At least a significant portion of us don't.

Religious people are used to being lied to all the time. It's simply part of who they are. They have to suspend disbelief or they will be cast out of their society.

The US still has a long time to go before it grows up and out of religion, if ever. There will always be people whose entire lives are constructed on a fantasy and they cannot allow anyone to pick at the base and have it crumble.

I suspect a significant portion of others spend their lives that way as well. So they believe nothing. They can't.

They consider doing their own research reading whatever lies support their current attitude. I consider it trying to find source scientific papers that will disprove my beliefs since that means I'm learning something.

The internet compartmentalized a huge portion of the population into their echo chambers. They don't give a crap about their neighbors, they give a crap about whether or not someone clicked a like on a post they made.

People have often succeeded by lying. And part of it is other people looking at them and wanting to believe. Just play on that desire.

I projected confidence my entire career. I had to pretend I was the smartest guy in the room. And sometimes I had to argue loudly when I wasn't really sure. But I am pushing the best option I know of the moment and God damn it, we have to do something now!

The people spending the money do not want to hear doubt in your voice. They won't spend the money if they do. That could be bosses or they could be owners or they could be clients. No matter what, they have to think you know what you're doing.

My boss, the guy who called himself my towel boy, often would loudly say the following in the middle of an argument:

Just because you are confident does not mean you are right!

I was usually right.

I could ramble on and on but I really don't think this is anything new. Our society simply does not care as long as they are rewarded in some manner.

On the other hand, the internet definitely allowed groups of distant people who are not neighbors gather and support each other.

Need support for having problems breastfeeding your baby? There's many groups for that. Need support for figuring out how to hunt down the Jews and kill them? There's many groups for that.

Before the internet, the people who expressed the abhorant antisocial attitudes would be isolated. They would be known as the local crackpot. Sometimes they would identify each other in some manner and send newsletters to each other.

You might get 10 or 20 or 50 of them in one of these identifiable groups. The rest of them would be isolated and wither on the vine.

Not anymore. These people can now gather online and support each other and amplify their attitudes in real time. This turns what might have been 50 people into many thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions.

I had optimism. I was an idiot. I believed that generational change will pressure people to act a bit nicer to each other, to lose some of the racism, to learn to work together a bit more. I was wrong.

Obama was a fluke. The right-wing reaction was very strong and got Trump in. The left wing bounced a bit and pushed and 4 years later got Biden. It was very close. And then we got cocky. We thought we could elect a black woman. This was insane.

She got millions less votes than Biden. Trump got new voters. He got every swing state. That blew me away. I have to accept that my optimism was misplaced.

One thing I expect the Democrats to do is to back off on lgbtq plus whatever the current letter is. They are going to back off on trans support. They're going to have to try to finesse a platform that gets them back in power while simultaneously paying lip service to the Republican points in those areas. Trump managed to get a lot of voters because of this.

People believed his BS because they wanted to.

A huge portion of the US population is programmed to hate gay people. They had their own family members who are gay and cast them out on the street. They spend their entire lives making jokes and denigrating them. And now a political platform considers them people and that they should have rights. How dare they! This litmus test that the Democrats lost on the current US population.

Democrat politicians are going to start making deals with the devil. Will they get it back? I don't know. When you lose this badly and lose the House and the Senate and Trump has essentially been coronated king by the supreme Court, what will the Democrats do to regain power?

I don't expect a midterm Blue Wave. I think there's too many people engaged now and the old rules of the midterms don't apply. It will pattern after this election.

Time to stop paying close attention to the news because the stress level isn't worth it.