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The "busloads of Antifa scare" is the best example of the power Facebook and the foreign influencers using it. It absolutely worked in rural America. It showed how susceptible, paranoid, and gullible the targets were. That's exactly what these people are TARGETS.

Tristan Harris is a first rate ethicist trying to do good in the world. Thanks for that interview link,Thom. Most of the content he speaks of has Russia's fingerprints all over it. Sadly, when you say the word Russia these days, it just means Putin. He hates us and wants to humiliate us. These right-wing nuts are helping him with that mission.

One man is holding peace hostage over there and maybe to some extent here as well. He is a psychopath and a THIEF. I am beginning to think these right-wingers have a "type". All I want to do with them is explain Putin, his tactics, and who the real target should be.

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How can America avoid bloodshed and chaos? One way NOT to do it is to ignore the complaints of the "other" side.

The way these complaints are usually addressed by the Left is to either call them not really problems or just a result of white-supremacy, ignorance, or racism. That may be true of the hard-core of the "movement," but there is a large number of people in the middle for whom it is not.

A great example is Virginia, which went for Pres. Biden in 2020 and then for Glenn Youngkin in 2022. It's my understanding that a lot of POCs went for Youngkin because they feared that entrance into elite high schools was going to be changed to modify the testing requirements. You see, too many of those POCs are getting into the elite schools. But for those POC-parents, getting into good schools is a primary goal.

The middle class (both white and black) has been decimated since the 60s. But this has not been an entirely Republican project. It has been a bipartisan project. The "other side" sees Democrats as contributing to it too.

It is hard to interpret Mr. Hartmann's comment about “the browning of American.” Does he see opposition to it just as a white-supremacist meme or might it have some bearing on the falling of the middle class?

When I was working my way through college in the late 60s I worked in slaughter houses in Detroit, MI. The workers consisted of white and black working class people. We were all unionized and made a decent wage. My understanding is that most of that work is now done by immigrants. Wages and unionism are both down. The reason given is that "Americans don't want those jobs." It's funny how we wanted them when I worked there.

My point is that summarily dismissing the complaints of the "Great Unwashed" is a losing formula. These people are not going to disappear. They are going to vote and therein lies the danger of a right-wing populist take over.

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