#american-perception

#american-perception

'They are small stakes, but, of course, everything that is quintessentially American—property, the right to violence, the right to protect land—are all intensely operative in this space.'

Jefferson's words on equality are often seen as self-evident, yet they fail to encompass enslaved individuals, women, and other marginalized groups, revealing a significant contradiction.

Americans are also facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism-gullicism, if you need a portmanteau-that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices. Reliable information is both more available and harder to find than ever.

Starting next month, the cost of renouncing your U.S. citizenship will go down dramatically - a boon for people already shouldering the burden of paying for a major overseas move. Anyone wishing to formally shed their American citizenship is required to obtain a form called a Certificate of Loss of Nationality, and right now it comes with a whopping $2,350 fee. In April, that fee will drop by 80% to $450.

A record high of adults—80 percent—believes that Americans are divided on the most important values. National pride, trust in government, and confidence in institutions are near record lows. The Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz says the United States hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. Nearly half of Americans think another civil war is likely in their lifetime.

The air feels heavier. And the struggles are changing shape. Beyond my office walls, the world is shifting, and my clients sense the tremors. The things they once trusted, global order, democratic norms, and even their own personal safety, no longer feel solid. They feel brittle, as if one strong wind could bring it all down. And what they're sensing isn't imagined.

They all follow the rule of 'only take one,' and you can rehide other shines you find. The entire city turns into a collective scavenger hunt for roughly a month, and it's common to see packs of humans hunting in the rain and snow, even at night with flashlights. In this small corner of the world, tucked into the armpit of the PNW, someone decided

As authoritarianism accelerates - as government-sanctioned violence becomes more overt in immigration enforcement, in policing, in the open deployment of federal force against civilians, and in the steady erosion of civil rights - people are scrambling for reference points. But instead of reckoning with the long and violent architecture of U.S. history, much of this searching collapses into racialized tropes and xenophobic reassurance: This isn't Afghanistan. This isn't Iran or China. This is America. We have rights. This is a democracy. This isn't who we are.

On Tuesday, the president did a drop-by into the White House briefing room, and he spent almost 90 minutes on what can only be called an "episode." Ostensibly, he was supposed to be speaking to the anniversary of the first year of his second term. The White House even released a stone hilarious list of 365 wins," one for every day of the first year of the Golden Age.

We in the rest of the world have had to hear a lot such a lot about what this US government and its hardcore fanbase thinks about us. So you know they'll be super-relaxed and free-speechy about hearing some thoughts about how they look from the outside. Let's use last Saturday as a single snapshot. In Minneapolis, they had the shooting by ICE agents of a protesting nurse who posed no threat an event promptly, provably and blatantly lied about at the highest level.