, eternally to be interpreted as the Founding Fathers intended back over 200 years ago in a completely different social, political, and technological context.)
Yes, we can vote third parties, but this point always comes up at the presidential election and by then it's too late. If I just vote third party, that's how people like Trump make it to office. What we need is third parties to rise up naturally through local and state politics. Then, and only then, can we humor it at a federal level.
The main issue is that Americans are just not involved enough in local politics. Most Americans only vote during the federal elections.
1) I use "socials" anonymously. Have anon accounts on X, IG, FB. If asked to disclose them at the border (am US citizen, but it's happening to them too), do I disclose the anon accounts?
2) Nothing too controversial in my "socials" (I'm careful), but there's still stuff there that could embarrass me (e.g. mocking or abusing people on X). What would happen if I scrubbed my socials before a trip? Would they be able to find out that I scrubbed, and then construe something about me?
3) Relatedly, is there a recommended way to scrub one's socials?
4) Is something like HN considered part of "socials"? I assume Reddit is. So HN must be too? I've had multiple accounts on HN over the years (been serially banned until I stopped leaving controversial comments). What am I expected to do in such an instance? Do I disclose all the HN accounts?
5) Relatedly, I have multiple X accounts (squatting on usernames). Do I disclose all the accounts?
Read this line back to yourself a few times.
Now tell me where your democracy went.
2. + 4. It depends
3. If you plan to go to the us while Trump and his chronies are in an position of power, then the best way to scrub them is not to post it.
5. See 1. if you don't disclose all, they can pull the lie on a form card
Have you only ever logged onto them on burner devices / qubes and over eg Tor?
Assuming they do ask in the first place.