The treasury is expanding the Patriot Act to attack Bitcoin self custody

The main website that matched people to trade fiat for monero (localmonero) got closed recently because "reasons".

It is pretty popular and outlawed since a while. Basically the only relevant crypto currency used for purchases on the street since several years now. You can look up the number of daily on-chain transactions and tends to be on top every day.

You likely would only notice this if you need to donate money for someone with the wrong opinions or live at a non-aligned country.

If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy.

Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular.

>Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do

There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.

Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.

Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.

Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.