Listening to United Nations world leaders address the ongoing pernicious and embarrassing world situations places responsibility squarely on President Donald Trump.
Trump, who tastelessly made the Oval Office resemble a gilded 19th century New Orleans bordello, is bereft of dignity, compassion, or sensibility. He insolently cares nothing of inflicting harm on others. He conspired with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to bomb Iran. These unprovoked strikes are killing innocent civilians and degrading the global economy. Trump’s imposition of derelict trade tariffs severely increased inflation for Americans and the world’s nations.
At his rallies, Trump boasted “I love the undereducated,” prompting history of Lutheran theologian Reverend Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was executed in 1945 Germany for preaching against Nazism. Witnessing the German public fall in line through Nazi propaganda, Bonhoeffer argued that lack of discernment is a moral and sociological defect rather than an intellectual one, something way more dangerous to human wellbeing than malice or outright evil.
Evil can be exposed, protested, and fought with force because it instills fearfulness in people who become immune to reason. However, facts contradicting bigoted beliefs are ignored, dismissed, or disbelieved, making fanatics self-satisfied and dangerous. These non-thinking audiences are the target of Internet and TV political ads that use mockery to lie and instill hatred among the naive.
Poverty of intellect is not lack of brainpower; brilliant intellectuals can be profoundly senseless, and dull people can be mentally gifted. It is a group phenomenon, like Christian nationalist doctrinaires, Turning Point USA zealots, Branch Davidians, and MAGA cultists, who manifest evangelistic culture as a part of a crowd, rarely as individuals. People voluntarily give up personal independence and critical thinking to conform to external power or slogans.
Powerful political or religious movements rise, turning individuals into lemming-like followers who use catchwords and slogans to mock people unlike them. Systems of authority or oppression thrive when questioning is discouraged; followers willingly trade autonomy for the comfort of conformity.
Trying to mock, partisans latch on to terms like “woke,” “radical socialist,” “democratic socialist,” “extreme leftist”, and (shades of the 1950s Red Scare!) “communist”. Subservient people think these words as derogatory.
Rooted in Black American argot, “woke” indicates awareness of situations or surroundings. “Radical,” from Latin “radix,” or “root,” politically denotes “uprooting” a government to institute a more novel form of polity. Democrats are NOT “radicals,” just as MAGA cultists are not “conservatives.” MAGA dogmatists are “reactionary” or “tribalistic” people easily manipulated who view those who look or act differently as unacceptable in their society.
“Socialism” and “communism” are left-wing philosophies proposing elimination of worker exploitation and reducing class inequality. Socialism allows for personal property and pays people based on their work contribution. Communism connotes government owning the means of production, abolishment of private property, and goods distribution based on individual need in a classless society.
Misleading language by Texas Republicans, like “radical Democrat socialist,” perverts reality to instill divisiveness and hatred. Citizens need to know: Social Democrats like Senator Bernie Sanders, Michigan senatorial candidate Dr. Abdul El Sayed, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani support economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of liberal-democratic governmental organization and a capitalist-oriented economy.
They are not “socialists” or “communists.” They do not propose replacing capitalism. Social democracy aims to reform and regulate capitalism with strong social programs to make it more equitable, to do away the vast gulf between the lower-/middle-income class and the oligarchic super-rich.
Social democracy promotes mixed economy keeping private property and businesses. Taxes and regulations are used to fix inequality. Social democracy promotes market-based capitalism, using progressive taxes to fund services like healthcare, education, and childcare.
Capitalism is at its core. It aims to tame the negative effects of the free market to create a stable, fair society. Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are social democracies with thriving businesses alongside large safety nets.
Rising inflation, harmful trade tariffs, elevation of mortgage interest rates, expensive gasoline and diesel fuel, crazy increases in grocery prices, plus the insensible bombing Iran that is ruining the world’s access to fuel, fertilizer, and food should alarm citizens.
World leaders at the United Nations recently averred the main cause of this malevolence is Donald Trump, who pretentiously presents false “machismo” on his “X” website, shamelessly propped by his tongue-bathing cabinet. Servile Republican Congress members and a majority partisan-dominated Supreme Court equally allow Trump to wreck America’s reputation among the world’s nations, waste taxpayers’ money, and inflict harm on humanity.
Humans have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel, and live in his or her own way, to have the basic “rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” People join to defend this right. But it is a gross error to base these rights in the name of a race, a god, a party, or a state as the purpose of life. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the right of the individual.
