Even more insane is prisoners (and their families) end up paying for their incarceration. When you consider that 40% of African American men are under some form of penal supervision, this goes a long way to explain why so many seem to be in a perpetual state of poverty.

For your argument that Democrats are the same as Republicans because of Gaza to have any weight you’d have to establish that 1) the Democrats are the “genocide” party and the Republicans are not, and 2) Democrat supporters follow the party lock step on the issue of genocide. As an independent, it sucks that there is no anti-genocide party, but there is way more opposition to it on the Democratic side, both among elected officials (who are beholden to AIPAC) and voters. The “both sides” argument just doesn’t hold water.

There’s this quote from Chomsky about how spectator sports plays into propaganda because it trains people to think in terms of aligning themselves with a group of people that they they don’t know or have any meaningful connections to, while vilifying the other groups and their supporters who are just like they are. When the team that they are only connected to in their minds win, they win. This is the mindset that gets working class people to obey the orders of plutocrats to go kill working class people just themselves.

Imagine either hating paying taxes or hating brown people so much you’d vote for people who want to see you hanged.