[Senator Clay Davis]

I know some people don't want to laugh or be lighthearted in moments like this, and I get it. Obviously it is not exactly an uplifting time and all that. But I just can't help but laugh that the US empire is going to end up being brought down by cable news and social media. When I first started following politics all those years ago, it was...well, a loser's thing to do pretty much. Back in the election nights of the 90s, even for Canadian elections, most people didn't really pay attention, and they really didn't pay attention to US American elections. And outside of election cycles the vast majority of people didn't care about politics all that much, and talking about politics was something that was really not something you'd see all that often in the general public, it was pretty much just the politicos who followed it with any intensity outside of election cycles.

Now? It's absolutely inescapable, people you know who never used to care about politics are now the loudest voices. Cable news and social media have made the complexities and nuances of politics a thing of the past. Now it's just rage and bait posts and TV shows designed to prey on those base instincts. And the GOP has shown they understand how to convert this to their advantage far better than the Dems have. And you see it in those videos about things like tariffs, where the GOP convinces voters they will help them economically cause "the foreign countries will pay for them". Is that what's gonna happen? Definitely not. Are those voters likely to suffer the worst from those policies? Very likely yes. But does it matter once their vote is locked in? Not at all, especially when, as the GOP specialises in, they'll find someone else to blame.

Once foreign countries figured out investing in people sitting in front of a wall of screens and phones, posting the most divisive #### they can, was a far greater investment than in military as a means of defeating the US, then it was really over. Americans are dumb by nature, and foreign countries leveraged that incredibly well. Now those countries are in a position to get everything they want. They could never beat America in a straight up war, so they found another way. Full credit to them. Feel for the people of Ukraine and eventually Taiwan, collateral damage to the gullibility of Americans.

And that's ultimately it: if it was the US and the US only who was going to feel the pain for this I wouldn't really care, and frankly I'd probably be kind of happy about it. This has been coming and it is deserved, and this was always going to be the end game of unchecked capitalism. But since we're all going to feel the pain, goddamn it Murica.