Good to hear from you. I was afraid you had died. I have not run across any comments from you in a dog's age. Your fellow Liberal posters on OPP mostly avoid me as if I have dandruff. Dashy is the only one brave enough to dare respond to me. Plus my new topics seem to disappear off the face of the earth.

As far as my investments, I never buy individual stocks. I only have mutual funds. My IRA and my personally controlled investments have only recently recovered from your boy Joe's malfeasance in governing, that keeps me from being homeless. Plus, luckily my doctor has me on a severely restricted diet because of my liver, so I am spending less on food. It is almost a starvation diet. It is amazing how little food a human being needs to live on and still not lose weight.

To get back to investment talk. You must be doing well as always. You are the man. The man who never lost a penny in the stock market. I just sold my 25 year old car. It still ran, but I got more from the crusher guy than anyone else was willing to offer. The price of scrap metal must be up. Joe's henchmen at the IRS are holding up my much needed Tax Refund. It seems they needed documentation which they have never needed in previous years. Instead of getting my money in 3 weeks, I will be lucky to get it in 3 months. I think somebody told them I am a Trump supporter. It couldn't have been you, cause you been MIA lately.

Glad to see you back.

First of all, I do think that many Trump supporters are indoctrinated, but this indoctrination is not so much based on Trump himself as it is based on decades of slow-cooked, right-wing propaganda which Trump is leveraging.

Over the course of the last 20 years, I have made several automotive journeys from coast to coast and all you have to do is turn the radio on to really feel the weight of this propaganda. You can only hear a full spectrum of music and news for about 2% of the journey. The rest of it is all country music and right-wing propaganda on AM radio for thousands of miles of emptiness and there is literally no escaping it without turning the radio off. It was like this 20 years ago and it's like this now.

This is what Trump chose to tap into and it makes sense, because no other realm of opinion is as willing to accept a narrative without question. With red-state America being almost entirely defined by faith, questions and challenges are almost entirely eliminated and an overwhelming sense of pride drives it home with an obsession toward supremacy and righteousness.

So in the confidence game, in which Trump is a superstar athlete, marking red-state Americans that are already prone to faith-based, pride-driven narratives almost guarantees a mesmerizing show that obscures the little man behind the curtain.

This is why I always refer to Trump's one-term presidency as a parade of PR stunts. With a complete absence of bi-partisan legislation, multilateral diplomacy and long-term strategy, Trump's super-biased agenda was entirely composed of one-sided PR stunts in which he scored brownie-points for affirming the righteousness of the alt-right and suggesting the demise of everyone else. Any of the previous presidents could have achieved the same level of dedication among his followers if only they could have abandoned their work on hard problems and chose instead to patronize his base.

Your point about specific instances is fair enough. I will give it some thought and get back with you.
However, I think the example you use is suspect. The government spent billions, if not trillions of dollars in paying for the C19 vaccines, then attempted REPEATEDLY to make them mandatory, while at the same time REPEATEDLY besmirching and even outlawing any other treatments or preventatives. Unconstitutionally and through lying to us, using government agencies forced to support their lies.