Matisyahu's Blog

Well, it is FAFO season once again or as it is sometimes called: “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. I see many videos being uploading of town hall meetings with Republican representatives from the senate and congress with unhappy constituents – questioning what DOGE is doing and voicing with great passion their displeasure with what is unfolding due to the negative consequences they’re experiencing. I really would love to believe that this is an example of a sea change but something tells me that these people only care because they’re negative impacted – if it were negatively impacting a person they’ll never meet, in a state they’ll never visit then that person becomes some ‘the other’, someone they don’t recognise as someone having the same value as they themselves.

This is what the hyper individualistic “fuck you, got mine” has created, a nation of people with a narrow self interest who only care about things that directly impact them because they treat politics not as an outgrowth of some sort of guiding philosophy but one based on having a shopping list of things and voting based on vibes rather than what is best for the country overall. Then there was the selective hearing by some voters who are now claiming “but he only said he would deport the bad ones”, no, Trump never said that – he said he would deport all undocumented immigrants but would focus on those undocumented immigrants in the country who had broken the law. In other words, the primary focus at first will be on undocumented immigrants in the country who had broken the law but if they pick up undocumented immigrants who didn’t break the law they’ll still pick them up. In other words at no time did Trump ever say what many are now claiming. Imagine allowing machismo and bigotry to shape your politics and then finding it comes back to bite you in the backside when you or friends or family are targeted by ICE.

This reminds me of the whole Brexit fiasco where the Brexit supporters were warned about what could happen and their response was “oh, that is just project fear, you just can’t handle the truth” and what happened all these years later? there is now Brexit regret – people admitting they screwed up but the problem is that the damage has already been done, 10 years of austerity under the Tories combined with not being in one of the largest free trade and free movement zone has come home to roost. Will the European Union welcome the UK back at some point in the future? possibly but I couldn’t imagine it being in the near term because there is still a significant minority who are hell bent on sticking with Brexit – that the pain of Brexit needs to hit those hold outs to the point that the overwhelming majority of people (upwards of 70-80%) cry out to politicians, “we want to get back in the European Union”. Given the demographics of age it might be a matter of, as morbid as it sounds, that generation to die off given that the younger people who did vote overwhelmingly voted to remain.