Now now, they innovated by turning Facebook from the way you could see what your friends were doing on your feed into algorithmically determining exactly which batshit insane ‘news’ stories from cranks and posts from crazy people would be the most effective rage bait to specifically you once they figured out that anger and rage are the most effective way to cause retention and engagement.

They basically scientifically perfected trolling, and figured out how to monetize it.

Sure it widely proliferated dangerous anti science nonsense, bigotry, racism, sexism, homophobia, fostered the Q Anon insanity mind plague and facilitated it going mainstream, but hey, hate sells.

And then right wing media and talking heads run with only that news and voila the election was rigged, against them.

According to a recent FD Signifier video, they have already purged him and a whole ton of other people (cough probably black people cough) from voter rolls in Georgia, he said that hadn’t happened to him in nearly a decade, gotta re register, and of course they don’t tell you if you’ve been purged, that onus lies on you to figure out.

Its already illegal to hand out water to people in line for polls.

I would be entirely unsurprised if say I dunno maybe your scenario happens… or maybe they just call in a bunch of bomb threats to polling locations in blue areas, seems to be doing a good job of shutting down Ohio at the moment.

Judging from what I’ve seen so far from reports which are early and incomplete, I would eduguess that Mossad basically intercepted a particular brand of these ‘pagers’ known to be used by Hezbollah, put small bombs in them and wired them in such that they could be activated by a broadcast signal, and probably a lot of non Hezbollah people who just happened to buy this model of ‘pager’ in the target areas and timeframe for introduction of these tampered device onto the market also got an exploding hot pocket.

May I suggest you take up learning a martial art?

Not sure what they’re like in your area, but when I learned Karate as a kid in the 90s/00s, everyone was treated according to their skill level and discipline, gender/sex is irrelevant (beyond cups for guys and thick sports bras for gals).

Its not likely to make you bullet proof, but it does stand a decent chance at bettering your physical and mental health, give you more options when a gun is not part of the scenario.

Also, I would second the notion of going to a range and signing up for basic pistol and rifle familiarization, as well as basic medical training, unless you legitimately are totally terrified of firearms or have some kind of trauma or PTSD related to them.

Such courses usually provide you with firearms for the course, you don’t own them or take them home, they stay at the range. You just learn the basic principles of operation and safety and shooting technique, under hopefully an extremely serious couple of range masters who will hopefully teach you to treat all guns as if they are loaded until you have personally verified they are not, and to never, not even accidentally, point the barrel of a gun at something you do not intend to destroy.

You don’t need to go buy a gun first and not trust yourself with it.

In fact usually a novice shooter is going to want to experiment a bit with different calibers and guns with differing grip styles and weight distributions untill you find something comfortable to shoot.

I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Except that you can effectively screen for basic interpersonal skills with a casual conversation of 15 to 30 minutes where the interviewer throws in some flashpoint / hot topics and asks a few more pointed or consequential questions after a general report has been established.

Or better yet, do that with their possible coworkers, or get said coworkers to suggest topics and questions for the recruiter in the above scenario.

Why ask?

To further solidify the notion that you, as a recruitee, must show total devotion and unwavering loyalty to a potential employer.

Obviously recruiters know that people jump around after contracts or when they feel they are not being paid enough, that people scatter shot apply to anything like guys swiping on tinder because their prior experience trying to get a job has shown them that there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, that desired qualifications are nearly always absurdly niche or dramatically overinflated, and that there’s a hundred or a thousand people applying to every job opening.

It is literally their job to facilitate this process. Of course they know how all if this works.

This rhetoric is basically an attempt at conditioning you into being servile. If you ‘play ball’, you might get this particular job, and then they’ll basically lie to you about upward mobility, job stability or repeating contracts.

They are salesman. They sell the job to you and you to the company.

Why would they be anything other than slimy underhanded liars?

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Obviously scientists don’t want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.

Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?

The game had a whole system of ranks and qualifications based off actual Army ranks and skills.

You had to do pretty comprehensive medical training before you could be a field medic, you had to qualify as a marksman to be able to use a DMR, you had to pass the SERE school before I think night time missions and NVGs could be used, had to complete parachute training before levels you’d paradrop into, etc, and these would become available as you reached a certain number of kills or successful missions or what not.

Basically, it had a persistent progression system, and it was quite in depth…

… And if you did things like tons of team killing, or killing the instructor, not only would you end up in the brig… you’d have basically all of your progress reset.

Its about as close as you can get to permadeath in a round based, pvp shooter.

A few things about America’s Army:

It may (I am 90%, but not 100% sure of this) have been the first PC, online, FPS to feature ragdoll physics for dead players.

It employed a… rather baffling way of doing team conflicts:

You are always on Team America, and the opposing team is always Team Generic Terrorists. (With 80s/90s movie era costumes for the bad guys, dependent on map location)

What this results in is… you have your M4. You are shooting at bad guys with AK74su’s. But… from the opposing team’s POV, its the same.

So, if you kill someone… you can now pick up an AK74su. Even though from their POV they dropped an M4.

And so on, with rough equivalents as an SVD and an M110, an RPK and an M249.

These ‘picked up’ weapons would basically morph into having the ballistics of the Eastern Bloc weapon at the point they were picked up.

Very weird, I’ve never seen another game do that.

The game also had a good number of training courses, many of which were initially bugged as all hell.

I remember the SERE course failing me consistently, showing that I had been detected by guards who are apparently able to see through boulders or 30 feet of a hill (the camera would show you how you were spotted like a ‘deathcam’ and it was quite obvious it was often total bs).

Also, in certain training missions it was possible to shoot your instructor.

This would result in you being sent to the brig: Log in to your account, and for a week, all you get is a view from inside a prison cell, no game menus or options at all, rofl.

Oh, final thing: I am pretty sure this was the first online PC FPS that modelled that M203 projectiles must travel a certain distance before the explosive charge will detonate, so taking out someone with an M203 round to the face, non explosively, became a way to humiliate people, as you either had to be pretty skilled to do it , or your opponent had to have very poor situational awareness.

There are grenades and grenade launchers that are or have specific anti tank designs (though they probably won’t work too well against any tank produced after the 70s), so, probably yes.

Also, while an RPG is not technically a ‘grenade launcher’ (as it fires in a basically flat, direct trajectory, compared to grenade launchers that lobbed more like artillery shells, indirectly in high arcs), a lot of less weapons literate people and journalists see ‘Rocket Propelled Grenade’ and might think it thus counts as a ‘grenade launcher’.