Yeah, let's stop with this "don't judge people for their poiltics" bullshit
Yeah, let's stop with this "don't judge people for their poiltics" bullshit
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Hot take:
The problem isn't the other middle class people who've been convinced to wear a different color hat.
The problem is the oligarchs who've been plotting to take over and destroy the power of the people by dismantling the government. The people who are actively doing that exact thing while the ignorant masses engage in tribalism and attacking people for voting.
Engaging on this topic is just furthering the distraction tactics. The people who're actively working to destroy the government or implementing policies targeting minority populations are not your neighbors or anybody that you will run into on social media.
Ok but I still partially blame the people who voted the oligarchs into power
Sure, but as a leftist who grew up in a deep red area, I can tell you that those people are, largely, uneducated and ignorant.
It is because of that ignorance that they're able to believe the lies that led them to acting the way that they did. The people who bear the majority of the responsibility and blame are the ones who know that they're taking advantage of and cultivating that ignorance.
I get to hear, in real time, the propaganda engine work on these people (which includes most of my family). I see how topics are framed, by media personalities, into palatable actions. As I'm writing this, there's a podcast playing at my job, where DOGE is being celebrated for finding 'fraud and abuse'. I know, for a fact, that the listeners don't have a high school education and have no idea how the government's payment systems work... but the radio is telling them that DOGE is doing good work.
So, how can they know any better? These are not people who're ever going to continue their education and their media literacy skills were developed in the 80s. They're simply not equipped to handle the scale of lying that exists in the modern world.
On the other hand, the person talking, has multiple degrees and has served in the federal government. That person KNOWS they're lying but continue to do so because it is profitable. I find people like that to be far more culpable. They're lying for profit (grifting, to use an over used term) and their lies reach millions of voters.
Then you have the people who benefit from the lies. Trump and Elon know that they're dealing with ignorant people, they know exactly how to use populist rhetoric at public events. While, in private, they're using the power that they've obtained to corruptly enrich themselves and their sycophants.
Direct your ire at the people who're actively profiting off of lies and corruption. Help to educate the other people around you when they're being fed lies.
Attacking your neighbor while Elon and Trump ransack the government is not only pointless, it's completely counter-productive and ensures that we'll never unify against this kind of power grab.
I live in the state that gave Trump his highest margin of victory, so I have seen what you describe many times.
My friend listened to punk music and played in punk bands. He was very conservative politically. I hadn't seen him in a while and we decided to go to a show hours away and catch up. We had stopped talking politics to preserve our friendship. We were on our way back from the show, listening to Rancid, and I couldn't stand it anymore. I was like "hey man, you love this music, but do you not hear the lyrics? How can you say the things you say?" I didn't know he had changed.
He had been doing survey work for a mining company for years. He explained that after he got out of that job, everything became clear. He wasn't conservative anymore, in fact he had become progressive.
He explained that when he worked with nothing but hard right conservatives, with Fox News on all day, it seeped into his brain and corrupted him.
This is an intelligent man I'm talking about. He was a victim of propaganda and was smart enough to realize it once he was away from it.
This is always on my mind:
""We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated."
Trump said this at a speech in Nevada during the primary in 2016, and people cheered.
Ignorance is no excuse.
What if the system is designed to keep you ignorant?
If you want to come to that conclusion in a political postmortem 20 years from now I'd fully encourage it.
The problem is that right now the house is burning down and shaming people for playing with matches won't save us.
Oh but you don't get it, they are NAZIS you seeeee
I mean I am sure of that even tho I haven't actually met them or talked to them or even made an effort to understand them. But yeah pretty sure
I think once someone is making Nazi salutes on a presidential inauguration stage, we can safely call them a Nazi. And as the old saying goes, you know what you call all the people who sit down at a dinner table with a Nazi?
Fully agree that we can see the obvious fascists at the top and the rot seeps down. But idk that I can call 77 million people who casted one ballot Nazis.
My (maybe optimistic) perspective is that the rot has shallow roots. These days you don't need thousands of dedicated grunts to print flyers and hang posters. Just get one billionaire with a social media platform and a few dozen managers and you can broadcast anything you want.
Germany had a reckoning after the war and plenty of people were able to admit that yes, in fact, they were Nazis and that was wrong of them. And then they tried to make things better.
Because they realized that maybe all they did was support the Nazis by wearing an armband, but that still made them a Nazi and that made them complicit.
Plenty more were never able to admit it but also were never willing to talk about what they did during the war out of shame and embarrassment. Because they also knew they were complicit.
All of these people who voted for Trump did not just sit down at a table with a Nazi. They went out of their way to go to a voting booth or sit down and fill out and mail a form to choose a man who made absolutely no secret about his Nazi ideals. The roots are very, very deep.
Right but this isn't the conclusion of a world war yet. I don't doubt that the problem gets worse after people are forced to participate or be complicit while atrocities are committed.
There's a series of miniscule steps from being ok with a hateful statement to being ok with dangerous people being rounded up to being ok with dangerous political opponents being rounded up to being ok with gas chambers.
Assuming that everyone who ignores the first step is a full fledged Nazi isn't putting faith in people to change or even resist. Plenty of people stepped out of line in Germany and paid the price.
The real lesson after WW2 is that the Nuremberg Trials were far too lax and narrow in scope. Germany's populace (while on the cusp of swinging far right) went through the most thorough denazification. It's still putting up much better resistance than the United States (which had basically no punishment for nazi sympathizers) or Italy (handwaved due to surrender).
What is the effective difference between a "full fledged Nazi" and someone who ignores all of their promises and votes for them anyway?
Ya, I think calling them all Nazis isn't accurate or right. But you can absolutely call them Nazi supporters.
What is the fundamental difference between a Nazi and a Nazi supporter?
The word supporter of course.
