re: I have never seen Politics this divisive.

One old Vermont senator and a host of young female politicians is the reason. And at the local level, the mayors and administrators of large cities across the US just add fuel to the fire.

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Will everyone who voted for Trump stand up who would change their vote today. Raise your hand and be counted. Don't believe everything that you read or hear. That is their method of control. Makt tp where the Truth is so blurred that people don't know what to believe. Covid proved proved how easily sheep are led.

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The irony of this post is off the charts.

It all started with the DIC in 2009.

I'm happy to blame the left for a lot, perhaps most of it.

But truth is, everything is more divisive. Dumb people have access to information at unprecedented levels. Everyone is asked to have an opinion on everything.

People who would have been too consumed with normal life to have any concept of obscure debates online are engrossed now.

As hard as we claim it is for young people (and I think some of that is meritorious, at least relatively) - people want for very little. The large majority of people find plenty of time to pay attention to the drama with the neighbors on Insta or the drama with Hegseth on X.

And what's particularly scary to me is that it's so addictive and pervasive that now I see people who really have life strife, who really have challenges that would have previously dominated their life and squeezed anything else out - now those people are going to X or FB or TikTok to deal with their trials. It's the only way they know how to live.

I all started when Trump came down the escalator, both sides shite themselves thinking an "outsider" who can't be bribed was going to infiltrate the grift.

Ever since it's been destroy the Orange Man

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Okay I get it. You hate religion. But the left is just as bad pushing trans, DEI, homosexuality, normalizing pedophilia down the throats of the rest of society.

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Everyone has a religion, even if they don’t call it one. Hating religion is to hate humanity.

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I’ve really tried to take a hard look at Republicans to see what changed? I don’t see much difference from when I was a kid. But the Democrats? It just blows my mind how different they are now. So extreme left.

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What happened is that several ideological shifts were embraced, several within an expanding concept and under the tent of Marxism, after WWII.

Modernism was the dominant philosophy going into the 20th century and after two world wars, thought leaders began to rebel against it and you had post-modernism.

That and feminism acted as kind of an accelerant on philosophies that had been around for a while at that point simmering, but hadn't erupted into a full fledged bonfire, such as hedonism, existentialism, and scientism.

Another key moment was the publishing of Franz Fanon's "The Wretched Of The Earth," which introduced anti-colonial dogmas into the mix.

So to kind of break it down:

Hedonism—The ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life. This philosophy has been around pretty much as long as people have, but it gained a lot of traction as a serious, academic thought system under Jeremy Bentham and his concept of classical utilitarianism.

Existentialism—A philosophical theory or approach which emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Existentialism assumes no God and that humans are born with no purpose and must create purpose for themselves by "an act of the will." Nevermind that without God there is no framework by which an act of the will can confer any actual meaning—and adherents of existentialism admit that life is absurd in the philosophical sense—the philosophy nevertheless insists on this as the prevailing worldview. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, and (as an easy tie-in to feminism) Simone de Beauvoir.

Feminism—I find that people think they know more but actually know less about feminism than any other philosophy. Feminism started in the 18th century with Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman," published all the way back in 1792. The first organized feminist event was held in 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention. People think that all that these 1st wave feminists wanted was the right to vote, but that's revisionist history. People think that Jim Crow laws were only enforced against black people, but poor white men were also disenfranchised by them as well. All men including all white men didn't get to vote until roughly a decade before the 19th amendment was passed in 1920.

And the extrication of women from the nuclear family was always a part of feminist philosophy, going back to its beginning. Many 1st wave feminists abandoned their children and husbands (many of those that could afford to do so, anyway).

de Beauvoir's, "The Second Sex," published in 1948, is considered by most to be the dividing line between 1st and 2nd wave feminism, and in that book you will find the foundational philosophical basis for transgenderism. It states clearly that people are born genderless and have their gender forced upon them.

And to the idea that leftist try to force people to buy into their philosophy more so that people on the right, that book also contains a statement from Ms.de Beauvoir that women could not be allowed to choose to remain in a traditional family role because too many of them would choose it.

Post-Modernism—Embraces the idea that there is no objective truth, that truth, culture, identity, and knowledge itself are entirely subjective, that diversity is essential and that a monolithic culture is oppressive. Truth is whatever someone thinks it to be.

Marxism, which I trust everyone is familiar enough with that I can skip an intro.

Scientism—The belief that science is the only authority that can produce reliable knowledge. Interestingly, this idea exists unnoticed in complete opposition to existentialism, which teaches that truth and knowledge can only come from individual experience, and post-modernism, which denies that truth even exists objectively. But that dynamic completely explains why leftists will criticize someone for being a "science denier" about climate change and in the next breath be unable to define what a woman is.

Anti-Colonialism—Fanon. He's the one who started the anti-colonialism fad in terms of framing it such that white people are always evil because white people have colonized the most. (Not true, but whatever).

Notice that all of those philosophies are antithetical to traditional Judaeo-Christian values. Except for maybe the last one.

Now reading through that list of philosophies, if you can't see the link between them and someone in 2025 being militantly and dogmatically committed to the idea that unborn babies are free game to kill if they inconvenience the mother, that someone's identity is anything they feel it to be, that all cultures are equally valid and the more of them represented in a system, the better, that as long as something happens between two consenting adults it's fine, that women and men are just interchangeable widgets that have no inherent characteristics as such, etc., etc....if you can't see the link between all of that stuff and pretty much everything the left stands for in 2025, I don't know what to tell you.

Why has it become so much more extreme? Because that's how ideas work. That's how they permeate through a society. Gradually. In our case, we have three main thought leaders, academia, the media (including social media), and the entertainment industry. Ideas like this are taught in universities and then reinforced through the other thought leaders. It takes time, several generations, and generally each generation is (net) more extreme than the last, with some backlash exceptions embedded within.

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I also never have seen Democrats act like they do now

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This is why I am no longer a Democrat. Demons run that party now.

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Been following politics a long time since Carter.

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It's been since JFK for me - was aware of politics since Truman, but gave no attention to 'adult talk' until the RMN/JFK debate. Watched that with interest and thought Nixon won, but we had a very grainy TV and did not even understand the notion that JFK 'looked better' - what I 'saw' was just grainy images on the 'radio.' My big objection to JFK was his position on Cuba.

To me, the 'welfare' aspect of politics 'sounded good' but a little analysis showed that the conservative side of the debate was more logical. I was disappointed when Nixon lost, but soon became a loyal supporter of JFK - his leadership on the space program won my support.

But I still was a Goldwater supporter for the next election - and after the LBJ debacle I became hard core conservative.

BUT - the dialog was decidedly more civil back then - there WERE democrat voices that were logically presented and the media bias was so subtle you had to be acutely aware of the underlying issues in order recognize it.

My first realization that the 'mainstream media' was actually morphing into a propaganda arm of the democrat party came in 60s when Nixon was running for gov. of California after his defeat in 1960. A photo of him appeared on the front page of the newspaper where he was speaking to a group on the street in SF. What caught my eye was the street sign that appeared directly over Nixon's head - reading "DEAD END".

It was obvious the photographer had to maneuver into an elevated position in just the right spot to obtain that composition - not an 'incidental event'. = purposeful.

Then came the gradual buildup until Obama happened on the scene when the entire media proclaimed him the "new jesUS." After that, the media just said = 'to hell with it - let's just blare out demoCRAP propaganda and find fault with every single word spoken by any conservative."

With the disaster of the biden administration in their rear-view mirror they have now joined in with supporting abject sedition and wholesale murder if it effects the 'MAGA subhumans'

We are in their crosshairs - they are waiting to pull the trigger on a proper kill-shot.