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I had my last conversation with my MAGA supporting cousin in November of 2020. Until that point, he had led me to believe he cared for my immigrant family enough that he wouldn’t cast a vote for a lying, treasonous xenophobe who had turned a call for violence into a campaign slogan.
But my cousin had been drinking and he let the truth slip out.
His final, slurred admission made me lose interest in anything he had to say. However, until that point, I’d been trying to understand his perspective.
Perhaps I was making it more complicated than it needed to be. His perspective was this: GUNS!
That’s it. There’s no nuance. There’s no complexity. There’s no hidden meaning. My MAGA supporting cousin wanted guns.
“I won’t live beneath the rule of a tyrant!” he declared.
“Okay,” I said. “But right now, your dear leader is claiming he’s not going to step down even though he lost. Without any evidence, he’s spreading lies about election irregularities that threaten to shake our country apart at the seams. He’s behaving like a dictator. If you refuse to live beneath the rule of a tyrant, will you march on Washington if your dear leader unlawfully attempts to retain power?”
“Er… the government listens in on these phone calls you know. So, I’m not going to say anything.”
“That’s what I thought.”
My MAGA supporting cousin’s personal mythology was that if he was in the possession of guns, he would be able to magically save himself from “tyrants.” He considers himself a “law and order patriot” but also firmly believes the government represents the greatest single threat to his freedom.
For some reason, he completely fails to recognize the danger of a billionaire who longs to become a tyrant, not just in practice but also in name. Why do conservatives have this blind spot? Why can’t they recognize that billionaires are tyrants already?
My cousin’s heart pills
My cousin thinks he’s free, but he can’t live without his heart pills. He’s always complaining about how expensive his heart pills are. Pills are more expensive in the United States than anywhere else in the world.
Why are life-saving pharmaceuticals expensive in the USA? It’s because the physical suffering of American citizens is secondary to appeasing the billionaires’ insatiable hunger for profit.
You may have a gun, but how free are you if your heart doesn’t work?
Billionaires control the price of everything. If working class people start to get ahead, billionaires have enough power to crash the economy. Inflation doesn’t bother them. They can just wait it out. They can hold on to assets until the economy recovers. It’s only working class people who feel the burden.
The whole idea that it’s possible to “get ahead” in the USA is an illusion. Billionaires dangle that carrot to keep us docile as we work ourselves to death while they reap all the rewards. Wake up! We’ve got the yoke of the tyrants on our backs. The government is supposed to protect us from “all enemies foreign and domestic.”
Why does the government refuse to protect us from the tyranny of billionaires?
The government is based on following the will of the people. We go through the charade of having elections, but in the end it doesn’t matter who we elect. Every representative from the state to the federal level follows the will of the billionaires, not the will of the people.
The result is that everything in the United States is unfairly tipped to favor obscenely wealthy sociopaths. These individuals who accrue massive fortunes are able to push through the laws that they want, manipulate markets, deny your access to health care… the list goes on and on.
We live under the rule of tyrants now
The government is supposed to protect us from tyrants, but conservatives have duped their followers into thinking the government is the only threat to freedom we face. Freedom has MANY enemies. That should be obvious.
Why can’t the American public see that individual citizens who are more powerful than the government are also a threat to our freedom?
We’ve all been disenfranchised by the fact that billionaires own every candidate that runs for office.
The truth is government isn’t a threat. Government is a tool. In the right hands, the tool can be wielded for good. In the wrong hands, the tool can be wielded for evil. It’s ironic because that’s what conservatives say about guns.
Right now, the tool of government is being wielded to establish a class of billionaires who think the “rule of law” shouldn’t apply to them. Just a few years ago, we witnessed a billionaire make an attempt to overthrow the government.
That’s a pretty blatant attack on your freedom.
Anyone who is paying attention should have seen this coming in 2016. The government isn’t our enemy, the billionaires are. Electing a billionaire to the highest office in our country was like making Freddy Krueger chief of staff at a nursery.
It should tell you something when the most tyrannical people in our society crack a smile at you and say, “You can keep your guns.” It’s because tyrants know guns in the hands of citizens do not represent a threat to their power.
The billionaire mentality
Billionaires have a gaping hole in their psyche that can never be filled. Our corrupt president has placed himself squarely in the spotlight, so he serves as an appropriate example. All you have to do is look at his life with unfiltered eyes and it’s obvious how detestable and miserable it is.
The way he chases attention is pathetic. What other word could you use? His behavior lacks any sign of dignity or self-respect. People only tolerate his company because they want something from him.
You don’t have to be a billionaire to see this unfortunate side of human nature. I’ve been in the presence of people who liked to flash money around. Every time they did so, a certain class of individual came crawling out of the underworld to shower them with intoxicating praise.
When people get in the habit of flashing money, every interaction in their life becomes transactional. They begin to delude themselves into believing that this is the only form of relationship that can exist. They think, “It all comes down to money in the end, there are no sincere emotions.”
Don’t build your whole life upon a lie
Billionaires delude themselves into believing all human interactions are transactional because flashing money around is easier than being a decent human being.
But the thing is, billionaires are wrong. There is sincere affection in the world where the party who loves you does so unconditionally and wants nothing in return.
Don’t believe me?
Get a dog. A dog will love you until the day he dies and never ask you for a penny.
I bet billionaires avoid owning dogs because they know the existence of dogs is a proof that exposes their flawed ideology. They’ll mock dogs, and then cry inside because they so desperately want the love a dog provides.
Dogs aren’t dumb.
If a you hire somebody to take care of your dog, the dog will love the person you hired. If you refuse to do the work, no love for you.
Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons
Deep down, billionaires want to be loved just like anyone else. However, their psyche has been so corrupted that achieving true, selfless, vulnerable love is impossible for them. Therefore, rather than change, they convince themselves that things like empathy, compassion, and true affection are various forms of weakness. It’s a toxic state of mind.
Billionaires don’t deserve our praise. In fact, they need an intervention. They’re miserable, conniving people who labor ceaselessly to make the world worse.
It’s largely due to their selfish behavior that the oceans have begun to overheat. Poor people aren’t doing that. Poor people don’t have the resources to destroy the planet.
Billionaires have learned all the wrong lessons from life, that’s why their hunger for wealth is insatiable.
There is always a short term profit to be gained through a betrayal of love. This is why people who are fixated on profit have trained themselves to see true affection as a weakness. By conditioning themselves to believe love is a “weakness” they can avoid thinking of themselves as monsters.
Inferior men are always able to turn betrayals of love into huge fortunes, but betraying love incurs a greater debt that comes due at a later date. This is the inevitable consequence all rich men are frantic to escape. This is why they expend such effort promoting the false narrative that wealth acquisition is to be praised. They are destitute, and they don’t want the world to perceive this truth.
You must strive to be worthy of the love people give you
Being worthy of love is the most admirable ambition of any human being, not the acquisition of wealth.
Love is a responsibility, not an entitlement.
It feeds the ego when somebody reveres you, but you can’t succumb to ego and abuse the love you’re freely given. You’re not entitled to that. You’ll destroy your chance at life satisfaction unless you’re ceaselessly dedicated to living up to vulnerable faith of the people who truly care for you.
Billionaires see love the same way as they see any other object. Once it’s in their possession, they think it belongs to them. But love doesn’t work that way.
Anyone has a right to withdraw their love at any time. Actually, “withdraw” is not the right term. What happens is that love is murdered by the abuser. The fault always lies with the unworthy.
A sincere person can do nothing more than extend an olive branch of vulnerability. If the object of your affection tears up the branch from its roots, the chance of growth is lost. That destructive action, though painful, frees the sincere person from the abuser. The abuser is left to scream in defiant anger as the decent person leaves them forever.
It’s not the purpose of this life to indulge in the wanton destruction of anything beautiful that comes across your path. The way to happiness lies in cultivation. Our whole society needs to understand this.
Acquiring wealth is the path of moral debt
The whole of the United States is charging down the road to ruin. There’s a reason our nation has accrued a debt in excess of 32 trillion dollars. When you chose the path of profit over compassion you doom yourself to future destruction.
Terror over inevitable accountability is what has compelled the corrupt president to go to such lengths to retain power, but his actions have always driven him further from the deepest longing of the human heart. The billionaire, traitor president has condemned himself to hatred and his crimes are so terrible that his own mortality has robbed him of the possibility of completing his required penance.
As I look upon the devastated political landscape of the United States, I see a lot of frustrated souls that still express their love and reverence for MAGA. The saddest part about this is that our corrupt president, like all billionaires, is unworthy of anyone’s love.
Throughout its history, the focus of the United States has always been on profits at the expense of humanity. Human beings were enslaved in order to build obscene wealth that could only be enjoyed by a privileged few. Genocide was committed so that land could be stolen. The justifications for those inexcusable transgressions against humanity form the backbone of our philosophy even to this day.
We won’t be free of tyrants until we learn to revere human beings over profit. The United States isn’t “the land of the free,” it’s the land of tyrants and it always has been.
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