We have to agree where we ARE before we stand a chance to agree about what we do from here.
I appreciate any attempt to win these people back. I mean, there’s nothing to lose. But they were not lied to. Trump was honest about the big picture and it’s exactly what they wanted.
These people are lost for democracy and for reason. To stupidity or to plain evil.
Just look how even people like Dick Cheyney saw this coming and tried everything to stop what’s happening now.
He didnt lie about what his plans of action were, but he was telling everybody immigrants and foreign aid are the source of our problems. (Redunctionist i know)
So he did lie. And most people arent equipped for the disinformation age.
Its easy to say they should be smarter than that, but its also easy to say our administration shouldn’t be fabricating reality to further their platform. Blaming the masses seems pretty pointless to me. We all want better for ourselves. Maybe some are more outwardly selfish or racist or whatever but when are we going to learn to not frame 50% of america as inherently evil? Whats the point of watering down our perception of others?
This doesn’t work with cultists. Any reasonable republican left bailed on the party with Trump.
God shut up
Did I strike a nerve?
Yeah, no thanks. These people were fine with all the hateful and cruel shit the Republicans pedal until it affected them. Whether it’s because they themselves are cruel or just morons, that’s up for debate. But either way, I will not consider them an ally in this. They’ve got to change their shitty ways first.
100% this. They didn’t care at all until it affected them directly. They refuse to feel empathy for others so I refuse to feel empathy for them.
If this “let’s reach across the isle” approach was viable, the present thread would not exist. I’ll go beyond, trumpists watched Jan6 unravel like anyone else and they still voted for him in 2024. So while I’m not advocating for hatred, I would not consider any plan viable that heavily relies on trumpists changing their minds.
The fundamental problem with reaching across the aisle is that the people you’re reaching to aren’t influential in any meaningful capacity.
I’ve got family who voted for Trump. I can visit them, grab dinner, talk politics, reach sensible rational positions that would lead us both to be able to live freely and fairly. And none of it matters. Because neither of us write legislation, enforce the law, or adjudicate disputes.
Meanwhile, I’ve got friends who are working their way up the respective party organs at the local level. And I’ll periodically ask what they think about this or that. They tend to be as annoyed and disgusted as I do (although I’ll often get the “But your team is worse” rejoinder). Then I’ll ask what they are hoping to change. And the simple response I get back is “We just have to be patient until we’re in a better position”. But they’re never in that position. They’re always subservient to some other vulgar asshole. They’re always pandering to some gross freak of a mega-donor. They’re constantly getting hoodwinked by the Elon Musk / Jeff Bezos political turn.
I would not consider any plan viable that heavily relies on trumpists changing their minds.
There are plenty of voters who went from Obama to Trump in 2016 and then from Trump to Biden in 2020 and then from Biden to fucking Jill Stein in 2024 and it didn’t fucking matter. Even when you do get people to change their minds, they don’t get to do anything with the new information.
Vote for Trump or don’t, your district is as gerrymandered as ever. Vote for Beto O’Rourke for Senate or don’t, the SCOTUS isn’t changing hands in our lifetimes because the deck has already been stacked. If Dems retake Congress in 2026, it won’t matter because they’ll still be the same pack of sycophants courting elites in the Tech and Finance Sector that they were back in 2018 and 2006 and 1992. Many of them literally the same people just moldering in office for 40 years or more.
Winning doesn’t mean anything in a system where the outcomes are predetermined. Shaping opinions among the powerless doesn’t mean anything unless you can convince them to actually take back power for themselves.
Right now, its just voting for your favorite politician on American Idol.
people can take back economic power
Keep in mind, the amount of conservatives that have shown any regret in the slightest is an extremely small percentage.
The majority of them do not use social media outside of Facebook. They still get their news from Fox and Newsmaxx.
We do not owe them anything. Conservatives who have a conscience need to abandon POLITICAL conservatism. If you want to be socially conservative, go right ahead and do that in the privacy of your own home. But, if you think you’re going to cross the aisle and try to organize with leftists while still holding politically conservative beliefs you wish to eventually see enforced for everyone, then yea, fuck off.
Nah, they should both admit that they were wrong and okay with extreme bigotry in the White House.
Meanwhile, the rest of us who will continue organizing with our fellow minorities, trans, and working class folks.
That’s it how you get people to start moving over to our side here mate. Sure, what they supported is pretty fucked, but if you’re not going to offer people a way to crawl out of the hole they dug themselves in, no one will want to leave the hole.
You’re not wrong for wanting that, but in your righteous superiority, you’re not helping to make anything better.
You are misunderstood. The path to crawling out of their hole of conservative bigotry is simple: abandon conservative bigotry.
It is they who want us to compromise our ethics and values. They want us to compromise on immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and helping the unhoused.
You can’t be a conservative AND join leftists in organizing a better future, sorry. Conservatism is antithetical to progress.
Why in the fuck would I agree to give you people a second chance? Yall openly voted for the racist, criminally convicted sex offender. Fuck you, fuck your farm, and fuck your entire colonist bloodline.
“So anyways, that’s how I made sure the Democrats wouldn’t gain any voters!”
“But I thought you were anti Trump…?”
They weren’t lied to. They had a whole road map for this. They just didn’t think they would also be affected.
The average person will only spend 5 to 10 minutes a day watching news. The networks they watch are owned by billionaires. I bet most people haven’t heard of project 2025 let alone know what it contains.
Just because you are tuned into politics, doesn’t mean everyone else should be.
This is our curse. We know things, but if we want things to improve, we must also convince the average retarded voter of the things. If we fail, we don’t get to write off half the population.
I guess I’m just tired of always having to force this horse to the river to drink. We’re told to make it more inviting, change the flavor, talk softly, and they still go galloping into manure, flinging it on the rest of us in the process. Then they look back, covered in shit, and go, “I didn’t know the shit would have this much shit. Why didn’t you warn us? Aren’t you at least going to help us clean up?” It’s like weaponized incompetence, but with politics.
but I’m also still incredibly bitter about the current situation. My anger is going to have to die down before I can be reasonable. Which is a me problem at the end of the day.Your feelings are valid. It might be worth taking a break from the politics for a bit. Burnout is real and it is happening to quite a lot people after this last election.
They have plausible deniability. Some of them truly think trump doesn’t mean most of what he says because he’s trolling. They have poor critical thinking skills, so they aren’t able to take a lot of information and pick out the truth. That’s also why they copy each other. They want the easy solutions.
They need to be given an appealing way back to sanity. We need them and they need us.
I guess I feel like being a decent human being should be an appealing enough way. Even if they thought he was joking, what he was joking about wasn’t funny. They were fine risking him, at the very least, being their mouth piece. Saying they were lied to removes the responsibility. It doesn’t make them inherently bad people, but they need to admit they made a mistake (if that’s what they truly believe) and want to come back into sanity because it’s right, not because they feel bad that it’s now their eggs and Medicaid that’s being fucked with.
I think maybe that’s the best we could hope for. They can’t take responsibility and now they think its fine to lie and obscure, to gaslight like he does. He’s a public figure who is allergic to accountability and has no shame. Should they be expected to behave better than he does, when he’s like the Teflon man, no consequences stick and he just goes and plays golf, posts pics of himself in a crown as democracy dies?
If anything can make them turn against him and at least fake giving a sh*t or having morality then I’m all for it. Let’s massage their egos and welcome them.
They were not lied to though… it was known they were going to do this.
They were all under the impression it wouldn’t happen to them personally. While it is satisfying to say, “I told you so” it’s never helpful. We kinda need to lift up our dumb compatriots if they see the error of electing a huge mistake.
Even when it happens to them it seems like they would still vote for him again, and they are more complaining they were affected than the outcome itself.
And they aren’t going to listen to liberals. Only ones who they will listen to is conservatives so the only way to change their mind is conservatives or false actors pretending to be conservatives to win their vote.
Suffering is better than voting for a lib.
There’s a quote from Robert A. Heinlein that I like to bring up:
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
Replace “Communist” with “Conservative” and the quote works the exact same way. People don’t take on awful political views in a total vacuum. Their lives and futures got messed up somehow, and in all probability by vast forces beyond their comprehension, let alone their control. And then they went looking for what felt like real answers, and someone was willing to say to them “I’ve got the solution to your problems.”
On some level, their grievances are real. They just got sold on a lie about what could be done to fix them.
This is gold.
When I was a young teenager I was a communist because I believe in fairness and equality and on paper communism sounds great. Because of this I believed that Russia must just be misunderstood and maligned by the evil capitalist west - 2+2=4. I didn’t have access to a lot of info and my idealism carried me a long way. Then I read about what had happened under communism and in Russia, and it didn’t take long until my views changed entirely.
I think the (not sociopathic or psychotic) majority of MAGA supporters are that way because of what you said - MAGA uses real issues too - a clever mix of lies and truths, and because they believe the ‘fake news’ lies and immerse themselves in echo chambers of MAGA lies.
This has also happened in the UK with the BNP, EDL etc and now reform, which does well mostly in deprived areas (I wonder why?)
There has to be a point when they no longer believe the lies because reality directly contradicts them. But by then will it be too late?
We have to agree where we ARE before we stand a chance to agree about what we do from here.
We don’t do that with self-delusion and deflecting blame though.
The blame doesn’t rest solely on conservatives for this current situation, sure. Some of it falls on the huge number of people who “protest voted”. Some of it rests on the Democratic party for pretending to be the party of the people, but really just being a milquetoast center-right corporatist party that serves the same masters as the Republican party.
For any of us to “come together” and “agree about what we are to do from here,” for any one group to trust the other, we all have to come to terms with and accept our share of the blame. Deflecting blame or deluding ourselves with rhetoric like “we didn’t do anything wrong, we were just lied to” is unproductive. No side will trust the other as long as anyone is still making excuses for themselves.
Be adults, look inward instead of projecting blame, accept responsibility for your actions, and then maybe we can come together to fight against fascism.
Wow this thread is kinda fucked. Im way more left than most to the point that i think supporting biden/harris leading up to the last election was a mistake, although i would’ve begrudgingly voted harris when it came down to it. But this is just vindictive and unproductive. How about “lets both admit the corporations and their stooges have fucked us for way too long and come together to stop them” rather than some stupid childish finger pointing shit. Like i get the rage, but keep it pointing at the ones who are actively fucking you over.
It’s unproductive to try working with people who, for the past few decades, were actively voting to get rid of my friends and family because they didn’t fit White Heteronormative Christian Right America’s box.
They put all of their faith into Trump. They literally believed God sent him to save America from the Democrats and liberals trying to “destroy” this country.
I’m sorry, but I do not want to put my trust in the hands of racist bigots who can easily be lead astray by their own greed and prejudices.
This place has become a self-righteous circle jerk with no means of spreading the information we believe in as they’re hostile to anybody that isn’t exactly the same.
So if all use leftists are here and all the right wingers are on Twitter, then nobody is going to learn anything new as we have become our own echo chambers.
Oh no! How will I know what right wingers think? That would mean I need to open a newspaper! Or turn on a television! Or spend an evening with my mother in law’s new boyfriend!
Fuck off with your echo chamber bullshit.
I know what they want. They want to hurt me and mine. And I’m not going to roll over.
So you don’t believe us all being in echo chambers is going to make the situation worse?
Do you believe that you can’t get any right wingers to turn left wing? What about vice versa?
I couldn’t give a fuck what they think you pleb, I am interesting in trying to get people to open their eyes and leave the right and come join us on the left.
Many of those people have been lied to, just as much as we have and I believe given the opportunity we would be able to reason people out of their mindsets to find a common enemy which is elites.
Edit: There is a YouTuber who makes left leaning content and he has said on numerous videos how he was drawn into the alt-right pipeline and he was smart enough to learn that wasn’t right and that they’re not spreading truth. He’s called JimmyTheGiant. If he is able to be taken from the right to the left then that means other people are and they’re only going to make that leap if we talk with them. Sure some of them are lost causes, but I want to focus on the people who we can reach.
Unless you just want to hang around here and we can all wank each other off a how much more superior we are because of our beliefs whilst never actually increasing our numbers because nobody wants to interact with the perceived other side.
Funny how you can now what all republicans want, but I’m sure you would take issue if they said all leftists want the exact same thing.
I love how the comment degenerates into madness slowly like a bad copy pasta.
Yeah yeah. We already get that “both sides bad” argument. You’re clearly ignoring that the Republicans are actively destroying our government, our rights, and our access to necessary infrastructure and services while giving even more power to corporations. One is orders of magnitude worse. So trying to equate the two parties is insultingly misleading.
The ones who are actively fucking me over are the ones that keep supporting the ones that are also actively fucking me over. Accountability doesn’t end at the ballot.
So we agree that the ones fucking you over are the billionaires bankrolling the fire hose of toxic media that gets people to vote against their interest?
Genuinely not sure of the stance you’re taking…
Geez. The being lied to wasn’t really very secretive, it was out in the open for a very long time.
This is a very weird apology for just being stupid.
They weren’t lied to by the right. They were lied to by themselves.
Themselves are the problem and one cannot not remove one from the other.
Those themselves will never be our allies. They will slink right back to their comforting lies at the first convenient moment, betray us, and laugh about it.
The time for solidarity has passed and this bullshit “sowwy” crap some cons are trying to put out there is disingenuous at best. No, will fix everything again and y’all will get the benefit again then go right back to being shitty Republicans again. Fuck all conservatives.
But I low key do want them to admit that they were wrong. Because many people told them a million times and they went 🙉
