On a disturbingly similar note, my FIL was career military - two tours of Vietnam, and he was stationed in West Germany in the 70s and early 80s, having made his way up to Lt Col before retirement. And now he’s a full-on Trump supporter. He gets all his news from FoxNews at home and on the car radio.
And yes, we’ve pointed out that Trump has done nothing but insult serving military, Vietnam vets, POWs, Gold Star families and the honored dead. And none of it makes a dent. There is no rational thought behind this. He has been indoctrinated by right-wing media into a cult run by a man who despises and denigrates everything my FIL once stood (and fought) for.
My disagreement with the above ties into my earlier comments and the OP. It’s about the “crazies” that keeps getting missed for the mass of MAGA foolishness with IMHO is distinctly different.
If someone, like the party mentioned in the OP is so gone that they consider everything a fake, a movie, then they’re out and out dangerous. What’s the harm of attacking an extra? I mean, it’s just one more redshirt/zombie/NPC “non-person” word of the week.
The more normal (hah, does it hurt to type that phrase and mean it) MAGA supporter can and should be challenged to the extent the circumstances (and HR) allows it. But challenging the nuts = a non-zero chance of violence, which is rarely discriminate.
Yep, and the thing is- what i am seeing is never 'trump is a great man, vote for him" they are mostly the most scurrilous fake news attacks on Harris. Like Harris has magic earrings that communicated with her during the debate, or that she was involved with P-Diddy, or that she responded “Next Question” during the debate, etc.
Three of my ex-friends were liberal, but liked guns, they got sucked into Conservative Talk radio gun talk shows, then Fox news, and came out total MAGAs.
Back in the 80’s when I served, most of the noncoms I reported to made no secret of their Rebublican leanings. I became convinced that they held the Democratic party responsible for the loss in Vietnam, all of them being vets of that war. I didn’t try to argue with them, being sensible of the E4 to E7 relationship.
I think there is still a segment of the right wing that is butt hurt over that war, and that fuels the pro Trump sentiment among some military vets.
I’m sure that’s part of it. But I would also say that a lot of the Republican leanings in the military was also due to simple self-interest. The military was vastly underpaid throughout the ‘70s when I was an Army brat. There were enlisted soldiers who were getting food stamps for their families. Nobody in government (President or Congress) seemed much inclined to do anything about it.
Then Reagan got elected and pushed through big pay raises for the military that were well overdue. My standard of living growing up greatly improved.
(Then the pendulum continued to swing in that same direction, with the military actually being overpaid…at least for a time. I’ve been out for 20+ years, so I stopped keeping track.)
So my parents voted Republican, and so did I when I got to voting age.
Several years later, I remember a Navy lieutenant commander proudly displaying a letter he got from President Clinton in the ‘90s and remember thinking it was unusual for a member of the military to be so supportive of a Democrat.
Anyway, that was before the Republican Party veered into crazy-town. I haven’t voted for a Republican since 2000.
I grew up in a very entrepreneurial family and both my father and (maternal) grandfather… two men who, shall we say, didn’t care for each other… agreed on the following: Never, ever, mention politics, sex, or religion at work.
In a rare moment, I become glad that the significant influnces on my life (father, grandparents, uncle) had passed by 2015 for I can still convince myself that they would not have been caught in the Trump madness.
They likely would have though. But I can still convince myself.
My Grandmother died at 98 on Christmas morning 2016. She was in a rehab facility during the election after taking a fall, and I don’t think she actually voted, but she was not going to vote for Trump. She was a Fox News viewer, Rush Limbaugh fan since the 90s, but she could not stand Trump. She hated Hilary of course, but I am glad that she saw through the Trump BS. I’m also glad she didn’t have to see what we all have the last 10 years being subjected to that awful POS every single day.
100%. Work is work. How are your kids and such chit chat is fine.
Got new neighbors 10 years ago. Sort of part timers from TX. Uh oh. But if it’s possible, it turns out they despise Trump as much as we do. Pheeewww.
Other new neighbors, from PA about 3 years ago. I suspect they have been indoctrinated into the cult. The wife kept complaining about ‘Woke’ people. A bad sign to be sure. Get a little wine into them, and the politics come out.
As a fellow Coloradan, have you noticed this trend? I’ve been seeing a lot of former Californians moving here because California was perceived as too expensive (probably true, but then their property purchases hurt local buyers) and too liberal (they’re still very liberal, but in the more pre-MAGA libertarian sense of worrying about “wealth redistribution”), while at the same time seeing a lot of Texan liberals moving in due to Texas being too conservative?
I’m generalizing from small samples, and of course, as such, drawing largely unproveable correlations, but it’s enough to ponder.
As it is, it’s the locals here in Colorado Springs that are likely to be the Crazy Trump supporters, the newcomers from most places are what’s been accelerating the bluing of the state far past the previous decades of largely conservative, but with a stronger-than-average Green/Environmentalist bent that made it a battleground in the past. And of course, it doesn’t change the existing bright red rural areas and terrifying Christian cultist areas across the state.
Despite the many debunked falsehoods about widespread voting by noncitizens, liberal Latino advocacy groups say they are being trailed by conservative activists with cameras and accused of registering undocumented immigrants.
The conservative activists are recording them, tactics that have also targeted migrant shelters,Democratic politicians, abortion clinics and student protesters. They say they are just trying to expose flaws in the voter-registration process.
And surprise, surprise, guess who’s behind this nastiness?
The conservative Heritage Foundation has sent teams with hidden cameras posing as voter-outreach workers groups into apartment complexes in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia to ask the mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants there if they were citizens and registered to vote.
Some people, their faces blurred in shaky videos, told Heritage’s investigators that they were registered to vote, but not citizens. The group said its survey showed a widespread threat to the upcoming election. Extrapolating from its conversations at one apartment complex, it said that some 47,000 noncitizens in Georgia could be on the voter rolls, as well as thousands more across the country.
But Georgia officials later said they had found no evidence that any of the people filmed by Heritage at the apartments in Norcross were actually registered. Some of the residents later said they had misspoken and denied being registered.
Is it possible some of those Spanish speaking immigrants were confusing being registered to vote with being registered to be in the country? I mean, a bunch of people wandering around asking questions about their status would raise suspicions about motives.
Boy I don’t know. The TX people down the road I think are here because they wanted out of the city life. Husband can work from home. The Wife, a teacher, has to wait until she can do early retirement in about a year.
We live sort of remote. I work remote (my wife does not). Only two other full time couples on the road. My ‘town’ is Breckenridge (I shop there), about a 20 minute drive. My Wife and I both work for the county. My wife is an appraiser and I work GIS. Prices for properties have exploded. Things in town are busier every year.
It doesn’t help that there seems to be some sort of festival every weekend.
I feel for you. Sadly my Wife and I will be leaving the mountains. It’s just too much to deal with when you get older. Oxygen, and 30 feet of snow a year combined with the very real possibility of not being able to get EMS in the winter.
We very briefly thought about Colorado Spgs. We will probably land in the Ft. Collins/Loveland area. Retirement is… wow 14 months away.
There is someone building across the road from us. And looks like the next lot over too. The illusion of seclusion is gone, gone, gone.
So, into the frying pan we may go. But we want to stay in Colorado.
North of Denver doesn’t seem too red, but the crazy is everywhere.
I volunteer at the early voting polls and yesterday a Trumpist came in yelling that if Trump was president “those people wouldn’t have died.” He was the only voter in the room, the rest of us were poll workers.
We all kind of looked at him and he said it again, “they’d all still be alive.”
None of us said anything and he kind of sheepishly voted and left.
Also yesterday, a voter spoiled four ballots in a row because she kept trying to vote for both Trump and Cornell West for president. Finally, she filled out the form so that one of us could help her vote. It wasn’t me, so I have no idea what she was trying to do, but I have a guess.
I suspect he meant the people in western North Carolina who died as a result of Helene. One of the RWNJ talking points is the death and destruction from the hurricane is all due to egregious, even criminal, actions from the Harris-Biden administration.
Of course, the efforts to prevent any action to ameliorate the effects of climate change has more to do with the severity of damage than anything the Biden administration has or hasn’t done. Even the effects of climate change is likely a minor contributor. The affected area was hit a similar storm about 100 years ago which had similar effects, except there were fewer roads, a lot fewer people, and the people who lived there knew better than to build right next to the river, since rivers flood.
The latest from these crazies is calling for a full and complete audit of FEMA funds for 2023-2024. They are convinced that the Harris-Biden administration has raided these funds, which has, predictably, resulted in all these deaths. I know, it makes no sense, but consider the source.
