Agree that the problems predate social media. Also agree with your assessment of the courts and insider palm greasing. To the dumbing down of the populace: there has always been an undercurrent of conservative white people trying to maintain the county’s wealth and power for themselves.

But this:

widespread ridiculous amounts of Nationalism >switching of people’s critical thinking about their >country and the purposeful stupidification of the >populace

Was made infinitely worse by the media environment post-9/11. Since at least 2005, it has been apparent that there was an intentional effort to sell conflicting versions of events to the people so that they could not discern what was true. Yes, all of the American media at the time contributed to the garbage decision to go into Iraq. Initially though, the worst of the confusion of facts was largely driven by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News. All of the Internet has greatly exacerbated this since then, and it has been asymptotic post-2020.

Yes, American culture has (always?) been narcissistic and obnoxiously self-aggrandizing. But America had been a gigantic population of wealthy consumers for decades. So it draws all the avaristic psychopaths from around the world like moths to a flame. Are the local people to blame for the machinations of Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk? Saudi Arabian and Russian wealth underwrote Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, even if you count him as one of “the local people”. To the headless beast that is social media now, you have Russia contributing millions of dollars via Tenet Media in the 2024 campaign.

Obviously there are plenty of American bad actors in this stew of billionaire-owned manipulative media, but most of them act with an agenda that does not involve ripping the country apart.

The US has had centuries of the conservative white majority consistently trying to suppress the vote of minorities and the youth. Hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the voter rolls shortly before the 2024 elections, with a majority of those purged being minorities. Sauce: https://sdvoice.info/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-here-are-the-numbers/

Many conservative states put fewer polling locations in poor communities. They block measures to make voting easier like same day registration and vote by mail.

Stop demonizing people that have been systematically disempowered. The Republicans in the Senate are about to shut down all other business in an attempt to strip married women of the right to vote.

The local people are to blame, but they’ve been influenced by decades of foreign-backed media/ propaganda and ideologues. Yes, some of it is due to the selfishness and greed of American culture - at every level - but the collapse is due to a confluence of multiple factors. And a non-trivial factor has been the influence of foreign propaganda and henchmen (it’s not just Donald Trump that is beholden to Russia/ Israel).

“The honor of taking Cuba” sounds like an old man talking about a young girl he’s about to rape.