Doormat in the Form of the American Flag

You’re asking your guests to step on the flag?
That’s hardly the biggest issue here. The vast majority of Americans (~70%) have liberal values. Why announce your politics if most people find them abhorrent?

You’re asking your guests to step on the flag?
That’s hardly the biggest issue here. The vast majority of Americans (~70%) have liberal values. Why announce your politics if most people find them abhorrent?

I’ll be the first to admit ignorance of the rules that govern federal vs. state prosecutions; I really learned a lot here.

The pace at which our society is falling apart seems to be near freefall.
I know these are tough times. We’re trying to:
Manage a pandemic when 20%+ of us are anti-vaxxers.
Restore rule of law after an attempted coup, where 50% of Republicans believe Trump won the 2020 election.
Live amicably with people of color, though white nationalism has expanded to a level not since the KKK in the 1920s.
Keep our children safe in a country where AR-15s are multiplying like rabbits.
Yet it tears our hearts out to see people, like this guy, turn into savages and make a bad situation worse.

How could the mass stupidity and hatred we have in the United States wind up in Canada if they didn’t learn it from their neighbors to the south?

The problem, of course, is that this piece of legislation in the State of Washington will be challenged in various courts, and one of them will eventually overturn it. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the extremely unlikely event that it gets that far, will refuse to hear it.
I love this reader’s enthusiasm, and I hope she will not be let down, but that’s all but inevitable. It’s one of what could be collectively called “our great American tragedies.”

Fox should not be allowed to promote itself as a “news” source and, at the same time, defend itself against lawsuits on the basis that “no one with even a feeble level of intelligence accepts that its programming is truthful.” This is the basis on which Fox has consistently prevailed in court against litigants who accuse it of libel.
This idea is not my own; the Canadian government doesn’t permit Fox to broadcast, but only because the network refuses to replace the word “news” with something honest, perhaps “opinions” or “entertainment.”
Having said all this, the FCC actually should revoke Fox’s license to broadcast if it’s shown that it deliberately spread COVID disinformation that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

We hope that all the phenomena that signal the rise of fascism, book banning among them, will all be rejected by the American public.

What are the take-aways from this piece about the ants?
Very little intelligence, at least as we conceive it, is required to optimize well-being for everyone.
We are born with an instinct to take care of one another.
Our civilization has “evolved” to the point that the most core elements of our being have been stamped out. The result: the systematic destruction of our only home.