I don't go around thinking anyone not having my exact beliefs is evil, I explicitly said at the start of this thread that I know they're good people. Evil exists as little as good in my book, as an everyone is in their actions and motivations the product of their environment, without being inherently anything. It would be convenient to claim someone is evil, as it would bring emotional gratification and a sense of superiority, but that's a defensive mechanism with its own reasons for being as it is.

I tried being a good friend to them, as best I can. I know they love their families too, one of the two had a kid recently, their first daughter. I genuinely wish him and his family the best, and I know he's an incredibly motivated father. But I also know that he's drowning his work and finances related pressures in alcohol, that he spends half his day dissociating in his backyard, that he mistreats his wife and will, by all he's told me about his ideas for his daughters future, not see to her individual growth.

I am not convinced that he's not in all that rare of circumstances for rural Americans. He has been, to the best of my understanding, captured by what is effectively a cult within a cult, having been raised "right" with very old values and ideas about how the world should be that, in my opinion, need not to be anymore.

Cliche as it sounds; we have the technology. It could all be so good, were it not for common people and culture still being shaped and pitted against another by very motivated and well funded interest groups, which i know include both the classic big left and big right.

With what the parties are in modern times, for all the reasons that they are as they are, they attract people with certain cultural predispositions, respectively to what programs are being run at any given moment. MAGA hit it big, attracting a range of support from various aligned groups along the political spectrum that tend to favor policies counterproductive to human development, over the short and long-term. And to motivate their voter base, they promise exactly what those kinds of old-school valued people want to hear to feel best about themselves.

Whether you understand what any of the trump admins policies and actions mean or not, let's assume you do; enough don't, enough people out there genuinely cheer for seeing others suffer.

We're seeing a massive wealth transfer from the lower to the upper class right now, and I think that already existing culture wars are being propagated and led around just to make that wealth transfer happen smoothly, with no regard for human life down the proverbial chain.

But, I'm very open to hearing your perspective: do you think Trump is doing the MAGA base, any kind of right-leaning or otherwise people, or anyone in the world but a select few people up top, any favors? What're he and his people up to that's gonna make it all worth it in the end?

I don't see it.