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It’s crazy how many people are not only thinking this, but saying it out loud now.

Also the amount of people that open up a conversation with “I can’t believe what’s going on in this country” or something similar

It's not crazy at all if you understand populism.

Populism produces an unreasonable degree of discontent among adherents, it's part of the formula.

Populists, whether on the left or the right, have only one guiding principle: I am a victim of The Man, who is continually keeping me down.

They have somewhat different definitions of The Man depending on whether they are leftist or rightist populists—for the left The Man is white people, institutional racism, the 1%, colonizers and oppressors. For the right The Man is The Deep State, "Globalists," the 1%, the "GOPe," and the "Establishment."

But populism requires that they live every day in a kind of paranoid stupor in which they continually believe in doomsday conspiracy theories that almost never amount to anything, yet they believe them nonetheless...but also, they don't believe them at all.

Because if you really DID believe that all elections were rigged and the government could control the weather at will and Biden is preparing to arm illegal immigrants to subdue American citizens and the Deep State is controlling the population by releasing aluminum shards into the atmosphere to give people cancer, etc., etc., etc., you wouldn't talk about leaving, you'd do it—you'd get the hell out of here.

So it's a strange mental state that populism creates.

It's a mental state that creates an unreasonable degree of dissatisfaction (due to all of the conspiracy theories and paranoia). Point out to a populist—left or right, doesn't matter—that we have a society with the least racism, the most opportunity, the smallest gap in quality of life, the most advanced technology and the most comforts, the most civil rights protections, etc., etc., that the world has ever seen, and they will flatly deny it and still maintain that we need to tear down the system that gave us all of that and "start over."

And they will type that on their $3000 laptop at work and get in their $75,000 truck to drive home to their $750,000 McMansion and sit in their hot tub on the patio sipping their homemade latte they made in their $2500 latte machine.

I understand why you say it's crazy.

But if you understand populism, it's just the logical conclusion of it. These people do not live in actual reality. They live in a kind of virtual reality made up by Huckster Carlson and Alex Jones (if you are on the right).