This Week Has Revealed 3 Types of Americans

[Coventina]

About halfway through the 2024 film “Civil War,” the actor Jesse Plemons appears in an unforgettable cameo. Playing a psychopathic militiaman of unknown allegiance in an anarchic conflict that has divided America, he stands next to a mass grave filled with bodies. He has just sprinkled them with powder, but somehow his candy-colored sunglasses and eerily still demeanor are even more menacing. Brandishing his rifle at a multiracial group of journalists, he asks a question.

“What kind of American are you?”

Plemons blithely executes two journalists he deems foreign; the others manage a narrow escape, rescued by a colleague who arrives not a moment too soon.

It isn’t surprising that this searing seven-minute scene from a movie released before Donald Trump’s return to the White House has become something of a viral meme over the past year. Masked paramilitaries roam the streets of American cities, asking anyone whose Americanness they deem insufficiently obvious to prove they belong here. Brown skin or the hint of an unfamiliar accent is often reason enough for these agents to demand that a person show their papers and answer a version of the question, “What kind of American are you?”

But I have been thinking these past few weeks about that scene, and the movie as a whole, for deeper reasons. In Minnesota, I saw scenes that reminded me of the chaos and violence in civil wars I’ve covered in other countries. Heavily armed agents have rampaged through the streets, assaulting, tear-gassing and arbitrarily detaining people. They have fired on civilians at close range, killing two of them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/opinion/trump-minneapolis-america-pretti.html

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This nation is falling apart.

[NewHendoLib]

1. There are empathetic, thoughtful people. There are weak, aggrieved, easily lead people afraid of "other". And those

to manipulate them - narcissists, the greedy, seekers of power and little else.

Gross generalization, but somewhat fits.

[keep_left]

2. Unfortunately, 30% of the electorate, or rather 30% of Trump's electorate...

...are MAGA dead-enders. I imagine that only about half of them are actually willing to follow Trump over the proverbial cliff, so let's call it 15%. But that's just a guess. And that 15% is still a hell of a lot of people. It's a truly scary mass movement.