Calm your tits, Karen (Part 1 of 2)

Or: why the United States of America is not the world, never was, and is proving it more spectacularly every single day

In a recent Note I told the AI-haters to ‘calm your tits’.

Karen from Ohio took offence at an Australian expression. An American, offended by something someone from another culture said. Truly unprecedented. Alert the media. Oh wait, your media’s busy covering whatever Captain Impulse Control tweeted from the golf course at 3am. Never mind.

And like all the best keyboard warriors, you didn’t have the guts to say it in public. You slid into my DMs with your snottogram, Karen from Ohio, because apparently confrontation is only acceptable when you’re doing it from behind a screen where nobody can see you. Very brave. Very on-brand.

Let me tell you something about Australians. We have non-biological cousins. We call them Kiwis. New Zealanders are some of the nicest, politest, most generous people on this Earth. They will sit there at the bar while you rip into them, take the piss out of them, tell them why they’re wrong about everything you know is right. They’ll smile. They’ll nod. They’ll buy you another round.

But everyone at the bar recognises when our Kiwi cousin has had enough. It’s not like they stop smiling. It’s more the way their jaw sets. A light flickers, so subtly, behind their eyes that the hapless newcomer doesn’t see it happen. But the locals know. And the locals leave the bar via the nearest door or window, because they know what is coming next.

Our cousins will come over and upturn your table, then give you a pummelling so intense your embassy will find it hard to recognise you, and you will never, ever forget it. If you’ve seen Once Were Warriors, you know Jake the Muss. Sitting quietly in the pub, minding his own business, until some dickhead says the wrong thing and suddenly furniture is airborne, teeth are on the floor, and grown men are climbing out bathroom windows.

I am an Australian Jake the Muss.

You sent me your little DM. You poked the Aussie. And now you’re going to hear what the rest of the world actually thinks about your country. Not because I hate America. I have dear American friends, and I’ll get to that. But because someone needs to say it with the data to back it up, and I am entirely out of patience.

Your offence doesn’t interest me, Karen. What interests me is what it reveals: the reflexive assumption that American cultural norms are universal norms. That the way things are done in the United States of America is the way things are done, full stop, everyone else can adjust.

They’re not. There is a vast, ancient, complex world outside of your borders. A world with millennia of culture, art, language, philosophy, science, and humour that was already old when your country was still a tax dispute with the British. A world that, by virtually every measurable metric of human flourishing, is doing a damn sight better than America right now. And a world that is increasingly furious about being dragged into the consequences of American stupidity.

'It is not that I am not a fan of American exceptionalism. That is like saying I am not a fan of the moon being made out of green cheese. It does not exist.' — Noam Chomsky

Don’t take my word for it. I’m just an Australian psychologist sitting in a café in the Vietnamese highlands, drinking cà phê sữa đá and wondering how we got here. But the data doesn’t care about my feelings or yours. Let’s walk through it. Every number sourced, verified, and damning.

Education: a nation of people who can’t do basic maths

Let’s start where it all begins. The classroom. Because the ignorance has to come from somewhere, and Karen, I have a theory about where.

The PISA assessment tests 15-year-olds across 81 countries. In 2022, the United States ranked 26th in mathematics. Twenty-sixth. Singapore topped all categories, in case you’re wondering what competence looks like. American maths scores were the lowest in the assessment’s entire history. More than a third of American teenagers could not compare distances between two routes or convert prices into a different currency. A third of your teenagers can’t manage the basics of functioning in a world that uses numbers. No wonder you elected a man who thinks tariffs are paid by other countries.

And here’s the part that should make you spit your coffee out: 39% of American students who sat the test were among the most socioeconomically advantaged students globally. They had every material advantage money could buy. Private schools. Tutors. Laptops. The works. They still couldn’t keep up with kids in Estonia. You’re not failing because you’re poor. You’re failing because your system is broken and you refuse to see it.

'A lot of the educational system is designed to make people as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.' — Noam Chomsky, paraphrasing Adam Smith

But education is only the first domino. Because when you don’t educate your population, the consequences cascade through everything else. Starting with what happens when those poorly educated people get sick.

Healthcare: spending the most, dying the youngest

The United States spent US$13,432 per person on healthcare in 2023. Over US$3,500 more than the next highest country, Switzerland. Nearly double the average of comparable wealthy nations. For that kind of money, you’d expect Americans to live forever. Or at least longer than the Poles.

You don’t. The result? The lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries. 78.4 years, ranking 30th out of 38 OECD countries. On par with Poland. Now, Poland is a perfectly fine country with excellent pierogis, but it’s probably not the benchmark the Greatest Nation on Earth was aiming for.

'Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.' — Martin Luther King Jr., 1966

Australia: 84.1 years. The US: outside the top 40 globally. And getting worse. Forecast to drop from 49th to 66th by 2050. Drug use, obesity, high blood sugar, high blood pressure. Americans are dying younger while their healthcare system hoovers up more money per capita than any nation on Earth and delivers it straight to insurance company shareholders.

You spend the most. You get the least. You die the youngest. And you call it the greatest healthcare system in the world. If that’s not a symptom of a country that can’t think straight, I don’t know what is.

And nowhere is the human cost more obscene than in what America does to its mothers.

Maternal mortality: killing your own mothers

The US maternal mortality rate: 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022. More than 55% higher than Chile, the nation with the second-highest rate among high-income countries. Norway: zero. Zero, Karen. As in, none. Switzerland: 1.2. Sweden: about 3. The US ratio is three times higher than Sweden, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, and France.

‘The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.’ — Mahatma Gandhi (attributed)

Among Black women in America: nearly 50 deaths per 100,000. In the richest country on Earth. In the twenty-first century. Women are dying in American hospitals at rates that would shame most of the developed world, and the country can’t even be bothered to send someone round afterwards to check on the ones who survive.

The United States is the only high-income country that does not guarantee provider home visits or paid parental leave after birth. The only one. Every other wealthy nation looked at new mothers and said, ‘You need support.’ America looked at new mothers and said, ‘Good luck. Don’t forget to fill out your insurance paperwork on the way out.’

Which brings us to the broader question of whether America cares about its people at all. Spoiler: the evidence is not encouraging.

Paid parental leave: the only wealthy nation that doesn’t give a damn

The United States is the only country among 41 OECD nations that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. Zero at the federal level. Estonia offers more than a year and a half. Thirty-seven of 38 OECD countries offer paid maternity leave, averaging 17.3 weeks.

The richest country on Earth wraps itself in the flag, weeps about family values every Sunday and election year, and then tells a woman who’s just given birth to get back to work or starve. The cognitive dissonance would be impressive if it weren’t so lethal.

Child poverty: a deliberate cruelty

Relative child poverty exceeds 20%. Norway: 5%. The US rate is twice as high as the UK, Sweden, or France. The US spends about 1% of GDP on family benefits. The UK and Ireland spend 4%.

This is not an accident. This is not a funding shortfall. This is not ‘we’d love to help but the money just isn’t there.’ This is a policy choice. America chooses, actively and repeatedly, to let its children grow up in poverty while spending more on its military than the next ten countries combined. Priorities, Karen. Your country has them exactly backwards.

And what happens to those children when the system is done failing them? Brace yourself, Karen, because the answer is worse than you think.

The foster care pipeline: what America does to its own children

I have written a book called The Convenient Monster. It examines the global child sexual exploitation trade from the demand side: the market economics, the systemic failures, the questions nobody wants to ask. And one of the most damning findings concerns the United States itself.

The Polaris Project and multiple state-level investigations have identified the American foster care system as a direct pipeline to sex trafficking. Children age out at eighteen with no support, no housing, no money. Traffickers know this. They wait. In some documented cases, they recruit inside the care facilities themselves, building relationships with children months before they age out. The underage-sex market doesn’t need to cross an ocean. It’s waiting at the care home door.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported over 32 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation material online in a single year. Thirty-two million. The number is so large the brain can’t hold it. It becomes noise. Which is, I suspect, partly why nothing proportionate to the scale has been done about it.

The mechanism is identical to what operates in Thailand, the Philippines, or Cambodia. Vulnerability plus economic desperation plus inadequate protection equals supply. The only difference is that when it happens in Ohio, nobody makes a slow-motion documentary with obligatory melancholic, sparse piano. Because the comfortable narrative requires the problem to be over there. Among them. Not us.

'The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.' — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A country with these numbers has no moral authority to lecture anyone about protecting children. None whatsoever. Does that stop you? No, you love pontificating about how badly Johnny Foreigner treats their children. You have reports and publications and conferences about it. Entire careers built on pointing fingers at the developing world while your own foster care system operates as a recruitment agency for predators.

But America’s talent for exporting dysfunction doesn’t stop at its borders. It also exports its psychiatric framework. And that framework is doing damage worldwide.

Psychiatric hegemony: exporting broken thinking

Full disclosure: this one’s personal.

I am a counselling psychologist. I hold a Master’s in Counselling Practice and my academic research has generated over 450 citations across 25 years. (That means it’s still being cited a quarter of a century later, which is indicative of something, but I’m not entirely sure what. Proof that I am both smart and that I also know nothing, I guess.) At the age of 66, I was diagnosed with AuDHD—autism and ADHD occurring together—after spending decades being medicated for bipolar II disorder that I almost certainly never had. Thirty years of wrong medication, wrong diagnosis, wrong framework. My book Misdiagnosed documents this in full, and believe me, it’s not a fun read. Enlightening, yes. Fun, no.

A psychiatrist who oversaw my care in Australia, Dr Amel Hmam, abandoned me as a patient mid-treatment, a patient with documented recent suicidal ideation, because I had the audacity to lodge a written complaint about her chronic lateness and missed appointments. She fired me by deleting every future appointment without consultation. That’s not a personality conflict. That’s a systematic professional failure with potentially lethal consequences. I filed a formal complaint with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. Their response: they’d look into it, but I’d never know the outcome. Regulatory opacity protecting incompetent practitioners while patients remain in the dark. Outstanding.

But here’s where it becomes an American export problem. The diagnostic framework that enabled my misdiagnosis, the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is an American product. Published by the American Psychiatric Association. It is the dominant diagnostic framework used by psychiatrists worldwide. Its categories, its assumptions, its pharmaceutical entanglements shape how mental illness is understood, diagnosed, and treated in countries that had no say in writing it.

'It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.' — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The chemical imbalance theory of depression, the one used to justify prescribing SSRIs to hundreds of millions of people globally, was an American export. The research evidence doesn’t support the theory. At all. But it was phenomenally profitable for American pharmaceutical companies, and so it travelled. It crossed every border. It shaped psychiatric practice in Australia, in Europe, in Asia, in countries whose own research traditions and cultural understandings of mental distress were bulldozed by American diagnostic hegemony.

When American psychiatry gets it wrong, the whole world gets it wrong. Because American psychiatry, like American foreign policy, assumes its framework is universal. It isn’t. And the bodies, the decades of wrong medication, the misdiagnoses, the lives diminished by a framework that mistakes neurodivergence for mental illness, those are on America’s tab too.

The DSM isn’t the only American product that’s damaged the rest of the world, of course. The technology sector has managed something equally destructive, with added surveillance capitalism and slightly better graphic design.

Social media: America’s gift to global mental health destruction

I was in the vanguard of social media for business, back when it first started getting public attention in 2005. By 2009 I was being flown around the world to lecture on how social media was an incredibly powerful tool for human connection, for business transformation, for democratic participation. I was a true evangelist. I believed in it.

I was wrong. Or rather, I was right about the potential and catastrophically wrong about the people who would control it. Which is, now I think about it, a fairly succinct summary of the American experience generally.

Every major social media platform that has shaped global discourse is an American product. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. YouTube. All of them. Built in Silicon Valley. Governed by American corporate ethics, which is to say governed by shareholder extraction and almost nothing else.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is built on surveillance capitalism, profiling users with a granularity that would make the Stasi blush. It enables, amplifies, and profits from political manipulation, ethnic violence, and disinformation on a planetary scale. It ran secret psychological experiments on 700,000 users without consent. Its own internal research showed Instagram was harmful to teenage girls’ mental health, and it did nothing because fixing it would hurt user growth. It paid a US$5 billion fine, the largest privacy settlement in history, admitted nothing, and carried on. It has been fined €405 million for violating children’s data protections. It builds shadow profiles on people who don’t even have accounts. If you’re reading this and you’ve never had a Facebook account, congratulations: Facebook has a file on you anyway.

Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it and turned it into his personal ideological playground, was something genuinely remarkable. It was imperfect, chaotic, sometimes vicious. But it was also the platform where the Arab Spring found its voice. Where dissidents in authoritarian regimes communicated in real time. Where passengers live-tweeted from plane crashes and the world responded. Where movements like Black Lives Matter organised and amplified. It was the closest thing the internet had produced to a genuine global public square.

Musk bought it and torched it. Gutted the safety teams. Turned verification into a paid attention-ranking scheme. Platformed extremism. Suppressed dissent. Algorithmic preference for the loudest, angriest, least thoughtful voices. An American billionaire took a globally significant communication tool and turned it into a rage-click carnival because he could. Because in America, if you’re rich enough, you can buy the town square and set it on fire and call it free speech. America does love a bully.

‘If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.’ — commonly attributed to Andrew Lewis, 2010

The void Twitter left has been filled, imperfectly but meaningfully, by Substack. A platform built on direct relationships between writers and readers. Little algorithmic manipulation. No ad economy. Long-form thinking, depth, nuance, and conversation over performance. Ironically, closer to what social media was supposed to be than anything Silicon Valley ever produced. And it is where the writers, thinkers, and citizens driven off other platforms by American corporate enshittification have landed. For now, anyway. We don’t trust it, because you taught us not to.

And then there’s TED, which went from a global platform for innovative, informed thinking to a platform where someone will confidently tell you how to live your life and then coincidentally sell you a book and a course about how to live your life. TED was LinkedIn for the intelligentsia and intelligently gullible. Many of my incoming DMs on Substack begin with words to the effect of, ‘I trust this DM finds you well.’ It does not.

The pattern is always the same. America builds something with genuine potential for human connection, then its corporate culture extracts every dollar of value from it until nothing remains but a behavioural-modification farm. It did it with social media. It did it with healthcare. It did it with education. It does it with everything. It’s like watching someone buy a beautiful old house, gut it for copper wire, and then wonder why the roof fell in.

But social media and Silicon Valley are relatively recent American exports. There’s an older one. One that’s been doing damage for far longer, and far more insidiously.

Religion: God’s own country exports God’s own bigotry

The United States is the most religious wealthy nation on Earth. Not in a quiet, contemplative, tend-your-own-garden kind of way. In a loud, organised, politically weaponised, globally exported kind of way. American evangelical Christianity is not just a domestic phenomenon. It is a multinational operation with a budget, a strategy, and a body count.

The prosperity gospel, the doctrine that God rewards faith with material wealth and that poverty is essentially a spiritual failing, is an American invention. Born in megachurches and televangelism studios, perfected by preachers with private jets and stadium-sized congregations, and then exported to every corner of the developing world. It is now, by many accounts, the most common form of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. It tells some of the poorest people on the planet that if they’re poor, it’s because they don’t believe hard enough. And then it passes the collection plate. Which is, when you think about it, quite the business model.

'When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.' — commonly attributed to Sinclair Lewis (disputed, but widely cited)

But the prosperity gospel is merely cynical. The real damage is political.

When American evangelicals lost the fight against gay marriage at home in the early 2000s, they didn’t accept defeat. They exported the war. They shifted focus to Africa, particularly Uganda, which they saw as fertile ground due to its conservative Christian majority and young population. In 2009, top American evangelical leaders headlined a three-day conference in Kampala on ‘exposing the homosexuals’ agenda.’ They told audiences that gay Westerners were trying to corrupt and recruit African children. Shortly after, Ugandan politician David Bahati drafted the first version of the Anti-Homosexuality Act.

That law, signed in 2023, imposes life imprisonment for same-sex relations and the death penalty for ‘aggravated homosexuality.’ It makes it a crime to simply identify as LGBTQ+. More than 20 US-based conservative groups have funnelled at least US$54 million into anti-LGBTQ campaigns across Africa since 2007. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: US$7.6 million. Family Watch International, an Arizona-based hate group, co-sponsored an inter-parliamentary conference on ‘family values’ in Uganda just weeks before 444 of 557 parliamentarians voted for the bill. The law was partly drafted with the assistance of Jay Sekulow, a personal attorney to Donald Trump.

The grotesque irony: many pre-colonial African belief systems tolerated homosexuality and, in some cases, incorporated LGBTQ+ people into society with named roles and identities. The homophobia now being presented as ‘African values’ is itself an American and colonial import. The evangelicals framed their campaign as resistance to Western imperialism, when it was Western imperialism. American bigotry, dressed up in African clothing, funded by American dollars, killing African people.

Similar bills are being pushed in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zambia. The pattern is coordinated. The money is American. The ideology is American. The suffering is everyone else’s.

Meanwhile, at home, the same evangelical movement that exports death-penalty homophobia to Africa constitutes the single most reliable voting bloc for Donald Trump. Eighty-one per cent of white evangelicals voted for him in 2016. They came back for more in 2020 and again in 2024. The movement that tells Ugandans God wants them to execute gay people also told Americans God wanted them to elect a man who raw-dogged a porn star while his wife was home with a newborn. Moral clarity, American style.

The rest of the world has religions too, Karen. Ancient ones. Complex ones. Religions that predate Christianity by millennia. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Indigenous spiritual traditions that stretch back to the dawn of human consciousness. None of them needed American televangelists to explain God to them. None of them asked for the prosperity gospel. None of them invited American hate groups to write their laws.

But they got them anyway. Because America doesn’t just export its products, its pharmaceuticals, its diagnostic manuals, and its social media platforms. It exports its God. And its God, like everything else America exports, arrives with a price tag and an agenda.

And what has all this moral certainty, all this God-given exceptionalism, produced at home? Let’s see.

The children America already stole

During Trump’s first term, the ‘zero tolerance’ policy separated more than 5,000 children from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Babies. Toddlers. Children as young as eight months old, flown to foster facilities in the middle of the night, in states thousands of miles from where their parents were being held, without being told where they were going.

The policy was deliberate. This was not bureaucratic incompetence. This was cruelty by design. Attorney General Jeff Sessions told federal prosecutors in May 2018, in words that became the title of a Human Rights Watch report: ‘We need to take away children.’ When a senior ICE official discovered that parents were being reunited with their kids too quickly after court appearances, he wrote to confirm that ‘the expectation is that we are NOT to reunite the families,’ because reunification ‘obviously undermines the entire effort.’

Read that again. A senior official of the United States government explicitly instructed his colleagues to prevent parents from being returned to their children, because giving children back to their mothers and fathers would undermine the policy objective of using stolen children as a deterrent.

The director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement instructed his staff not to maintain a list of which children had been separated from which parents. A federal judge later observed that the government kept better records of seized property than of the children in its care. Let that land. Better records of confiscated suitcases than of confiscated children. There was no tracking system. No database linking children to their parents. No plan for reunification. Because reunification was never the intention.

'The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.' — Martin Luther King Jr., paraphrasing Theodore Parker

Children were held in cages. Literal cages. Chain-link enclosures in converted warehouses and detention centres. A five-year-old boy who would not speak to anyone. A twelve-year-old who developed suicidal ideation. A one-year-old returned to his mother after three months, dirty and infested with lice. Infants taken at legal points of entry, not from people sneaking across borders in the dead of night, but from families who presented themselves at official crossings and asked for asylum, as international law permits them to do.

Hundreds of parents were rapidly deported without their children. Sent back to Central America while their kids remained in US government custody, with no mechanism to find them and no legal pathway to get them back. Mothers were given the choice between abandoning their asylum claim or abandoning their child. In the United States of America. In the twenty-first century.

By March 2024, the ACLU estimated that approximately 2,000 children had still not been reunited with their parents. Human Rights Watch put the number at 1,360 children still unaccounted for, six years after the policy was supposedly ended. Nearly 30% of all separated children. Gone. Disappeared into a system designed, from the start, not to find them.

Human Rights Watch concluded that the government’s conduct met the legal definition of enforced disappearance. They further concluded the forcible separations may have constituted torture: the intentional infliction of severe suffering for an improper purpose by a state agent.

Enforced disappearance. Torture. These are defined terms in international law. And they are being applied to the actions of the United States government against children.

The architects were not held to account. They were promoted. Thomas Homan became Trump’s ‘border czar.’ Stephen Miller became deputy chief of staff. Matthew Whitaker was nominated as ambassador to NATO. The people who stole children from their parents and then lost them were rewarded with more power.

That’s not immigration enforcement. That’s state-sponsored child abuse. And no amount of flag-waving will ever wash it off.

Happiness: a nation eating itself alive

You’d think all of this would make Americans unhappy. You’d be right.

The 2025 World Happiness Report ranked the United States 24th. Its lowest ever. Down from 16th just two years ago. Finland has topped the rankings since 2018, because apparently universal healthcare, functional education, clean air, and not starting wars is good for morale. Who knew.

'America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.' — Oscar Wilde (attributed)

The researchers noted America’s decline was driven by political polarisation and votes against ‘the system.’ Since 2000, deaths of despair have decreased worldwide, with two notable exceptions: the United States and the Republic of Korea.

Your people are miserable, Karen. Your young people are the most miserable in the English-speaking world. And your collective response was to vote for a man who promised to make it all worse. Twice.

Which raises the question of what America does with its miserable citizens. Answer: it locks them up.

Incarceration: land of the free, home of the caged

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on Earth. 583 per 100,000. One in five of the world’s prisoners is American. Massachusetts, the most progressive state, still locks up more people per capita than Iran. The land of the free has more people in cages than any other free country on the planet. So naturally you lecture others about liberty.

'No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.' — Nelson Mandela

Xenophobia: a nation built by immigrants that despises immigrants

Here is a country whose founding mythology is literally immigration. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. It’s inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, for God’s sake. And here is that same country, in 2026, deporting people to prison camps in third countries where they have no ties, no language, no legal protections, and no way home.

'In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else.' — Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

The Trump administration has made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history, backed by nearly US$170 billion in new enforcement spending. That’s more than some countries’ entire military budgets, all directed at rounding up people whose primary crime is wanting a better life in the country that told the world it was the place to come for exactly that.

ICE arrests of Asian immigrants quadrupled under Trump, from around 2,000 in 2024 to more than 7,700 in 2025. Vietnamese immigrants, Karen. The people who built your nail salons, your phở restaurants, your tech workforce. ICE arrested 930 Vietnamese nationals in the first ten months of 2025. Some have been deported to third countries they’ve never set foot in. I live in Vietnam. I know these people. They are not your enemy.

The administration deported over 260 people, mostly Venezuelans, to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre. A 60 Minutes investigation found no criminal charges against 179 of them. A Cato Institute investigation determined more than 50 had entered the United States legally. Deported anyway. To a prison. In a country they’d never been to. Without charges. Others have been sent to Eswatini, a tiny African kingdom that reportedly accepted deportees for US$5.1 million. To Sudan, which is in the middle of a civil war. These are not deportations. These are disappearances with paperwork.

ICE agents have been authorised to raid schools, hospitals, and churches. Forty-one people died in ICE custody in 2025, the deadliest year in two decades. A Hmong American man was asked by a national park attendant whether everyone in his car was a US citizen, for no reason other than the colour of their faces.

Trump called immigrants an ‘invasion.’ When asked about using the military against civilians, he said, ‘These aren’t civilians.’ The President of the United States looked at human beings and said they are not civilians. That is dehumanisation as state doctrine.

Might want to update the Statue of Liberty inscription. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, so ICE can deport them to a prison in Eswatini.’ Pithier than the original, but more honest.

Gun violence: an American speciality

Among comparable wealthy countries: highest firearms per capita, highest homicides, lowest safety ranking. 22,830 homicides in 2023. Every other comparable country looked at the problem and did something about it. Australia did. Britain did. Canada did. New Zealand did. America bought more guns and buried more children and sent more thoughts and prayers and changed absolutely nothing.

'We learned that we can bury children and go back to normal.' — Amanda Gorman, after Uvalde

I know, I know. Second Amendment. Shall not be infringed. The founding fathers definitely intended for an eighteen-year-old to walk into a shop and buy a weapon of war to take to a primary school. Obviously. That’s clearly what they had in mind when they were writing with quill pens about muskets.

The failure compounds. The ignorance, the ill health, the dead mothers, the stolen children, the caged citizens, the buried schoolkids. None of it is accidental. All of it is the output of a system that has stopped working. A system that doesn’t educate its people, doesn’t keep them healthy, doesn’t protect their children, doesn’t support their mothers, cages the desperate, and then wonders why nobody’s happy.

But we’re only halfway through, Karen. So far we’ve only talked about what America is. In Part 2, we talk about what America does to the rest of us. And that, I promise you, is where the table gets flipped.

Part 2: ‘The world is standing up’ — coming next.