I have generally found three reactions from MAGA when confronted with ideas they don’t like.
As you say, they aren’t well-informed.
What they are is hyper-misinformed. They will tell you truthfully that they listen / watch hours of news coverage per day. Most of it political in nature. They are super duper massively informed. And far more enthused about political news & politics than most folks on the other side. They are exactly what an engaged politically aware citizenship ought to be. And they’ll tell you so.
The only problem is that substantially everything they think is news is actually fake propaganda.
Persuading them that they’re actually highly lied to, not highly loaded with the truth is a nearly impossible task. After a couple years of that, even the yardsticks they might use to measure their own thinking and events they personally witness occurring within their own lives have been comprehensively warped.
Oh, I 100% agree they are responsible for their decisions, but Fox gives them the talking points that helps keep them sticking to those decisions. My parents and in-laws parrot Fox and when we bring up the reality, they think we are full of it.
It’s the willful ignorance of these idiots that make me write off the deplorables.
A text conversation with my Trump-voting mom. We avoid the topic of politics, as you may imagine, but from time to time my curiosity gets the best of me. When I saw the Mueller tweet, I was dying to know what she made of it, as that sort of comment would have been strenuously discouraged in the household when I was growing up.
DB: This is a serious question. Have you seen this? [Screenshot of Trump’s post]
Mom: Not until now. I’m so disappointed that he’d even think this, and even more so that he’d think we’d support him actually saying it out loud. Trump says a lot of things he should be ashamed of saying…but this is unforgivable. I’m so ashamed of him. 
DB: I’m often curious if we’re receiving the same information, is why I asked.
Mom: Where did you get this? I hadn’t seen it previously and want to see the same things you’re seeing too.
DB: If you search the internet for “Trump Mueller tweet”, you’ll find stories everywhere. AP News is probably the most balanced site I read. I look at various sites, but I know the algorithm shows me more left-leaning sites than you would like.
I know I could have responded to this better, but I wished to be very tactful. I also have no faith in her being “ashamed” and saying this is “unforgiveable”. I likewise didn’t want to refer her to any particular sites, because she might shoot them down. But I got my answer: she doesn’t know what’s going on. If…I mean, when Trump says the next horrific thing, I plan to show her the evidence, right from the horse’s ass, I mean mouth.
Well, that’s all tied to their racism and bigotry. That was baked in when they where raised.
I think you did fine. 
It will be interesting if she goes to some other genuine news sites and discovers how much she’s not aware of. And if that happens, will she tell you?
But you did absolutely fine!
Thanks. I don’t think much will come of it, but we can hope!
The underbussing or scapegoating of Noem continues!
How dare she link her fraudulent expenses to Trump! It’s grift at your own risk for Felon47. I wonder if there will be any actual consequences for it, but since I hate all parties involved, I’d love for her or her spouse to have to pay those funds back…
That’s what I was going to say. She’s got a decade plus of his effluence to wade through. It could take some time.
Grift?
Invoices shared with CNN showed that the Strategy Group — whose CEO is the husband of Noem’s former top spokesperson — accrued more than $100,000 in labor costs, along with a $60,000 “signing bonus” to produce the ad. About $50,000 was spent on videography, photography and production vendors.
“This looks like waste, fraud, and abuse to me,” {Sen Peter} Welch said in a statement. “While leading the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem and her senior team allowed tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to be spent on wasteful production costs, a shady signing bonus, and a very expensive horse — and that’s just what we know so far.”
This looks like, when added to what I’ve already heard about how this was done, a straight up conspiracy to steal to me.
More like a conspiracy to steal from us, the taxpayers.
I was thinking about you last night while I was watching the Rachel Maddow show. I wonder if your mother would consent to sit with you through one episode of that program. She will hear and see things that she would never find out from Fox News.
At first I read that as hair and makeup on a horse.
As the saying goes "You can’t put lipstick on…
… a horse"
Challenge accepted.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
I don’t see that most alt med/woo advocates are trending right-wing these days (although the majority of antivaxers fit that description).
Falling for cancer woo is, for instance, a bipartisan affair.
And you still come across gullible types who embrace health crankery because they think it empowers them to fight society’s Dark Forces - like this person who believes that good qualities of modern medicine derive from homeopathy.
Nice to know Yale is in the middle of this.
I like this.
[This is supposed to be a gift link. I don’t know if it really is or what kind of strings might be attached.]
About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”
Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.
But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Tim Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”
The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”
The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist.
…
My bold.
This is good stuff.
But this–
…
In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism.
My bold.
“The next iteration of Trumpism”??
Are you fucking kidding me?
