My MAGA neighbor...
...doesn't live in the same reality I do.
When we started Starve The Media, the focus was on the fact that the media is run by a handful of billionaires and it's getting bought up faster than our domain renewals for the site. These billionaires need you to hate your MAGA neighbor, and they need your MAGA neighbor to be scared of you and your kid that dresses funny.
We have many Trump voting "friends" in the neighborhood that we walk daily. They are totally normal law-abiding, charity giving, christ loving, animal loving human beings that love and respect most everyone, or so it seems. So, why is there so much animosity against the MAGA faithful? Why do we hate them with the heat of a thousand suns? Why do we see them as cruel and spiteful? Why do we see them encouraging the continued abduction, torture, and deportation to random foreign countries?
That's because they aren't and they don't. Those people that you "hate" are a fabrication created by media narratives to goose you into believing the propaganda they want you to. There's a lot of power keeping people divided by ideologies. It's the fracture that pays huge dividends to billionaires. They can wind people up, gin up anger and divide factions that would normally work together. Black, white, Asian, and Hispanic Americans from all walks of life want the same thing. We all want respect, to be able to have a place we call home that is safe and inviting. Most of us want friends, and like minded people to talk to. We aren't divided by class or race. We are divided by the wealthy.
There is enough.
There is enough of everything.
There is enough food. There are enough rooms for shelter. There is enough transit to move people. Any scarcity we experience is created to force division. America is the land of the "haves" and the "have nots." Most Americans are a few paychecks away from being a "have" to a "have not." The media is very interested in making you believe that the "have nots" are here for your "stuff". They are just waiting to kill you, rape you, steal your things, or do whatever else they can scare people into believing.
The problem is that just isn't true. There may be a system built on inequality, but there is no group of roving ruffians waiting to pounce and if there are, they were created by the forced inequality that has been built into the system that made the billionaires, and sucked the wealth out of the economy. Healthcare is about to be stripped for millions of us. Why? They say there are adult men not working and living "off the system."
The real reason is profit and the destruction of the Affordable Care Act. The Republican right has long sought to take out this bastion of liberalism, that at worst, helped people get health insurance and at best created a huge profit center for insurance companies. Republicans hated the ACA because a Black man's name was on it. It didn't matter that it was originally a conservative plan from the Heritage Foundation, implemented by Romney in Massachusetts. It didn't matter that it funneled billions to private insurers. Obama passed it, so it became socialism, government overreach, tyranny, or whatever label would justify the rage. The opposition wasn't about policy. It was about who delivered it.
Lack of healthcare is the first step in the long and painful slide in the middle and lower classes. Lack of awareness of ongoing manageable illnesses creates huge problems for society as we become sicker, weaker, and less able to contribute. Lack of contribution lowers the tax base, and even with a gutted government, revenue is still needed for what few social systems there will be.
These things will surprise people fed their media diet from major outlets like Fox News, Washington Post, all of them. There is no liberal bastion any longer. There are outlets like MSNBC, soon to be spun off from NBC, that will still function as a pressure valve for the left to feel helpless. Meanwhile the LA Times, Washington Post, Sacramento Bee, Sinclair Networks, CNN, Fox News, CBS, are all controlled by billionaires siding with the political right in this country.
My MAGA neighbor is going to suffer through all of this. Whether it is the tariffs, the destruction of the federal government, or simply from losing access to healthcare, they are me, I am them. I'm under no real illusion about how I get my information, but I like to write it down in places like this, so when the normal is gone, there will be a place where we can remember, where we can read the warnings that should have been heeded, but weren't.
A time capsule outside of billionaire control, by the person, for the people.