You mean the Republican party? At this point I'm convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.

Irony is truly lost on this platform

what's happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it's dying, it didn't work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of "When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left"

So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We're seeing it in real time.

But this has happened time and time again. We're a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it's always the same song and dance "well lets go this way, sure it didn't work out last time but I don't believe it'll happen to us THIS time".

So it's not so much "what the fuck is this timeline" but rather "well it's our generations turn for bullshit". And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn't experience it, but their parents did, and now it's our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but...we as humans sure do love watching reruns.

And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails

They didn't just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn't be ignored. Gamers haven't done that, unfortunately.

Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You'll be fine.

As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.

That is, I expected things to get worse, but not "avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones" levels of worse.

Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.

But I thought there's some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that's not what I see.

As a bit of gloating - at least now the "why are you not all revolting against Putin" Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.

There's always Canada, a similarly large yet sparsely populated land with awful winters and bad food, you'll fit right in.

Don't get your hoped too high on Germany, Switzerland and Austria...

But how nice of the headline to imply such things don't exist while pretending to be shocked about other things

Well US free speech is telling lies and misleading millions of people on broadcast television.

They literally have a Press Censorship system where they will send something called "D-Notices" to newspapers to shut them up.

They are paving the way for feudalism to replace liberal democracies,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

If you're wealthy enough, you can do whatever you want.

Freedom™

With a president meddling in both universities and media free speech, there is no way to seriously say USA has free speech.
But even before these issues freedom of speech was very challenged in USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index

I lived for over a decade in Britain until about 5 years ago and by the time I left I truly believed the UK was the most likely country in Europe to turn Fascist within a decade.

So far, they're well on schedule and there isn't a month without some news about it further confirming how wise my decision to leave after the Brexit vote was.

Labour is centrist and they desperately want to exert more control. English are sheep, so no one will protest daddy government.