ANS -- America's Moral Collapse

Hi -- This one is not really a new message, it's just very blunt.  

--Kim

MS NOW{News Junkies}

Darrell Errey ·etdonpSsrol6g0lm5fh21m138gi721a41001lhgt302iftg671amuml38a76 ·

James Derheim

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Michael lives in beautiful St. George, Utah. I lived in Utah from August of 1997 to August of 2002, when I moved to Sarasota. So, we have that in common.

We also share a sense of disbelief that the United States of America has descended so far, so blisteringly fast, into fascism. It's not coming, it's here, now. The government of the US is fascist.

It causes me a lot of psychic distress to think about the tens of millions of Americans fully willing to throw away 249 years of striving to be that "Shining City on a Hill" that Ronald Reagan (that evil bastard) spoke about. He was a great speaker, a professional actor, and the last Republican I ever thought was decent. I learned how he started the time bomb of destroying the middle class that I grew up in later, after I became an adult and got engaged in politics.

Many people who are choosing to destroy America are doing so through passiveness and failing as citizens to be educated and engaged. Voting once every 4 years is not enough. Historians will record that the death of the United States' democratic institutions came about from a mix of evil, apathy and propaganda. I am so disappointed in those who have nothing to say.

Michael Jochum takes it from here:

What I'm watching unfold right now feels less like politics and more like a slow-motion moral collapse, the kind you read about later and wonder how anyone pretended not to see it while it was happening. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner ruling the killing of Alex Pretti a homicide," multiple gunshot wounds," flat, clinical, almost antiseptic language should have been a line in the sand. The murders of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good should have stopped everything. Full stop. Instead, they barely registered as a national reckoning, just more names folded into the ever-expanding ledger of state violence. That, more than anything, is what terrifies me: not just the brutality, but how quickly it's normalized.

We are living under an administration that treats the Constitution like an inconvenience and power like a birthright. A Republican Party and a Congress that once pretended to care about law, restraint, and accountability now function as a silent accomplice, unwilling to act against Donald Trump for anything, ever. And while the headlines churn through distractions, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, EPSTEIN, the next shiny outrage, the real story is happening in plain sight: deportations without due process, mass detention, the rounding up of the disenfranchised, the unwanted, the politically inconvenient. If you're disabled, poor, undocumented, outspoken, elderly, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, congratulations, you've made the list.

We are told, often with a shrug, that tens of thousands of people are now being held in detention. We are told new facilities are being built, quietly, efficiently, in small towns across the country. We are told this is about "law and order." But anyone with a functioning conscience understands what this really is: infrastructure. Capacity. Preparation. Prisons don't appear overnight unless someone plans to fill them. And when citizens start protesting, real American patriots, not flag-waving authoritarians, they're dismissed, mocked, surveilled, or threatened. That alone should tell you where this is headed.

Authoritarians are painfully predictable. Narcissistic psychopaths obsessed with power don't see people; they see obstacles. Humanity is collateral damage. Snatching a five-year-old into custody by masked agents isn't an aberration, it's a signal. It tells you how far they're willing to go, and how little resistance they expect. We've already seen the language: veiled racism wrapped in superlatives, open dehumanization, flirtations with fascist symbolism that are no longer even subtle. This isn't theoretical. It's happening. It keeps happening.

And like every authoritarian movement before it, this one has its propaganda machine. A network that reaches millions, floods the zone with lies, and reframes cruelty as patriotism. Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of the loyalists perform their roles dutifully, while Congress acts as a rubber-stamp Reichstag, applauding or looking away as the Department of Justice is hollowed out and repurposed into a political weapon. Career public servants, journalists, minorities, the LGBTQ community, anyone committed to actual truth, all labeled enemies of the state. That is not hyperbole. That is the playbook.

It is not a giant leap from where we are now to ghettos, to trains, to destinations "unknown for security reasons." The only thing that ever slows that descent is public resistance and a refusal to pretend this is normal. What's most chilling is that the missing piece, the logistical framework, is actively being assembled while we argue online about decorum and tone. At the same time, religion has been hijacked and twisted into a cudgel. The message of a poor carpenter who preached compassion and humility has been reshaped to serve greed, cruelty, and blind obedience. Prosperity preachers rake in money while blessing policies that would have horrified the figure they claim to worship. Their congregations, misinformed and inflamed, become an unofficial army, loyal not to conscience, not to truth, but to a false prophet who demands everything and gives nothing back.

History tells us that systems like this don't collapse because someone makes a well-reasoned argument on cable news. They end because people finally refuse to comply. Because fear stops working. Because the cost of silence becomes higher than the cost of resistance. That is where we are drifting, whether we like it or not.

I'm not a religious man, but even I find myself reaching for words that sound like prayer. Dear God, or whatever still listens, save us from this gathering storm of demagoguery, cruelty, and moral rot. Save us from confusing power with virtue, obedience with patriotism, and silence with safety. And if salvation isn't coming, then at least grant us the clarity and courage to see this moment for what it is, and the spine to act before it's too late.

—Michael Jochum

Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition