I was able to catch the first hour of this tonight (I am worried how much longer these will be possible).
One very good point made when stating how you just want to be left alone and do your own thing.
Airing political grievances works as a safety valve.
I have often warned people to stay away from politics, that it is a time waste and the leaders you put your faith in will just end up failing you. (Whether that is due to a corrupt system, or bad leaders, it matters not)
However, in one respect, allowing people the farce of participating in democracy, exercising their freedom of speech, and playing the two party game, the US was able to get away with SO much by just allowing us the meaningless exercise of criticism. Americans are treated worse than citizens of most developed nations I've been to. Our police do not treat us with respect. Our government is rude and treats us as enemies. While most of Europe is collecting $1000+ a month during the lockdown, Americans get a last minute surprise $600 check after 8 months, well after many businesses have failed and homes have been lost.
We are the only people in the world who are forced to pay (around $6,000+ a year) to a private insurance firm that will only pay for a health expenditure if we need massive surgery or cancer treatment. We have a fraction of vacation time and freedom to travel that other nations offer their people. We allow predatory and usurious financial firms to take advantage of our people, through abusive practices like reverse mortgages and payday loans that do nothing but steal wealth from the people who have the least of it. None of this exists in most of the developed world.
But they were able to get away with all this because there was always the safety value of "yeah but you can complain about us all you want, see, we aren't like a king at all tho" argument.
And this is huge. Our ruling elites could have continued treating us like garbage for a very long time, if they just let us make youtube videos or spout off on comment boards or make inflammatory tweets. I was perfectly content to critique feminism behind a keyboard at ROK but it wasn't until that option was gone did I really start looking into who was behind our society's evil roots and considered actively working for change.
They are very, very stupid. They could have had decades more of drag queen story hours, and globohomo wars, and private sex islands, and corporate grift, and expanded federal agencies, as long as they just allowed us to publicly rant about how much we hated those things. Now that we can't, the safety valve is gone, the pressure's high, and something's going to blow.
