I remember the 80s well, although I was a teenager then, I was politically conscious.
Times have changed. Russians did gain significant freedom from the time the USSR collapsed, although it’s still not a free economy.
The US, on the other hand, is much less free than it was then. Sadly, this was by design.
Our intelligence agencies have gone from supporting freedom (although the CIA was always full of socialists like Herbert Marcuse) to being hostile to freedom. They did what they could, twice, to remove Trump from office, and finally succeeded in the 2020 election.
Some conservatives think that the US is the same country that it was 40 years ago, that we just have the wrong people in charge. It isn’t- there has been a slow-motion, successful revolution to transform it into something hostile to liberty.
There are still benefits to living here, but they’re economic (job, property) and personal (proximity of family, schools, friends, etc.). It might not be possible to leave, but there are other countries that are more free.
I’m not against the West or Western values, and definitely Chronicles magazine is about as pro-Western as a media outlet can get. But our culture and mainstream media are now against Western values, and they’re the ones relentlessly pushing the CIA’s neocon Russia/Ukraine propaganda.
When it comes to propaganda, I avoid it, just as I eschew junk food.
Glad to hear your such a purest. You didn’t live through the first Cold War …. Showed us what communist states are really like
I point to places like Venezuela and 1930s Germany to suggest people are quite capable of voting them selves out of freedom
Don’t return incumbent politicians. Even the bureaucracy needs a shake up now and again to clean house