Trump's CNN Town Hall Meeting. We don't live in interesting times; we live in doomed times.
In the West, the notion that we live under the protective and liberal umbrella of democracy has become less credible. At best- to believe our democracies are strong serves one purpose. It makes us; complicit in crimes committed by the 1% because we voted for them to be our governmental leaders.
Our democracies are running on the fumes of nostalgia and wishful thinking. We still want to believe our system of democracy, which includes the corporate news media as a check and balance to power, works for the collective good of all of us. It doesn't, and maybe it never did.
Take CNN- the tainted meat it sells as news, maybe less rancid- than the political roadkill Fox News offers to its viewers. But it still is poison to democracy. CNN is simply a factory to manufacture consent for the politics of corporate America, which at best is benevolent fascism and at worst a Big Brother more terrifying than conceived by Orwell in his novel 1984.
CNN journalists may pretend to be inheritors of Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite. But they are counterfeits made decadent by excessive wages and the demands by their bosses to earn their pay by sustaining ratings through distorting reality and not telling hard truths.
CNN hosting a Town Hall with Donald Trump that had a live audience of Republican and Independent voters was not journalism or an event that served and strengthened that country's democracy. It was an updated version of Paddy Chayefsky's Network where satire was absent and contempt against decency and civil society was championed.
In 2024, Donald Trump will become President again. This happening would be inconceivable in a nation that was politically literate. America, however, isn't. It is a land that believes in second chances, even for Dollar Tree Hitlers. It also helps Trump that the 1% and its news media are betting that profits will be better for them if he is Commander and Chief rather than Biden. The presumption by the entitled is that what is left of the social safety net will be sold to the lowest bidder under a Trump Presidency further reducing their almost non-existent tax burden.
The Democrats will own much of their defeat to Trump as well because they have no grand plans for the country, outside of war with China and Russia. Biden has come up far short of anything resembling greatness or even progressive competence because food banks have increased for the struggling at the same astronomical rate as gated communities for the better off. He paved the way for Nazism America Style.
The US voter yearns for change- and they won't get it with Trump as President. But anger over their lives being stalled by crony capitalism is easily manipulated by libertarians that promise fewer taxes and more freedom for gun ownership.
Biden will lose the Presidency because he is the USA's, President Hindenburg. Joe Biden is a placeholder for the status quo; rather than a visionary for the American Empire in the 21st century.
However, every Potus, since Reagan enacted free trade agreements, sold national infrastructure and demonised Welfare as a gateway to sloth and dismantled what was left of Roosevelt's New Deal ethos has only been in office to rubber-stamp a status quo that ensured the entitled became more gilded.
Biden will lose in 2024 because the news media, like in Europe, Britain, and Canada, employs the refugee crisis as the wedge to rattle the middle and lower classes being assailed by this cost of living crisis created for the benefit of the wealthy.
There is a pattern to our news media, and its stich work is xenophobia and hard-heartedness to the outsider; unless they are white and Christian. Whether it was the influx of refugees through Roxham Road in Canada, refugees in their thousands on the US's southern border, or refugees taking to the seas in unsafe vessels to cross into Europe or Britain; the news media, along with conservative politicians has made it democracy's existential crisis. They have normalised racism against people migrating from lands our corporations and geopolitics destroyed. The terrifying part about all of this is politics can't save us because centrist parties are in lockstep with fascism as they fear socialism more and left wing political movements are stuck navel gazing about 15 minute cities when people can’t afford to pay their rent.
We don't live in interesting times; we live in doomed times.
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