My mother stopped touting the melon felon when she died in 2017 and my father stopped when he died in 2018. Sadly, I think that’s really the onlly thing that will get that particular segment of humanity to quit preaching the inanity. Sometimes I wonder what their reaction would have been had they lived long enough to see their hero’s insurrection on January 6, 2021. What ticked me off most about their support was my father was a career Army officer and they were not stupid people. But a lot of their support of the melon felon came about from the racism they were raised in. And I think that’s still true for the vast majority of his supporters now. The republican voters will never ever forgive the Democratic Party for giving us a Black president. What do you think their reaction will be when a Black woman gets elected president? People are going to die, and I’m not talking a smattering.
Both my grandparents on my mother’s side went to Europe during WWII (grandma was a WAC). My mother met my father in Germany when he was in the army and gathering intelligence on Eastern Bloc countries. I remember dad engaging in training exercises with NATO allies including a really big one in the early 1980s. To hear my mother shit all over NATO today and spout Russian propaganda about the special military operation in Ukraine was shocking.
I kind of feel like she’s shitting all over my father’s career and it pissed me off enough for me to call her out on that asking why she was pro Russia all of the sudden. One more reasons we don’t talk politics.
Who’s going to be the new right-wing strawman when Soros passes away? Or are they just going to argue that he’s not dead and still secretly controlling everything?
I saw a clip of a similar group yesterday, railing about women wearing leggings under their skirts because leggings were just a gateway to women wearing trousers.
I don’t think it’s the “woke” people who are suffering from a “mind virus”.
That implies he understands the concept of actors. As his Hannibal Lecter endorsement shows, I don’t think that’s an obvious truth. He’d be more likely to complain nobody voted for President Snow.
I know it’s probably weird but I’m glad to hear this. I’ve read some of your posts and remember how Trumpy everything was where you worked. I’ve thought about you at times, wondered how you were doing. I am lucky to work in an office where most of us hate Trump but stay quiet on politics anyway. I hope wherever you landed is better.
True, he’d be more likely to call him President Snow, who wasn’t as great as Trump was but that’s okay, not everyone could be as great as Trump or Lincoln.
I don’t believe that those among us who yak the most about politics in public and who post memes on Facebook slamming the party they hate change very many votes at all. It’s just cathartic for them. Let them rant and rave and bay at the moon, I just consider it to be a minor irritation we just have to live with- like mosquitos.
Best you can do with such people is avoid them, I think. If possible, which it sometimes isn’t.
They’ll probably find some other rich Jew, since that’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and they’ll want to find another Jew to slot in as bogeyman. Or just claim that he’s not really dead but hiding in some secret command bunker somewhere.
I’m seeing a noticeable uptick in right wing posts on my FB page. I keep killing them, but they’re like roaches. I guess it’s random, but it seems like this is a recent thing.
My parents lived in [West] Germany from the mid-‘70s through the mid-‘90s as my father had one assignment there and my stepfather had two consecutive assignments there with the U.S. Army. I myself lived there as a kid in the ‘70s, and visited often thereafter. So I know what it was like waiting for the ball to drop and for Soviet tanks to come roaring through the Fulda Gap. We had a neighbor at one point (an Army colonel) who was in charge of one of the units of tactical nuclear missiles designed to stop them.
Which made it all the more disconcerting when I saw that a co-worker who had also served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War, and who prominently and proudly displays photos of himself in uniform with his unit, was (and still is) a huge Trump supporter.
It makes me want to ask him what the hell he is thinking and how it is that he supports a Putin-loving suck-up who is shitting on his whole mission and service there. But I don’t want to get into it with a co-worker.
For me, the painful thing is the internal doubt, where was I wrong about person XYZ?
Do they support Trump because deep down, they’ve always been a horrible, bigoted person and I didn’t realize it, missed the signs, or they were just keeping it quiet? Did I ever know the person at all?
Or is it, like Qanon, that someone who was once as rational as any of us, started JAQ on a fringe issue, got sucked in, and are now so deep they will likely never dig out, because their defense mechanisms and information bubbles are working overtime to make sure they don’t have to have self doubt?
Either way, it’s horribly painful. And thankfully, to date, my internal audit has been about 90/10 that they just went down the rabbithole, but the 10% that I’ve realized were horrible people the whole time… yeah… serious self doubt.
OMG yes. I’ll never forget going to my beloved grandfather’s wake with my extended family the day after the 2016 election and trying to process the loss of my grandfather and Trump’s election at the same time, only to have a condescending, self-righteous aunt (by marriage) say to me “consolingly”, “Your grandfather would have been so pleased if he could have seen the results of the election.”
I almost swallowed my tongue. I so much wanted to say, “My grandfather had dementia at the end of his life. What’s your excuse?”
But I held back for the sake of avoiding a family squabble.
I hear ya. I came across this quote, around time of the 2020 transition, about Trump:
Trump is like dealing with a lunatic on the subway. Everyone just kind of sits and stares ahead, pretends they can’t hear him, and waits for him to eventually get off.
I would apply that to full on MAGA supporters, too. They certainly need to know they are wrong, but I think the most effective way to do that is to just completely ignore them. Anything more is just fuel on a fire.
And this (to me) is the terrifying bit. If they qualify as “Crazy Trump supporter” (as opposed to single issue voters on abortion / guns / Israel / what have you) then they don’t even exist or reason in the same reality any more. See the whole “You’re in a movie run by the military”. EVERYTHING feeds into their bubble of delusion and (emphasis!) persecution.
Trying to reason with most of the crazies just reinforces the whole assumption that you’re part of the conspiracy.
Ignoring it as a solution to the individual, social problem in mixed company. The real solution is getting the people profiting from the insanity out of power and influence, whether it be political office or the -BLEEEEP- at Fox News, Infowars (partial win there!), et al.
If you can’t reason with the crazies, you can tell them off in public and openly show your disdain to show those they are trying to influence that such craziness is no longer socially acceptable. You don’t worry about the “silence is consent” attitude of the crazies, but you certainly don’t want those nearby to think the same thing.
In other words, grab that fucking megaphone and use it.
At the dog park last week we were chatting with another couple about a development project going on nearby: mixed-used (retail and luxury condos). One of them stated that she’d heard that if you live there, they won’t let you leave and/or you’ll need to pay a tax if you work elsewhere, and that these are common in Canada, and that Kamala is all in favor of these things, and that it’s all “Marxism”. At which point we said “oh look at the time…”
Saw a guy in Trader Joe’s yesterday wearing a t-shirt (presumably from 2020) that said “The final Covid variant is Communism”.
I would disagree with this. The reason MAGA supporters think they are the Silent Majority is because everyone lets them think that. When people don’t push back against them, they think they are in fact the majority and that others think like them. That then fuels the perception that elections were stolen from them (If Trump was the majority-supported candidate, then how did he lose!!?)
