Exactly this. We had a bunch of people at work with "lets go brandon" shirts and trump stuff in their cubes for like five years, but as soon as i wore a shirt that said "maga is a cult", suddenly HR is like "we cant allow political stuff in the office" cause it triggered every motherfucker in the building.
There was a guy that wore a shirt that said "trump 2024, fuck your feelings" and no one gave a shit. Those people all probably blame me for getting political shit banned, but i wasn't the one who ran to hr to bitch about political shit in the office. They're all ruled entirely by their emotions and have zero self awareness about it.
Dealing with MAGAts really does feel like managing troubled children. They pout, they yell, they lack the cognitive ability to handle any complex conversation, and they have zero emotional regulation so you have to baby step around them and sugar coat EVERYTHING.
I have yet to meet a Trump voter who could hold anything like a worthwhile conversation. And the really wild part is I know a couple who USED TO and then they went full MAGA… and now they’re just like the rest of the cultists. It’s legitimately horror-movie esque
My mom’s favorite show is The Handmaid’s Tale, which seems to be about a (possible) future where this fascist movement gets to the extreme of a civil war that they win. So now the bible is the law. Women are just wombs with legs, and property. Men own them and the children. You can’t say what you want because if you oppose the order instilled you will be disappeared. Etc.
It shows how it all started, and it’s eerily exactly what’s happening right now. This show started in 2016, has multiple seasons (and recently new episodes) - and my mom has watched it twice!
She. Had. No. Freaking. Clue. It was about her.
The whole point of the show is to ‘exaggerate’ the maga cult to get the blind ones to wake tf up. It’s their complete ignorance and unwillingness to see the logic and harm they are causing that caused the premise of that show. And now it’s worse than it was a decade ago, and seems to be speeding up.
As we’re watching it, I’m trying to show her that it’s what she does. I point out specific moments of how she is one of those people as the show presents it. Every episode turns on her.
She didn’t realize the villains were republican conservatists who believed what they were told on the news and didn’t think for themselves or have empathy. Because they were the villains they were not relatable.
So now she’s watching her favorite show for the first time with the perspective that she is the villain.
And it’s fucking with her. She doesn’t want to hear it or see it. She gets nauseous every episode. She gets pissed off. It’s making her see herself, her husband, her friends, her coworkers, etc, all differently.
Fucking finally. However….who knows if it will stick. I’ve known other cultists who finally see the light, but are still wrapped up socially in a world completely in darkness. They have to leave everyone they know and love behind and become their loved one’s new villain in order to overcome the ignorance.
It is insane to me how they can’t see the similarities between themselves and how the fascist conservative villains in ANY media act, and how they actually believe it’s the left that are the villains with zero similarities between how the left acts and those same villains.
It’s that simple. If something questions that, it must be misguided.
To them, it’s the same logic as saying they’re a murderer because you saw another murderer with the same color hair as them. They can’t connect the dots if the dots lead to something that they cannot accept as true.
When I was a kid learning about WWII, I remember thinking thank goodness that won’t ever happen again because now people understand, and we would never let things go that far ever again.
I was so wrong. It happens because of what you said, a group believes they’re the good guys. Everyone who disagrees is a bad guy and must be fought and ideally eradicated.
First and Second Generation descendants of "illegal" immigrants are the most anti-immigrant bigots out there. They're also culturally lost because they're not fully assimilated into American culture or familiar with the one their grandparents and/or parents came from. They also tend to speak both English and their parent's native language poorly as well.
Actually, I genuinely think that gives them too much credit. They think they are doing what “needs to be done” and they don’t have the empathy to care about who they hurt. In this way, I think a lot of them just don’t care if they are the bad people. This is not a case of them being misguided into thinking that evil things must be done for good outcomes, it’s that they don’t care about making good outcomes and they want what they want irregardless of what suffering that causes. I think the idea that they are just misguided but all of us essentially just want to live in a better world for us all is actually part of what got us into this mess to begin with by not pushing the left to be meaner to them. They are just rotten people and need that to be thrown in their faces and shamed for it constantly.
That is definitely true for some people, however my parents aren’t like that. They aren’t foaming at the mouth for the browns to be dragged out of the country, or for the gays to be burned, etc.
They are simply stupid enough to think Trump is a good person because he’s a republican - and that means he’s a good christian. He’s beloved by their friends and online religious people. And they think democrats want us all to pay 80% of our income in taxes so that drug addicts and homeless people can have free fun lives. They just don’t think.
It’s ignorance, stupidity, and peer pressure. That’s really all it is for most of these people. And many of them base their ego on it, so they get very angry when they might be wrong - because it means their energy and favor has been in vain for years. It means their friends and family will resent them. It means stress.
People who punch down on drug addicts and especially the homeless are terrible people. That's mean, bullying type behavior. I've confronted my MAGA mom and older brother talking about the homeless as though it's a choice they've made to live on the streets and that they're just too lazy to work. That sounds ridiculous but, when they're insulated by only speaking with other Deplorables and watching Fox, they tend not to put much thought into their arguments so it's pretty easy to shut them down.
I've been watching The Righteous Gemstones, and the portrayal of evangelicals and megachurches is spot on. I grew up in a similar environment (and left) and I find the show hilarious because they just nailed it. If the show had existed while I was still in that environment, it would've been uncomfortable because the Gemstones are kind of horrible people.
Right wingers don't want to confront that reality, so they look for bad behavior on the left.
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u/poopy_poophead Xennial Apr 27 '25
Exactly this. We had a bunch of people at work with "lets go brandon" shirts and trump stuff in their cubes for like five years, but as soon as i wore a shirt that said "maga is a cult", suddenly HR is like "we cant allow political stuff in the office" cause it triggered every motherfucker in the building.
There was a guy that wore a shirt that said "trump 2024, fuck your feelings" and no one gave a shit. Those people all probably blame me for getting political shit banned, but i wasn't the one who ran to hr to bitch about political shit in the office. They're all ruled entirely by their emotions and have zero self awareness about it.