Why Trust is the thing enemies of democracies always target first.

When the Nixon scandals were at their height, 36% of Americans told pollsters they still had a high degree of trust in the American government.

Today, according to Pew, that metric stands at 16%.

How did we get here?

In 2016, Russian intelligence hacked both the RNC and the DNC.

They never revealed the dirt they got on the RNC, but at Donald Trump's request, they

handed off DNC data, including Hillary's emails, to the media via WikiLeaks with the successful

goal of destroying America's trust in her. Yesterday we learned from

reporting by the Guardian that Alexander Smyrnov The Russian agent who began peddling lies about Hunter and Joe Biden and Ukraine in time for the 2020 election and was recently arrested for lying about that to the FBI, was paid $600,000

paid $600,000 by people affiliated with Donald Trump,

all to destroy our trust in the Biden's.

This is part of a larger pattern that is tearing America apart.

The crisis with the Supreme Court, the racist mass shooters in Buffalo, El Paso, and white supremacist

militias, Republican primary candidates trying to

one up each other on their willingness to refuse to count all the ballots in the

2024 election. And hours surpassing 1 million deaths from COVID all derived from the same thing,

the destruction of trust in American society and politics.

As I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump destroyed our trust in our public health

institutions for his own political gain, so we have massively more COVID

deaths than, for example, Australia. As the New York Times noted in May of 2022, quote,

if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, about 900,000 lives

would have been saved.

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