I think you’ve kinda missed the lede - religious fanatics. We’ve got plenty of those. Other western countries have quite a few religious people, but they aren’t often in-your-face cross wearing, “I’m a Christian”, openly judgy Karens like they are here.

Operation Northwoods

One thing that's often missed about this in the hero-worship of JFK is that Kennedy's administration desperately wanted to intervene in Cuba militarily - just because Castro was a Communist - and they had been pressuring the CIA hard to find something to justify an invasion. This was the context in which the CIA finally said "well, we can't find anything, so how about we fake attacks on US citizens and blame it on Cuba?" It wasn't like the CIA came up with this plan on its own out of the blue and presented it to Kennedy for approval.

To their discredit, the CIA would certainly have done this happily if Kennedy had given the go-ahead, but he said "uh, that's a little too far."

don't forget the CONTA scandal, illegally financing violent drug cartels to flood black streets with drugs, to sell missiles to Iran and fill private prisons with black people for slave labour.

it sounds like made up BS.

I've always maintained that we let 9/11 happen to drum up public support to spin up the war machine and further the conservative plot to take over the country. I don't think we orchestrated it, but I do think we knew and looked the other way.

We did it with Pearl Harbor, so it's 100% within the realm of possibility that we did it with 9/11.

1. Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.

2. Because Americans didn't listen to George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.

3. Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.

Because they don't do proportional voting like you Germans or we Austrians do, most of their elections (and all federal ones) have one winning candidate in a state or congressional district.

And there is mostly not even a requirement for 50% of the vote, but the candidate with most votes wins. That creates the two party system.

The parties in the US are much broader than in our countries, it's very common for different members of the same party to vote against each other.

It is actually 2 flavors of the same party. The USA is a one-party state, controlled by the capitalist party.

EDIT: lol you can downvote me while you decide whether you want to vote for the Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border or the other Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border 🤪

"Winner takes it all" makes it inherent to the system. They really really need to change that. But that is hard, when it keeps the only two relevant partys in power.

Google "Gerrymandering". It'll all come together.

They have no impact for several reasons, but one weird thing about us Americans is that we're never happy. The Clinton years were peace and prosperity. Nope! Not having any more of that, in comes Bush. We did well enough with Obama. Nope! In comes Trump.

Oh man, I'm not sure how to condense this much context.

1. Since the days when the USA was economically reliant on slavery for land development and market growth, the US population has been split over the issue of race and ethnicity. Even before that, the USA was founded by religious conservatives fleeing the church reforms in Europe. "Freedom of Religion" was put into the constitution not to separate church and state but to protect church from state. Because of these very strong and very harmful ideologies, naturally the people split into two camps: for ethnonationalism or against.

2. The US Constitution is very old. The USA as a country is very young, but it's still one of the oldest democratic systems of government still in use today. It is very flawed: utilizing the electoral college, capping the seats in the house, each state with wildly different population getting two senators, the senate confirming judges, and worst of all "first past the post" ballots. In hindsight a lot of this is terrible for a functioning democracy, but the ethnonationalist party doesn't really like democracy anyways so it's going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.

It's kind of like how the Weimar Republic was before the Nazis took over. There is a united hard right party and then theres the SPD. You COULD split the SPD's influence into farther left and communist parties, but then if they don't individually have enough seats they fail to form a government the Nazis have opportunity to become majority in the face of continued inaction from the government.

Unfortunately, running on this as a campaign promise would get you killed. What you need to do is promise amnesty on the grounds of "healing the nation" and then revoke that amnesty once you're in power. As Sun Tzu wrote, never surround your enemy on all four sides.