Sing it to me, sister. My parents also, and I’d have said they weren’t racist at all. But they’ve always, always voted Republican and in the last few years watched only Fox for news. I think Mom has moved to Fox Business instead, but that’s still pretty bad.
My relatives are all Trump voters as well. In their case, it’s
- They despise Democrats
- They don’t pay much attention to the news
- The news they watch comes from Fox
- They are “Christians”
- And last but not least, they are racist to the bone.
Here I would like to wind up my post by saying something nice about them, and I’m finding it hard to do without qualifiers.
We love each other?
It’s a transition I’ve been watching with stupefied horror over the past 25 years.
My dad always leaned that way, but we shared most values. We could discuss topics based on a shared reality.
Then along came Rush. Suddenly my dad was spouting garbage about “femi-nazis” and all the rest of the Rush trash. I couldn’t quite believe it.
He was an easy mark for Faux “News.” I watched it a few times and immediately recognized their tendency to lie by omission. They didn’t outright lie in those days. This was in the early 2000s, and the tactic was to report only the part of the story that allowed them to support a particular perspective.
My dad and I would have conversations like this:
Dad: “Did you know blah-blah-blah? That’s terrible!”
Me: “I did hear about that, but are you aware of blah-blah-blah additional facts?”
Dad: “Oh. No, I hadn’t heard that part.”
He nonetheless continued to choose them as a valid news source despite my many warnings that they were a propaganda network, and he still does to this day.
I gave up on him somewhere around 2005, when during a visit and another discussion, he spat at me, “You won’t be so smug about your political views when you’re wearing a burka!”
Me, inwardly: “Um. Wut?”
He had bought into the whole ‘Sharia-law-is-going-to-take-over-our-country!!’ bullshit narrative.
My stepmom took a little longer, but she’s all in with the whole shit show now, too.
So hard to watch. And like @Dung_Beetle, I can’t defend it in any way. They should know better.
I do love them, but I’ve lost all respect.
This, to me, was the start of the Decline. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing the first time I listened to him. Then I couldn’t believe that friends and family were agreeing with what he said.
And it’s been going downhill ever since.
We should have recognized much earlier how toxic and powerful were the politics of grievance and victimhood.
We kept hanging our hats on the fact that little to none of what they were saying was true. But the truth already didn’t matter.
It took me forever to figure this out.
And add in sarcasm and sophomoric name-calling, which somehow appeals to the low-information listener. Femi-nazis, left-wing loons, etc. etc. If you can make fun of somebody or something, it must not have merit.
I’m not, I’m allowing for a whole raft of bigotry to motivate people to vote for Trump.
“Evil” is quite something else than bigotry. To quote a bigly philosopher “some, I assume, are good people”.
They just let their hatred for someone be the deciding influence in their voting.
'Murka!!
I think most of us would have been happy if every person knew at least one thing…
100%.
(Well, almost 
I do think that there’s a sort of person (of which many/most of us on the SDMB represent) who assume that everyone ought to be as smart and thoughtful and aware as them, and I think that there’s some confirmation bias that creates expectations about the kind and depth of intellectual rigor that people in general should be able to apply to abstract thoughts and philosophies. Yes, 2016 Trump was obviously a shitty person and a shitty candidate. But also there are lots of “obvious” things in plain sight that people struggle with understanding.)
Fair enough. I’m quite sure I’m clueless about many things I should know (using “should” across a range of shades of meaning).
This is bullshit. Who has said this?
I’ll defend Eonwe and say that was harmless (if ill-advised) hyperbole, directed at me and a couple other posters (I asked for it, when I implied — only half-jokingly — that anyone who didn’t read Spy Magazine thirty years ago was ignorant).
Ok, look. I’m telling you. I’m informed. Pretty smart. I take in a lot of information about a lot of things. Can I swear that I knew in 2013 what Trump thought about Obama’s birth certificate? Nope.
And, please stop mis-stating my position. I don’t know or care how often person X heard in the news about Trump’s position on this. I suspect that despite your assertion that it was “shoved into our faces every fucking day” is a massive mis-characterization of how much time the media was spending on this particular opinion of Trumps relative to all the other news that was also being “shoved into our faces every fucking day” in the early 20-teens. Regardless, even if someone heard it a bunch, with Trump being no more than a kinda-has-been-celebrity making a low-grade TV comeback, there was no good reason for the average person to try to remember it.
I’ve clarified that statement already, but if you want to pretend like you don’t understand my position or what my intent is, I’ll state it again here: folks are implying quite clearly that there is some set of facts about Trump that the average person “should” have known in the early 2010s and maybe even before- and that those who failed to know those things suffer from an intellectual or moral failing.
No one seems interested or able in explaining why details about Trump (and which of those details) mattered more at the time than details about any one of thousands of other interesting people or places or events that one might hang on to.
“It was in the news” is not an argument that people should have cared or remembered or even paid much attention in the first place. We’ve all forgotten more news and almost-news than we remember.
Like I said, read a fucking newspaper. The birther campaign was hugely important, it was the mainstreaming of white supremacy in American politics without any real challenge and Trump was an important part of that.
Your parents are fascists. I’m sorry, I have a sister who is a fascist. I told her that I refuse to normalize fascism or pretend supporting fascism is just a difference of opinion. We haven’t spoken since. I suspect we won’t again.
Well I’m not.
I am stating outright that that set of facts was in fact so obvious that voting for him is a moral failing in 2016.
I don’t care if you want to give those people an out: they knew and they liked what they saw.
Sure there might be some exceptions somewhere, but the overwhelming majority (as in 99%) knew exactly what they were voting for: Somebody who was going to hurt the right people.
They are not children or some poor brainwashed cultist. They have a remote for their TV, they know what FOX is selling.
What do you think they mean when they say they like him because “he is saying it how it is”? You think they like his speech impediments? They like the racism. They don’t care about anything else.
I voted Republican every presidential election that I was old enough to vote in. I could not vote for Trump because no way in Hell could I give that man my support.
Everything that has happened since then has made it so I’ll probably never vote Republican again.
I have to agree that it was hard to not know who you were voting for back then.
Well done, you. Everybody knows that voting for a Republican is a sin.
I am a lifelong progressive lefty, and yet I wish this weren’t true. IMHO, we need a sane, non-race-baiting, science-loving conservative party in this country. Among other things, it’s not good for Democrats to lack a sober, adult opponent with whom to debate and wrangle policies.
The old PJ O’Rourke line (he directed it at Hillary Clinton, but for me it works for how Republicans should be): wrong on just about every issue (from a liberal perspective), but wrong within normal parameters.
Limbaugh really did plant the seed for this horrific trend. Some blame Newt Gingrich, and he did put some of this stuff into action (and Ashcroft, and others). Some look at older Southern Strategy roots, or Reagan-era Evangelists. Anyway, it has to swing back to reality somehow. It has to!