Almost everything I ever believed, or thought I believed, about my country, the United States of America, has been disabused by the results of the 2024 Presidential election. We just elected a convicted felon, with multiple pending felony indictments for starting a riot leading to an attack on the United States Capitol and a joint session of Congress, a man who is in obvious physical and mental decline at 78 years of age, after berating and criticizing the sitting President because he is too old. A man who is surrounded by sycophants who are themselves felons for the government corruption they committed the first time he was in office, who, in his first term left the country reeling defenselessly from a viral pandemic he called "a hoax," and wrecked the economy, leaving behind a massive amount added to the national debt and job loss higher than any Presidential administration since Hoover.

We haven't begun to sort out the multiple reasons why an evenly split electorate which leaned into the electoral college giving Trump an advantage of less than 200,000 votes across three states to win, didn't want to put a woman in the White House. But I tend to agree with The Rude Pundit who characterizes it well by saying that America is a floating island of garbage. They didn't want to put a black, intelligent, accomplished, liberal thinking woman in the White House.

It has just proven it with the results of an election that its own mainstream media started setting up from the moment Trump left the White House in 2021. Trump has had four years of free publicity provided by the corporate interests who own the media. He got television, radio and internet news coverage every day for the past four years, far more than the sitting President got. Whether they were fascinated by him, or they were pushing his ideology into place for his next run at the White House, they are the ones who re-created his image, carefully leaving out the flaws, gross incompetence, unbelievable and filthy immorality and vulgarity, and most of all, making sure he stayed credible even though every word out of his mouth was a flagrant, intentional lie.

So it is that a convicted felon, and rapist, who led a treasonous attempt to overthrow a legitimate election, twice impeached for heinous crimes against the American people, an immoral denier of what is right and wrong, who, by anyone who understands decency and upholds basic human values, is himself "garbage," will now get another chance at being the most powerful man in the world. I'm not sure this represents an ideological shift, or whether it is simply a transition back to what has always been there.

And really, we are speaking of this in too kind of a way. This administration is going to be very ruthless toward those it hates. We're not just talking about hating with an angry face. This conglomeration of billionaires with roots in South African apartheid, American white supremacy and Christian nationalism are angry, brutal and lacking in any kind of human reason or empathy. We are headed into dark days. Ukraine will likely be the first victim, and those whom we've come to admire are reaching the end of their lives. In this country, let me tell you people, Dearborn and Hamtramk will be empty, and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank will be in refugee camps in the Saudi desert. The Latino asylum seekers will be brutally abused, and sent back to face the torture and murder they escaped by coming here.

And the mortality rate of pregnant women is about to head to places that only third world countries have seen.