You could start by reading about the School of the Americas, Operation Condor and Operation Gladio. See how the USA treats its “friends”.

Read about cointelpro and see how it treats its citizens. Some tactics are still in use today.

Add to this one another map of past CIA-backed coups and despair.

Wealth redistribution is only resetting the board, not a change in the game.

The US controls gigantic parts of the information/entertainment space: movies, music, social networks, YouTube, TV, even their politics is a keyfabey circus for the rest of the world. American propaganda is literally everywhere.

It’s an image of consumption and individualism above even self preservation, so deeply internalized that Americans and perhaps half of the rest of the world don’t notice. Sometimes it feels like the US lost its mind in 9/11 and started hurting itself in confusion but it was never a “smart player” in the world, just a narcissistic bully.

It’s not necessary for the CIA to be involved because it’s literally superliminal and grotesque at this point in time. The US throws its weight all around the world and is brutish and callous with its “use of force”, which means murdering people (and destroying property, oh they love them some property) in case there’s people in this thread that are lost in so many layers of euphemisms and irony.

Americans need to deal with this instead of becoming defensive and recurring to whataboutism. Yes, China and Russia are horrible and murderous in their own ways and at a different scale, but one must not use them to avoid self reflection.

You are clearly not a victim of these issues and the situation is so alien to you that apparently the only way for you to relate to them is via the news. Violence and prejudice are things that happen to “other people”.

Real people are suffering real oppression every day. Some in a small almost invisible way and others live in permanent fear of violence because of who they are.

That things were worse in the past is no reason to stop progress. And things did get better because people fought for them, often to death.

I hope you are arguing in good faith and have the moral strength to accept you may be blind to some realities and reconsider your beliefs.

Conservatism by definition is thinking “Things are good right now, let’s not change anything” or even worse: “Things were better before, let’s go back to that”.

The issue is “better for who”? Women, queer people, POC, working class people were NOT ok. Implicitly you can see that conservatism is bigoted by (at a minimum) ignoring or misrepresenting the realities of people they don’t care about. It’s just that lately, more and more conservatives are explicit about it and showing their true colors, but the philosophical underpinnings are the same.

Crack’s certainly involved in all this.

It doesn’t appear like they value growth for growth’s sake. And that’s cool because it lets them focus on other, arguably more important, stuff. Many of our preconceived notions about social networking don’t translate well to the federation model.

Be careful with this line of thought. It’s called Horseshoe theory and is usually parroted by right wing authoritarians to falsely discredit leftist points of view. Ironic that they are using some of their own beliefs to do it, isn’t it?

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

That being said, there surely are authoritarian leftists and they do not deserve any of your time. However, their authoritarianism usually is not born out of hatred like right wingers but out of impotence against the hierarchies that dominate our lives. Of course, as in everything, YMMV.

Edit to add: it’s important to mention that a lot of pro China and pro Russia discourse is astroturfing so it’s not really people declaring earnest beliefs.