Well it was a nice run, folks.

Fortunately some developing countries that used to look up to the US still have a vision of what we used to call the American Dream and are making positive steps in that direction according to the classic liberal democratic principles of the US Constitution (sans the slavery bits and a few other dead ends). So I won't say the experiment was a complete waste of everybody's time.

Thanks for playing those of you that did your best.
If we're fortunate, maybe we'll get a second chance at it.

Yes, the US has undoubtedly been a force of evil, and it's an inescapable part of imperialism. But the US has also held onto a set of ideals and democratic norms that could be used to hold it accountable and that make it much different from quite a few big powers. For example, as a rule, the US doesn't murder journalists that are critical of it and dissidents like Chomsky can speak relatively freely without accidentally ingesting poison or nerve gas. It's not a country where bribes are a normal and expected part of your everyday dealings with the police, doctors, or any kind of public official. And it's not a country where the ruling party would persecute and jail its political rivals. Or at least it didn't use to be.

Obama went after whistle blowers & morons like trump and Rand paul had no problem naming trumps whistleblower putting his life in danger. we are NOT that much better and it's a fucking shame

(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/)

[...]
One afternoon last March, I was on the phone with a Republican operative close to the Trump family when he casually mentioned that a reporter at Business Insider was about to have a very bad day. The journalist, John Haltiwanger, had tweeted something that annoyed Donald Trump Jr., prompting the coterie of friends and allies surrounding the president's son to drum up a hit piece. The story they had coming, the operative suggested to me, would demolish the reporter's credibility.

I wasn't sure what to make of this gloating—people in Trump's circle have a tendency toward bluster. But a few hours later, the operative sent me a link to a Breitbart News article documenting Haltiwanger's “history of intense Trump hatred.” The story was based on a series of Instagram posts—all of them from before Haltiwanger started working at Business Insider—in which he made fun of the president and expressed solidarity with liberal protesters.

The next morning, Don Jr. tweeted the story to his 3 million followers, denouncing Haltiwanger as a “raging lib.” Other conservatives piled on, and the reporter was bombarded with abusive messages and calls for him to be fired. His employer issued a statement conceding that the Instagram posts were “not appropriate.” Haltiwanger kept his job, but the experience, he told me later, “was bizarre and unsettling.”

The Breitbart story was part of a coordinated effort by a coalition of Trump allies to air embarrassing information about reporters who produce critical coverage of the president. (The New York Times first reported on this project last summer; since then, it's been described to me in greater detail.) According to people with knowledge of the effort, pro-Trump operatives have scraped social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of political journalists and compiled years' worth of posts into a dossier.

Often when a particular news story is deemed especially unfair—or politically damaging—to the president, Don Jr. will flag it in a text thread that he uses for this purpose. (Among those who text regularly with the president's eldest son, someone close to him told me, are the conservative activist Charlie Kirk; two GOP strategists, Sergio Gor and Arthur Schwartz; Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor; and U.S. Ambassador Richard Grenell.) Once a story has been marked for attack, someone searches the dossier for material on the journalists involved. If something useful turns up—a problematic old joke; evidence of liberal political views—Boyle turns it into a Breitbart headline, which White House officials and campaign surrogates can then share on social media. (The White House has denied any involvement in this effort.)
[...]