I mean, apart from his money giving him a platform to really spread hate and hurt people, it really is pretty sad at an individual level. Dude is mentally unwell, and not just because he’s an evil hateful person.
There’s plenty of evil people just as bad and just as loud that are in control of their mental state and understand what they’re doing.
Gutting your house and living in a utility closet is pretty messed up, rich or poor
Even looking strictly at the voting population, Trump got less than 50% of the votes; more people voted “not Trump” than voted for him. That’s before you account for the majority of 90 million non-voters holding left leaning views (studies say irregular voters are as low as 40% republican voters) with either no acceptable candidate to support or living under voter suppression.
Did you know it’s possible to with the presidency with as low as 23% of the popular vote? Guess which color states have a massively oversized impact on the electoral college…
The people getting shot are not Trump voters at this point. More specifically, people that are opposed to absolutely destroying other countries are the first ones targeted.
Even if we all suffered perfectly evenly, only 22% of Americans voted for Trump. Please keep the other 78% in mind.
Putting aside whether or not that’s anathema to the cause, I’m not sure how you’d “other” them in a meaningful way. The reason it works for the right is that they target groups who’s members are publicly visible and can’t voluntarily leave (LGBT+, minorities, foreign religions, etc…)
If you target a group of people for their beliefs (something not overtly visible), they can either relabel their group or plausibly claim their beliefs differ in some way. We already do this for fascists and nazis, but very few people are going to outwardly admit to these ideals. Now they’ll just say they’re “extra-constitutional”, “alt right”, “Christian patriot”, or any other hat a bigot wants to swap out for far right authoritarian.
You can’t “other” them where they already proudly claim a majority (white + Christian) so what are you left with?
There might not be an easy alternative right now.
People tend not to internalize a problem until they can personally see it, and a lot of these problems (deportations, cutting education, handcuffing the CDC, etc…) might not affect them until things get truly bleak. Unless of course they do something reckless like directly cutting funds that goes directly to their wallets (Medicare or Social Security).
Spreading awareness has always been a huge problem. Activists in Tsarist Russia had the same problem of trying to reach out to uneducated rural peasants and their efforts didn’t go smoothly. And of course this was before everyone had hand held disinformation machines in their pockets.
I don’t have a magic bullet but we do have some things going for us. It’s not yet illegal to spread radical ideas, our targets are generally literate, and we still share a fair number of cultural references.
The following is my best guess at advice, I’m just as open to ideas as giving them:
The tricky part is that mainstream social platforms are a non starter. You’d never outweigh the echo chamber. In my opinion digital organization is secondary at best because anything can be suppressed at the whim of server owner, ISP, or government.
So as dumb as it sounds, go forth and talk to people in real life. Be sure you’re educated on what you want to talk about (read your history and theory, know what political buzzwords actually mean). Try to avoid activities that insulate you in your own comfort zone, and gravitate towards ones with wide appeal and low barriers to entry.
Start a woodworking club with some like minded friends or join a book club and offer suggestions. Running group, bodybuilding, birdwatching, whatever… If you want to do some good for your community, join a mutual aid network.
Try to know the narrative these people are living in, even if it’s a fantasy. Avoid trigger words they’re primed to react to, keep it simple and let them draw their own conclusions. Not everyone will be receptive, some people are just assholes.
It’s not sexy but it’s also not that hard to point out glaring injustices in the world. Most people can at least see that far and agree that something needs to change, starting that conversation is first step.
Being reactionary to a nazi salute at a presidential inauguration is warranted, reasonable, and useful.
Being reactionary to my 70 year old neighbor who ate too many paint chips as a child because he had a Trump sign in his lawn for 2 weeks before the election is less useful.
Being reactionary against an anonymous stranger in your own digital echo chamber is pointless (assuming their bad argument isn’t also in bad faith).
It’s not necessarily a lack of education, I know a really smart surgeon, generally very reasonable, who fell for this stuff.
If you’ve never seen the echo chamber this guy lives in you don’t understand how bizarre it can be.
On the surface there’s a lot of influencers that can say truly regressive lies, and make them sound innocuous. They say it with such confidence and mixed in with truths and half truths. It can be hard to see the fallacies and misinfo even if you know what to look for.
There’s a constant drip of cherry picked stats and talking points designed to reinforce what he’s feeling. In the back of his mind he knows those support his case but he doesn’t really have an original source to reference. He tries to say them with the same confidence that he heard them with, but they’re not based in reality and look pretty ugly without the professional window dressing.
There’s videos where people do deep dives on this stuff (I can try to find one if you want). You could probably also experiment with it yourself if you have a VPN and a fresh/virtual device to make an account on.
Wecome to Disney’s North Korea+ (brought to you by Tesla)
I’d agree that your reasoning makes sense but is reductionist when talking about America’s two party system.
I grew up in a conservative town and I personally knew lots of people that were truly, deeply compassionate people. Christian in the truly radical, hippy sense of the word. Except they had one issue, abortion made them sad.
It wasn’t any ignorance of the issue or believing in satanic baby eating, but a philosophy arbitrarily picked by their community. They didn’t hate anyone getting an abortion, they just had some utopian vision of a world where they didn’t happen.
Since abortions were framed as murder and one party promised to ban abortions and the other party expand access, they were told there was only one ethical choice.
So their one line of thought trapped them. I could argue up and down the ballot on issues they agreed with, how the economy should be handled, prison reform, etc… but that one stupid idea held them back.
They’re still good people, and voted 3rd party a few times when the mood struck them. But I don’t think wanting one bad policy (with the best intentions) makes them bad people.
So I’d say yes. In that instance, with those people, it’s generalizing to say they were on board with any of the hateful policies. They were held hostage by their single issue, and the right’s rhetoric made damn sure they could never wriggle out.
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.
This is the political awareness equivalent of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
People are overworked, lack childcare, have poor healthcare, come from underfunded schools, never get exposed to diversity, etc… Just because it’s possible to escape those conditions and doesn’t mean it’s natural or easy.
Saying people are dumb and lazy is a thought terminating cliché, you have to view that as an extension of the problem.
Unless you’re talking about 90%+ of the force resigning, they won’t struggle to backfill with poorly train and radicalized militia LARPers. Probably a much worse situation
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).
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.
Surely my message will be seen by the millions of Trump voters on… checks notes …Mastadon
How do people not realize they live in an entirely separate digital space from the right.
Not just separate platforms (YouTube vs Rumble, Mastadon/Bsky vs X/Truth) but perfectly segregated by their personalized algorithms. They keep us separated by design. How many trans influencers are on truth social? Not enough for a user to view them as anything but an “other”…
This post is reaching nobody that needs to see it unless it has a sarcastic title over the screenshot
That’s the one thing that gives me hope: their views changed radically but only in one generation through concentrated, directed effort. Calling people idiots or sheep misses the point that this is the natural result of exposing people to this shit daily.
Nobody in history ever thought people are inherently rational and considerate, society is held together through a culture that reinforces it. The tools of the information age can rapidly and drastically shape our society however we want it, we just need to pull them out of the hands of those billionaires burning civilisation to the ground for their own benefit.
Nobody’s born a nazi, and in my opinion painting millions of people with a broad brush solves nothing even if feels righteous. There’s a whole spectrum of people ranging from apathetic to ignorant to hateful and inflammatory.
As funny as it is to call someone an idiot for voting based on the price of eggs, it lacks empathy for what that might mean to some people. What if all you’ve been eating is instant ramen with an egg to pay for a medical bill that insurance didn’t cover and now you can’t even afford that.
You might be more inclined to scroll past yet another “Trump says wild shit” headline but engage more with right wing Tik Tok content arguing that the system is broken because of the ((woke-ism)) and ((DEI)). Even if you don’t believe it, now the social media algorithm has your weak spot and can put you in an echo chamber to exploit it…
Are there still people out there waving swastikas and chanting racist shit in red hats? Sure. But screaming at them won’t change anything. If someone can be changed, you’re not going to reach them now with lecturing and scolding. It’s not kiddie gloves, it’s taking a realistic approaches to convince real human beings
Edit: Apparently saying people aren’t born Nazis is controversial in 2025. Let me frame it like this: if 30% of the population are idiotic, racist scum and tweeting about it for 8 years hasn’t changed anything, why keep doing it? Why keep tweeting free content for Libs of TikTok? Why not direct that anger towards the people running the asocial media platforms? The people actively dismantling our government? Why not do it in a non-digital space? Who cares if MAGA-loving Cletus is on your side or not?
The dirty little secret is that nobody in any government has control without the backing of guys with guns. In the US, that’s the executive branch headed by the president.
If Democrats (and any handful of Republicans secretly hiding their shred of dignity) have any chance, it’s not going to be as a toothless opposition. Best case they’re ignored, worst case they have a terrible accident involving a high window.
Ensuring they have some semblance of support from the military would be priority #1, second would probably be hoping the Supreme Court would lend them legal support by not tearing up the constitution. With the backing of both, the non-treasonous remnants of Congress could pick up the pieces with some semblance of legal continuity.
Without the military, your only choice is to concede to the executive branch. You could stand firm and end up a constitutional martyr to fuel some civil unrest, maybe even form your own government in exile, but not much beyond that.
Thanks for appreciating the struggle, I’ll drink to that 🍻