Tag: history
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Do Unto Others Part 3: Both Sides Are Hypocrites
But the Hypocrisy Differs in Depth and Kind After two parts documenting transactional empathy and Stage 2 moral reasoning, a predictable objection arises: “Both sides do it.” This is true. Both parties exhibit hypocrisy. Both say one thing and do another. Both claim to represent working people while serving corporate donors. But the question isn’t…
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Term Limits: Why This Popular Idea Could Make Things Worse (And Who’s Really Pushing It)
I Used to Think This Was a Great Idea I’ll be honest: I was sympathetic to term limits. Like most Americans, I’m exhausted by career politicians who seem completely out of touch. The frustration is real: So term limits sound great, right? Fresh blood, new ideas, less corruption! But then I thought: With how things…
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VOTING REFORM: Analyzing Every Voting System We Could Find. Here’s What Might Actually Work to Break the Two-Party Stranglehold.
We’re All Trapped Voting AGAINST Candidates Instead of FOR Anyone When’s the last time you actually wanted to vote for someone? For most of us, voting has become damage control. We’re not voting FOR our candidate—we’re voting AGAINST the one that scares us more. About 70% of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction.…
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Divided We Fall Part 10: The Freedom Fraud: Crime, Corporations, and Schools
When “Freedom” Means Government Control American conservatives claim to champion freedom. Small government. Individual liberty. Free markets. Get government out of our lives. Don’t tread on me. But look at what’s actually happening in Republican-controlled states: Governments telling businesses who they can hire and how they can operate. Governments dictating what teachers can teach and…
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Divided We Fall Part 9: Cancel Culture and “Woke”: Who’s Really Being Silenced?
What the Data Shows About Who Gets Canceled and Why Everyone claims they’re being canceled. Conservatives say they can’t speak freely without facing mob attacks. Progressives say they face consequences for standing up for justice. College professors say students are too sensitive. Students say professors refuse to update outdated views. Comedians say they can’t make…
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Divided We Fall Part 1: The Culture War
The Manufactured Outrage Economy Every morning, millions of Americans wake up angry. Not about their own lives necessarily, but about something they saw online, something Tucker Carlson said, something AOC tweeted, or some university policy they read about in a viral post. The outrage is real. The threat feels immediate. But the machinery creating and…
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Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other: How the Division Machine Keeps Us Fighting While Our Pockets Get Picked
The Name-Calling Trap Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Many of us have said it. And every time we do, someone wins – but it’s not you, and it’s not the person you’re yelling at. Americans have become increasingly polarized by design. When you’re pissed off, it’s hard to see…
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Broken By Design Part 25: The Bottom 90% Agenda – How We Fix This
We started this series with a simple question: What is wrong with us? Why does the richest country in human history rank 44th in life expectancy? Why do we spend twice as much on healthcare as other developed countries but get worse outcomes? Why can’t people afford housing even though we have more vacant homes…
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Broken By Design Part 24B: Rebuilding Worker Power – Why Unions Are the Key to Everything
We’ve spent 24 parts documenting how the bottom 90% are systematically extracted from: Healthcare, housing, education, prisons, military spending, taxes, monopolies, public service sabotage, media manipulation, environmental destruction, gig economy exploitation, financial system predation, and trade deals that ship jobs overseas. Every system is rigged against workers. Now here’s the question: How do workers fight…
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Broken By Design Part 22: Media Consolidation and Capitulation – Why You Don’t Know Any Of This
We’ve spent 21 parts documenting how the bottom 90% are systematically extracted from: • Healthcare monopolies charging you double what other countries pay (Parts 1-6) • Housing financialization pricing you out of homeownership (Part 7) • Student debt trapping you in economic servitude (Part 8) • Employer-based insurance making you afraid to leave your job…
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Broken By Design Part 21: Coordinated Sabotage—How They Break Public Services Then Blame Government
Let me start with the USPS example as the opening, since it’s the clearest case of deliberate sabotage. In 2006, a Republican Congress and a Republican President did something remarkable. They passed a law requiring the United States Postal Service to do something no other government agency, and no private company in America, has ever…
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Broken By Design Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team – How Culture Wars Keep Us Fighting While They Rob Us Blind
How Media Ecosystems and Broken Norms Divide Us A number of years ago, watching news coverage of conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, and various African nations, I remember having a thought that now fills me with embarrassment: No wonder there are always conflicts in those parts of the world—they’re still organized around tribal…
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Broken By Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It
Part 13 of the series: How Systems Are Rigged Against the Bottom 90% We’ve established that the political system maintains wealth extraction through bipartisan consensus. Both parties take corporate money. Both parties vote to protect extraction. The system works exactly as designed—just not for us. But here’s the good news: this isn’t how the system…
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Broken By Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice
Part 12 of the series: How Systems Are Rigged Against the Bottom 90% We’ve covered healthcare, housing, education, prisons, and military spending. Billions—trillions—extracted from the bottom 90% and funneled to the top 10%. Different industries. Different mechanisms. Same result: wealth flows up. And here’s what should be obvious by now: both parties perpetuate every single…
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Broken By Design Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex: $968 Billion in Wealth Extraction
Part 11 of the series: How Systems Are Rigged Against the Bottom 90% The U.S. military budget for 2024 is $968 billion. That’s more than the next 10 countries combined. More than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, UK, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, and Ukraine combined. And here’s what makes this the perfect example of…
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Broken By Design Part 10: The Incarceration Industry: How We Built a System That Profits From Failure
Part 10 of the series: How Systems Are Rigged Against the Bottom 90% Before we start, let’s address the elephant in the room: when we talk about criminal justice reform, we are NOT talking about “defunding the police” or “cashless bail.” These are real proposals that some activists made, and they’re bad ideas. But opponents…
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“Make America Great Again” sounds obvious. So why is it so hard to define?
“Make America Great Again” is one of those phrases that feels like a statement of common sense. Who doesn’t want the country to be “great”? But MAGA isn’t just a campaign line. It’s a whole movement. People get labeled “MAGA” (or “MAGA enough”). There are hats, shirts, flags, slogans, and a strong sense of in-group…
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Broken By Design Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking: How Language is Weaponized to Keep Us Fighting Each Other Instead of Those in Power
This is Part 2 in a series. Part 1 showed where America actually ranks. Now, before we follow the money, we need to talk about why you’ve been trained to stop listening the moment certain words appear. How I Realized We Needed This Post I was working on the next piece in this series – the…
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Who/What Actually is a Patriot?
Spoiler: It’s probably not who you think—or at least not for the reasons you think In contemporary American politics, “patriot” has become perhaps the most weaponized word in our vocabulary. Politicians invoke it to rally supporters. Activists claim it to legitimize their causes. Critics wield it to question opponents’ loyalty. Everyone wants to be one,…
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Is the US Heading Toward Fascism? A Data-Driven Comparison to 1933 Germany
Some people say yes and some people say that’s ridiculous—opinions are pretty much split by political affiliation. So I wanted to do a test. I figured I would ask a large language model to provide a factual comparison based purely on news reporting from major outlets like BBC, CNN, NPR, ProPublica, NBC News, and The…
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Our Williamsburg Adventure: A Family Trip with Two Elementary Schoolers
April 14-19, 2019 | Kids: Ages 6 and 7 The Great Musket Obsession (And Other Colonial Williamsburg Truths) Let me start with the most important piece of advice I can give you about Colonial Williamsburg with kids: Every single child will be running around with toy muskets. I’m talking about a full-blown colonial arms race in miniature.…
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Even that's Odd 