My years reading Soviet agitprop has made me hypersensitive to propaganda in all its forms. When you have clowns, like your current government, claiming that a budget cut for a program that they promised not to cut, isn’t really breaking their promise, you know they are delusional, or think that voters are too stupid to notice.

“Facism is a political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and opposes free elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Fascism is strongly associated with fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.”

The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ have undergone major changes in basic meaning over the decades, so they aren’t very useful other than identifying the parties that claim them. The Liberal Party of Australia is the ‘conservative’ party, while the Labor Party is the ‘liberal’ party. More than slightly confusing…

I agree that it isn’t very conservative to claim loyalty to a history that never existed outside of the imagination of a few writers of fiction being passed off as of the Truth.

Are we there yet?

– Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here 1935

The individuals are usually dupes of the demagogues who convince them that they are on a righteous mission, and that their goals are the real “American values”. After the individual acts with bloody results, the demagogues claim that they don’t condone such acts of violence, but they can understand the individual’s motivation.

The only way out of this mess is to have real liberals running for offices at all levels of government, so real Democrats will show up at the polls and vote. As long as both major parties are running conservative candidates financed by the 1%, nothing is going to change. As long as everyone bases ‘electability’ on the size of a candidate’s campaign account, nothing will change. As long as the system is based on money, the people with the most money have all of the power.

I am not an outright conspiracy theorist, but as the Koch brothers and their ilk begin to be exposed for the machinations they are revealed to have undertaken, I can’t entirely discount the possibility of a conspiracy of the “haves” to dominate, once and for all, the “have-nots,” much in the way masters dominate slaves. JFK, indisputably a “have” himself, clearly wanted to put a stop to that trend. In the end, that is very likely what killed him.

After Bobby Kennedy was assassinated it was not unusual to hear people say that voting for liberals just made them targets.