For years, Mackeys Ferry Sawmill in North Carolina depended on overseas buyers in China and Vietnam after domestic demand for premium hardwood declined. But when President Donald Trump launched his escalating trade war, the mill’s owners say the damage was immediate and ultimately irreversible. By July—just months after Trump declared his “Liberation Day” tariffs—they made the decision to shut the…
There’s something weird about seeing people saying they would vote for Trump again despite this one sliver of action that cost them everything. These folks are mad at something and it’s not specifically red or blue in the conventional sense. It feels like there is social pushback against something we all feel. A pressure put upon each of us.
It’s not specifically capitalism. It’s how no one has any influence on the output of what happens except the most despicable individuals, like CEOs and politicians. A lot of people are being ignored and it’s making everyone mad enough to vote erratically for whoever speaks the same level of angry as them.
Fuck institutions. They never listened anyway but now they don’t work with society as the focal point. Money has taken over as the motivation instead of improving things for the next generation.
Huh. Well put. Now it’s got me thinking, more folks are becoming cruel because they see those bad folks getting what they want. Monkey see Monkey do, right? It’s hard when you struggle every day just to make it. Only to see someone who has no morals living in security.
Its a cult.
What you are trying to describe… is a cult.
These people are brainwashed fanatics, to the point of either intentionally or unintentionally, nearly/effectively or actually committing suicide, for/because of the cultic belief structure.
We saw this with COVID.
Thousands of people, live blogging or live streaming their own deaths, basically caused by their adherence to idiotic nonsense ideas, that they held with the level of conviction of a religious extremist, many of them literally to their last breath.
Its literally a death cult, being a MAGA-type conservative.
They don’t believe they exist in “reality”, as any one not in the cult would understand it.
They’ll drink the KoolAid, they’ll off themselves to go to the spaceship behind Hale-Bopp… because nothing can change their core beliefs.
Just because their method of effective/literal suicide is economic/political doesn’t make it not a literal death cult.
It really is not that conceptually difficult to understand the basics of how a tariff works.
You can explain it to a middle schooler, without numbers, and …
(well ok, if we’re talking about roughly year 2000 middle schoolers, not roughly 2025 tiktok addict brainrotted middle schoolers)…
… most of them would get it.
Just like how most of them could be taught that drinking poisoned KoolAid will kill you.
EDIT:
The BITE Model of Cults:
https://freedomofmind.com/cult-mind-control/bite-model-pdf-download/
Just go checkoff each one of the subcomponents of each main component there, that you routinely see MAGA adherents/leaders being subjected to, or enforcing on other MAGA adherents/leaders.
I’m not even kind of joking, it’s literally a death cult.