Well you see, back in the 1970s there was a president named Richard Nixon, whom by all accounts WAS popular enough to win the upcoming election. Had he just run a fair campaign, I'm not saying it was in the bag, but he had a very high likelyhood of winning. This was the same president credited with ending the highly unpopular Vietnam War, which was credited as being started by, and escalated by two seperate democrat presidents. Here he was a republican who was ending it. He also created the EPA, which while less important for his campaign, was still a huge talking point. Just running on those two things alone, he'd likely have won.

Instead of doing that, he attempted to cheat, and install listening devices in his opponents headquarters. He was eventually caught. Now it's at this point that American culture forever changed.

See, when he was caught, the republicans COULD have taken the L, punished Nixon, and shown the United States government would not tolerate treason by imprisoning Nixon. That never happened. Instead, the republicans went a different route.

Nixon stepped down as president, Ford granted him a FULL pardon, and the republicans set about a long term planto make sure their future schemes wouldn't be held accountable by public opinion in the future.

So they began policies that lowered education. Years later they started Fox News. They continually year after year cut funding for public education all across the country. They could have chosen to run better candidates, held the position with respect, and came out more respected for having paid the consequences for their actions. Instead, they disregarded any honor our government might have held. They turned it into an us vs them mentality. They tried to, and achieved skirting all responsibility.

Now the only thing left to do to solidify this new mentality, is progressively get the general population dumber and dumber so in the future they hold party above country. They did this by killing education for the masses, slowly over time so nobody noticed a sizable shift. They began their own news channel with the sole intent on telling their audience that they're the good guys, and democrats are the bad guys.

The problem with this logic is that democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin. That coin being America. So by hurting democrats, you're hurting America, and the coin falls. It doesn't strengthen the republican side to hurt the democrats. It just hurts America, including the democrats. But after literal decades and generations of brainwashing, they're treating politics as a sports game. MY side won, so YOUR side lost! Except that's not how that works. They're blind to the fact that yes the democrats lost, but so did republicans. They don't understand that their policies (like anti-abortion) are leading to things like higher taxes to pay for welfare (due to a higher percentage of unwanted children born to parents who aren't ready to be parents).

The more they push their guys, the more they can't see that their guys are hurting their own lives, and creating problems they claim to be against.

So they blame the democrats for their problems, because it SURELY couldn't be their own people causing problems. And that causes them to go even MORE extreme on their candidates.

And now you got people like MTG, who I'm fairly convinced is just trolling her own base at this point, but her base is too stupid to get it, because the plan 50 years ago worked so well.

And that's where we are. A nation of nutjobs with daily public shootings, who won't admit that gun control is a solvable issue. Especially since we're the ONLY nation with this problem.

You don't hear Canada shooting up movie theaters. If England had a public shooter they'd politely wait in line, and take turns.