Comment by SpicyLemonZest
5 hours ago
I'm not quitting the site myself, but the kind of cynicism evinced in the comment is toxic. If your response to the very ideas of accounting, law, healthcare and journalism is to wave your hand and nonspecifically declare that they couldn't possibly be respectable, you're making things worse and creating cover for unethical people, even if you understand yourself to be doing it in a wise and savvy way.
It seems more to me like an acknowledgement of the realities on the ground, which is the first step to actually fixing things.
To be very clear, one of the things from the original Trump platform was to "drain the swamp", right? Now, clearly that's not what he meant... or maybe he did from different terms maybe from you and I. But for supporters? They saw a government that they felt was corrupt, wasteful, and out of touch. Propaganda or not, it doesn't matter.
That whole idea of the government being wasteful and untrusted reared its head again in the 2024 election with DOGE.
Now things politically have flipped, and more non-partisan or less radical individuals have been pushed out to make way for partisan yes-men. Now the people on the other side of that political equation no longer trust things like the Federal Judiciary, Department of Education (or that it will even be funded), things like the Center for Disease Control, etc.
Oh and journalism! Everything has been bought out, and been allowed to in massive mergers by the Trump administration. Then they stuck government-approved heads at each of them.
Not acknowledging these realities is the first step toward repeating them.
Somehow, trust in institutions in this country will have to be rebuilt.