I’m sure the media played a part.

But fuck. He was so obvious with his racism, with his desire to be a dictator, fuckin everything.

Fuck.

I don’t think I would say non-voters support this.

But they sure as fuck are complicit in not stopping an OBVIOUS threat to democracy by failing to do the absolute bare minimum civic duty of voting.

Edit: fixed grammar

I don’t think Trump won quite as decisively as it first seemed.

But shit, it’s still like… a third of our country that looked at Trump and went, “yeah sure”.

How the fuck do we fix this? I straight up have no clue. And that means it very likely will devolve into violence. And that is legitimately terrifying.

I think it’s fair to say Russia exacerbated our existing issues. That doesn’t absolve us, as you point out, but it’s not unreasonable to say “Russia won”, either.

We had every opportunity to fix our issues. But nope, we just never really dealt with our history of racism and all the other bigotries (and capitalism, let’s be real). When we tried to make things better, the reactionaries pushed back. First with war, and when that was lost, with law, and when that was lost, with rewriting history. That is a strategy that keeps working. Turns out if you don’t care for your citizens, they’ll eat up all that fake history looking for someone to blame. And that makes us weak to fascism.

So yeah, Russia may have sped up the process, but the roots of our downfall were here all along.

The “respect” and “you should be thankful” comments reminded me of that old (I think Tumblr) post:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”.

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person.”

and they think they’re being fair, but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.