“At empire’s end, it is not reality people desire to keep company with; rather, they seek commiseration with comfortable lies that serve to mitigate the shock that arrives when calcified arrays of self-deception are in danger of collapsing. Apropos, the hostility directed at those who point out the U.S. is not a democratic republic, but a corporate/bankster oligarchy and national security state/militarist empire, wherein voting maintains the illusion of free choice, and no matter [which] candidate of duopolist governed late empire is elected president he/she will pursue empire’s path of vast wealth inequity and perpetual war.

History is a story of bitter grace and pain-wrought wisdom: In this tale, we learn: Collective trust is a catastrophic misjudgment, made possible by its partner in crime, an artist of legerdemain, who goes by the moniker, Hope.

At empire’s end, at the graveyard of partisan conviction, it is self-deception to believe one can vote away the systemic corruption of the patrician class who control the apparatus of power and who own both presidential candidates of this duopolistic system i.e., two corporatist/militarist tools who have been well-vetted to ensure the continuance of the present order.”

— Phil Rockstroh (edit in brackets added by me)