Hello Dutch,
Poetically put but wrong. People are not robots, they have free thought, free will. Some are dumber than others, some are more mentally ill or, like Lionfish, simply not-to-bright and immature.
No one person caused all the problems in our nation. Our nation's response to COVID, to infrastructure, world events and the coup attempt on 1/6 were partially set in motion over 40 years ago when the Republican Party began shifting to a quasi-theocratic party. That, in turn, was a response to overreaching Democrats as the Cold War came to a close.
Consider it like black mold. It starts out very small. If nothing is done, it grows and keeps growing until something is done. The black mold growing in our nation feeds on partisanship and "the blame game".
Immoral assholes will try to use this "black mold" to their advantage instead of working with others to remove it. One of those immoral assholes attempted a coup on 1/6/21. He's backed by most of his party.
That was about the time the
Powell Memo came out. Powell outlined how big corporations needed to have their own way of getting their message out because after Ralph Nadar criticized the Corvair, and Big Tobacco tried to deny the fact that smoking causes cancer, corporations were seeing their image become tarnished in the main stream news.
The Powell Memo insisted that big corporations had to control their own public image. That began the whole myth that 'the media is liberal.' It was because the real news began to impact wall street profits. Big corporations wanted their own information stream to better control public thinking. It laid the groundwork for what became Fox.
"On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor, Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the US Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.[14][15] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step towards socialism.[14] His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.[14] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry.[14]
The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)[14] to use their private charitable foundations−which did not have to report their political activities−to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.[14] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
The Powell Memorandum thus became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as inspiring the US Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[16][17] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[18][19] "
