I'm not an American either, buddy. But they're our mutual imperial overlord. You can't just silo off Australia and Canada and Europe as the "good democracies" that are totally separate from the flawed American quasi-democracy - we've been following them in lockstep since the end of WW2, and only once the idiot Trump decided that soft power was gay did we even start to think about doing something different.

You have at least one former prime minister in the Epstein files, plus other politicians and businessmen. The Euros have plenty as well. This thing was an open secret and what just part of doing business. Beria was one man (I mentioned he's part of the bad 30% btw) and he got shot pretty much immediately after Stalin died. The Epstein thing is the entire political and business elite of the western "democratic" world.

Sure, in principle democracy is obviously better than dictatorship, but what democracy? I used quotations around "democratic" because we don't really have democracy. This goes for the rest of the western "democracies" as well as the US. Popular will has little effect on public policy, and voting just usually means selecting the bad option over the worse option. The worse option still wins about half the time. When a genuinely popular and progressive candidate comes along, the party and media machinery is sure to sabatoge them.

Chomsky (Epstein associate, but this doesn't invalidate all of his points) wrote about this in Manufacturing Consent - the media, despite all of our nominal free speech rights, despite not being state controlled, only presents a narrow ideoloogical spectrum, acting as propaganda just as surely as the state-run media in an undemocratic country does. Chomsky argues that this is due to market forces, internalized assumptions, etc. As he said during an interview "I'm sure you believe all that, but you wouldn't be working here if you didn't." Chomsky could get away with this not just because he was an anticommunist who was good friends with the ruling class's child pimp, but because a certain level of dissent is required to maintain the illusion that free speech matters. The system is built to tolerate dissent and subtly mold public opinion and public expectations. It's a very sophisticated and very effective method of control compared to the crude methods employed by "authoritarian" states.

But let's put all that aside for a moment. What good is democracy when it's democracy for a few rich countries that exploit the world's poor majority? Even in a social democratic fantasy where we all have democracy, human rights, and strong social safey nets, we're still just sitting at the top, extracting wealth from and oppressing the majority of the world. As Lenin said, “freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”