I’m going with a third option: who the fuck cares?
America appears to be the batshit landscape the rest of the world knew it was but we were always getting drowned out from the noise of your soft power via hollywood and manipulative political/economic orgs. If you’re having issues, has it been considered that you might wanna contain that shit instead of plaster it all over the world news? It’s exhausting to continually see headlines about what nutty thing that wouldn’t occur anywhere else happened today in Jesus land. And then have to suffer through the trivial machinations of moaning and hand wringing so that citizens can relieve themselves of responsibility and go back to their Netflix and video games.
America is cooked all the way through because it fosters a culture that takes away the compact mirror and hands a megaphone to kids when they’re born. That’s not gonna be cured in one or three or five years via election cycles. You have a terminal infection of culture and the sooner you come to grips with that, the better for everyone.
South Africa ranks pretty high on that list but it’s already gone through the discernment phase where the collevtive majority went “huh. This isn’t quite working out the way we’d planned. Let’s try something else”. And now the people who don’t like the results of “doing something else” are now fleeing to america, because the discernment phase hasn’t happened there yet.