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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Shall I just reverse this? I hate saying "Your insistence to the contrary shows that you reside in a bubble." But I don't know how else to put it.

If you think there aren't left wing media sources that traffic in Fox-like behavior, you aren't living in reality.

You said PLF is the left-wing analogue of a Fox News viewer, which is stupid. I wasn't talking about left-wing media sources. I don't know what you mean by "Fox-like behavior", but that wasn't what we were talking about.

He's very clearly of the opinion Trump is some form of existential threat. That puts one in the deluded bucket for two reasons. First, it's a rather extreme and paranoid view of the power of politics. (Kinda like people who believe the President controls the economy.) Second, it shows a bird bath deep understanding of the issues. Decades of economic policies that our government has followed caused the circumstances in which Trump emerged as a symptom.

He is not the cause. He's the metastatic tumor that finally results after decades of disease.

What he's said about Floyd in regard to living through the riots is worth reading. The connection he routinely makes between Trump being the cause of much racism, and a significant driver of the classism and racism that splits the country, is naive. The split is caused by a number of aligned actors who seek to divide the disenfranchised, white and black. Trump is simply the opportunist capitalizing on it.

The doomsday most of the top 20% of the country fears most is one in which the groups which are being marginalized stop squabbling, realize they're being divided and conquered, and get behind a candidate like Sanders. The affluent and educated who actually understand the American class structure will pay lip service to curing racism, or uniting people, but they don't really want that. They need to have the poor split along class, regional, and racial lines, so their votes can be neutralized, never congealing en masse behind any real transformative candidate.

That's why people here freaked about Bernie in roughly the same way Republicans did. "Holy shit... That guy's going to gore our ox!"

If you don't see the world thru the lens I just described... If you buy into the bickering, if you focus on party, if you allow the media to whip Trump into some massively scary would-be despot, rather than the hapless PT Barnum he is, your views can only be described as unlettered. Highly unlettered.

And yet that's so much of the country, on both sides of the argument. Including many people here, who should know better.

FWIW, Trump is both symptom and cause, and what you just said has some real truths and serious errors.