It’s because we were a nation founded by violence and oppression and built on the backs of a slave race, none of which are practices we ever truly abandoned.

You have healthcare, affordable schooling, and labor unions because, wherever you are, your populace is considered a workforce, not a slave race. When your society relies on a workforce, you want them healthy so they can work longer, you want them educated so they can work smarter, and you want them comfortable enough with their salaries and their hours to feel they can afford to have kids, who will one day join the workforce.

Governing bodies in the US don’t need us healthy, smart, or comfortable. They just need us to 1) work (hence tying our healthcare to our work hours), and 2) breed (hence minimal sex education, poor access to contraception, abortion bans, etc).

They don’t need to give us healthcare (or education, or basic human necessities or rights), because as long as we’re breeding, it’s cheaper if we just die. And if that ever bothers us enough to take to the streets (which it has, many times), our local police forces are highly militarized and have no qualms about doing to us what their white ancestors did to my native and black ones (which they have, many times).

And to be clear, this isn’t meant to be a woe-is-America spiel. These are problems that we’ve had many opportunities to address over the years, but let hubris, bigotry, and plain old stupidity get in the way. This is very much a mess of our own making, so I’m not trying to throw a pity party, just addressing your confusion.

TL;DR: Violence, oppression, and slavery. The tried and true American way.

Fair point. But there did used to be three branches that checked one another. The reason DJT can effectively do whatever he wants through the DOJ is because those checks and balances are no longer in place. If Biden had tried to do with DOJ what Trump has done (which I still would argue that he absolutely should not have), the USSC would have had something to say about it—similar to how they checked him when he (with Sec of Ed) attempted to forgive roughly half a trillion dollars of student debt.

To be clear, I’m not saying Biden (or his executive branch or the 117th congress or the USSC) was effective or… idk, good? They absolutely weren’t. I’m saying that for Biden to weaponize various departments and agencies (even for the arguable benefit of Americans), he’d have had to have engaged in the same slide into authoritarianism that Trump has.

He didn’t “sit on the files”. They were under DOJ’s purview, because there used to be three separate branches of government that checked and balanced one another. I’m not saying the DOJ under Biden didn’t absolutely drop the ball, because they did. I’m just saying that Trump’s weaponizing of the DOJ is antithetical not to “decorum”, but to democracy. Biden doing it first would have constituted executive overreach just as much as Trump doing it now.

So your argument is “why didn’t Biden become a dictator first”?

“Slandering police” lmaooooo

Still waiting on the tragic romance version of Mulan, where they don’t get together at the end because falling in love with boy-Mulan helped Shang finally come to terms with being gay.

I’d also take the version where he ends up with Mulan’s horny grandma instead. Either or.

Not disagreeing at all, but I think it’s important to note how effective wage slavery is in keeping people too exhausted to stay informed. I’m in California, where a studio apartment goes for about $1k/mo, landlords generally require you to earn 3x rent after taxes to qualify, and minimum wage is $17/hr. So, working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, you might just barely qualify, and that’s without even taking into account all other living expenses.

I agree that ignorance can be a byproduct of privilege, but it can also be a byproduct of poverty.