No Stupid Questions

I’m going to go on a less extreme take. They’ve been told from childhood they live in the land of opportunity, yet they work in dead end jobs or working fields.

They see money flying away every paycheck they live week to week on while being pumped propaganda (that people in suburbs and urban areas don’t see) that shows people who look different from them getting gov’t housing and getting programs funded with their tax dollars.

The same party they now demonize supports ridiculous looking gay parades that show a mentality they don’t understand, so they begin to hate. They wake up morning after morning in the same place with no change, and they stew and stew and stew.

So now they basically give up and see a hyper-masculine wannabe saying all the things against those who are different, and the long encrusted anger starts spewing out.

Most of the comments here are ignorant and hate filled against the wrong people. It’s not the MAGA supporters that did this, it’s the system. We need to stop polarizing ourselves with hatred and point the finger at those truly responsible. Not the poor (literallly) voters who are so dejected and living in decay that they just don’t give a rats ass anymore.

The more you hate the other side, the less you see the truth. The goal is to make you hate them. The goal is to make them hate you. You can’t define an entire person in a paragraph.

They will 100% sacrifice their own happiness and rights if they know it’s hurting people who live their lives is ways they don’t like.

This isn’t an exaggeration.

It hurts people they think are lesser, such as LGBTQ and people of color. Racism and bigotry are very much alive in the USA. They would eat a shit sandwich if they thought a lib would smell their breath. Hate is all they know.

A MAGA I know told me this is all worth it because he doesn't want his son to know gay people exist and wants revenge on the people who told him he can't say "Merry Christmas" anymore...

OP is asking an interesting and important question. While I don’t claim it as definitive, there was an insightful article written in 2016 that attempted to address the question head on: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

I’ve wondered this exact question. How does any of this evil fascist shit benefit the average Trump voter.

Trade tariffs just make things like durable goods more expensive.

Deporting migrant workers is going to make food more expensive.

Killing all references to Trans people doesn’t do anything but hurt the Trans folks.

Killing all references to climate change is just going to eventually destroy the whole planet (well just our existence on it.. the planet will be fine eventually).

Killing the Dept of Education is just going to make us all dumber.

DOGE is just a meme dept whose soul purpose seems to be to let Elon enact his revenge.

RFK2 gets in charge of all the countries medicine and vaccines and bans it all just in time for Pandemic 2, Electric Boogaloo.

So basically things get a lot more expensive, the rich get richer, lots of people die, and the world becomes a generally more shitty place. Yay!!! Let’s Go Brandon!!

I normally do not talk politics with people I know, but this one person said they like trump because: “all I know is when he was president, I did good financially”.

I tried to tell him that the government is slow to enact things so he did good because the previous president. He didnt want to hear that and dismissed it.

Check r/conservative and you get a fair idea.

if you ask a hundred of them..

you will get a hundred different answers.

they voted because it made them feel good and addressed their anger. not for any rational reasons. it's why they are so surprised at what is going on.

they had NO IDEA what they were voting for or why they were voting.

"We made people we don't like fucking miserable for a bit"

Ultimately the kind of person that goes all in on a cult like MAGA could lose everything to shitty policy or because their great leader started a war or smth -- But they'll still reason it was worth it because all those s were put in their place.

I've talked to friends that were very excited Trump won. Recently tried having an open conversation with someone that left my community afterwards over the conversations because I didn't come to his side.

They just believe it'll be better. What better? They don't know. They can't verbalize, because they're told it's terrible now and will be better.

They believe Trump isn't a criminal, didn't incite violence on Jan 6, the woke people are out to get them, etc. I've literally asked people to define "woke" for me when they use it that way. They can't. They don't know. They're not bad people, they're brainwashed at this point.

MAGA doesn't know.

They're fearful, hateful, instinctive idiots who are more afraid of being proven wrong than anything. The definition of ride or die.

The way it is playing out in my family has led me to have to totally reevaluate my perception of my own father.

He is a generally kind man. He stayed with my mom for two decades as she declined with Parkinson’s. He took good care of her when so many people might have ghosted.

But based on his inability to see the danger here to things he himself values, I can no longer think of him as a good man. He has always valued knowledge and reason yet he swallowed the cat-eating crap out of Ohio in spite of the clear bullshit of it.

He is Mormon and very faithful. So I don’t know what he gets out of this all, except that it has required me to grieve him before his passing.

He is not actually a good person I am afraid, but he is very obedient. Learning that distinction is very painful. He does not possess the moral clarity to know the difference between what is legal/popular and what is right.

I always idolized my dad as a child because he was in so many ways a good father. We will probably never speak again.

Crabs in a bucket. They don't care if things get worse for them as long as they inflict the same suffering on everyone else.

Remember that they accurately believed the DNC were horrible. They stopped Hillary. They stopped Biden and Harris. Good for them? Kinda, not really though.

... We know Trump is worse. Far worse. But they saw a legitimate threat, a group of people who were not going to make their lives better, and they took some kind of action to stop them.

And then lots of bigotry. Can't forget that.

Many years ago, I was at a friend's house and his parents were watching Bush on Faux News. Friend said, "We're loyal Republicans. We'd rather have an idiot in office than a Democrat."

Edit: Before the inauguration, I got back in touch with another Friend who went to a few protests but converted to maga because he started listening to the JRE podcast and whatever the algorithm also recommended. We know the type of influence that jre guy has on vulnerable minds. The podcast host literally twisted his mind 180 degrees.

Edit 2: I'm not sure that I consider them friends anymore as they would rather have their guy in office and not care that people like me get screwed over.

they want to be openly fascist

They think all of the gov'ment was corrupt and bad, so they're cheering for the destruction of all gov'ment.

Causing a complete collapse of society to own the libs.

Hurting their perceived enemies.

They don't all agree on anything. Logic and reason aren't part of the requirements for MAGA.

Reactionary ideology is all about protecting privilege by demonizing marginalized people. They believe in zero-sum rights and privileges: in their view, expansion of rights for another group inherently means a loss of rights for them.

Validation of their feelings and a return to a mythologized past. Try having a reasoned political discussion with someone like this:

Well back in my day things were just better. America was the best and we didn't have to apologize for that. And the blacks and mexicans and what not didn't complain so damn much because folks were wired different back then and there wasn't nothin to complain about. Chuck Berry. You know Chuck Berry? Greatest rock and roller of all time and he was colored. Didn't nobody have anything to say about it, he was just damned good at guitar. Now the kids - black kids - listen to all sorts of damnable noise and them from the cities in gangs shooting each other up and corrupting good white kids in the small towns and suburbs getting them into drugs. We'll be lucky if we dont end up like another Chicago. And they whine and complain about racism, but we had a black president and look how that turned out. Granted he was a muslim and not even a citizen, but try tellin them that. I mean hell look at what Hillary did to all them folks at Benghazi - just let them muslims kill all of em, probably wouldn't have been politically correct to fight back. Dumb broad even wrote it all down - the emails. Had her dead to rights - she should've hanged but thats what you get when you have all those corrupt democrat senators in charge of the kangaroo court. And those democrat cities just keep letting illegals stay because they know they'll vote democrat - they don't care how many of them are raping and murdering women and kids long as they get their votes. Not even just the mexicans anymore, you got those communist gangs from venezuela taking over whole apartment complexes and the defunded police can't do anything about it. You know something was wrong with that Biden election - not just illegals voting but I saw on Fox that they were sending out whole reams of mail-in ballots to blacks and college kids and what have you. And then they take all the conservative ballots and conveniently lose boxes of them. Maybe Elon's going to fix it now since he knows all about those voting machines. Liberals voting for dead people too, but that's been on the news since Bush - I don't know why nobody does anything about that. Now you know what's really racist is planned parenthood - nobody hates babies, especially black babies, as much as planned parenthood. They kill more black babies than anything and the demonrats just keep convincing folks that its OK. Makes me sick that we kill hundreds of thousands of babies every year and i dont care what color they are. You know another thing? We knew which bathroom to use - we figured out a genius method. I'll tell you: drop your drawers and look down. Then you'll know. And you'll know if you should be on a mens or womens track team and if you should wear dresses. It's probably because all the kids have autism from the vaccines these days - now I guess they're mutants because of that COVID mRNA vaccine too - but not me. No sir. I'll stick with the DNA god gave me. That's probably why all the boys think they're girls now. Or cats and try to piss in litterboxes at school. People knew who and what they were once. They knew their place, worked hard, and didn't complain. Now if we can just get Trump in for a few more terms then he'll set everything straight and get rid of all those regulations so I can afford eggs again.

That is roughly paraphrased from my parents, grandparents, other family, some senile guy at the grocery store who wouldn't stop telling the cashier about Chuck Berry, etc. They don't have rational political goals, usually. These folks are genuinely operating on an entirely separate set of facts and assumptions to us. Their brains are co-opted by decades of counterfactual propagandized conspiracy theories, which are too numerous and ingrained to easily disabuse them of. They are faced with an increasingly complex world and are constantly told versions of events that are terrifying or disgusting to them and spoonfed the solution: fascism, piece by piece, until you get MAGA.

They want you to suffer. Their lives are miserable, and their media has taught them that it's YOUR fault. So now they want you to suffer.

Hint: the reason it's this way is that the elite control the media. If you're fighting with your financial equals on the other side, then both sides aren't getting together to fight the rich.