cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20930689
My job is doing outside sales in Ohio and my customer base is very much blue collar manufacturing. There is an obvious overlap in manufacturing and Trump supporters. A lot of places I visit have Trump memorabilia posted around - signs, stickers, flags, whatever.
The other day I was in a spot southeast of Columbus, near the Ohio River. I pull in to this smaller machine shop and see Trump signs in the windows and Trump stickers on the only car outside.
Go in and start chatting with the owner. Within 5 minutes he had already hit me with 3 hard Rs, going on a rant about the “criminals in office” and “if everything goes the way it’s supposed to November 5th” and “if it doesn’t there’s gonna be some problems on November 6th”. Had a Biden-Harris Target List hanging (idk if it was a list of people he wanted to kill or if it was one of those “people judge me for my shitty actions and I feel attacked” things).
He was carrying a Glock (not uncommon in a lot of these places that people open carry) and I’m not unfamiliar with firearms (I grew up in Kentucky and was in the Marine Corps), so in order to turn the conversation back to business and away from the racist pro-Trump conversation, I mentioned that the company I work for makes gun barrels for a couple high-profile gun manufacturers. Conversation went that way for a minute (he says it’s “bullshit that they try to take guns away from people like you and me (I’m a white dude so I guess we are the only ones supposed to have guns) when everybody knows the hard Rs and illegals are the ones committing all the crime”), then he says, “yeah, if you were a hard R, you’d be seeing this pistol up close”
Idk what my point is other than this guy is the type of dude that’s gonna vote for Trump and if that’s the people Trump supporters want to side with idk y’all need to look at yourself in a mirror or something.
We live in horrid system and it produces horrid people. Do not seek to redeem those who don’t seek redemption themselves. You will end up doing more work than them on their own life. Practice a little radical acceptance and realize they are exactly the kind of scumbags they portray themselves as.
Oh brother, she went from “I pity Trump supporters because they’re just too stupid to understand why he’s a bad man” to full-on “they’re sad, racist and stupid, and there’s just no helping them”. She just can’t help but look down on the tens of millions of people who plan to vote for him for a variety of reasons. The constant elitism coming from the left isn’t doing them any favors.
To quote one of my favorite books: “I look down on you, because that is where you are located.” Maybe if republicans stopped being sad, racist, and stupid, we’d stop thinking that they are. Have some personal responsibility. I don’t think it counts as “elitism” to suggest that freedom or equality should be respected.
Can you blame the left? The dance of interfacing with Conservative rhetoric means constantly having to change up tactics under the assumption that the person doesn’t understand because the alternatives to that are that they either refuse to understand because they are selfish and want to be comfortable at the expense of other people’s safety… or because they do understand but they are creating scapegoats and targets for the deliberate harm of others because doing so gives them kickbacks or because they think those people are deserving of harm.
Believing they are being tricked or haven’t actually thought things through at least gives one the comfortable idea that one’s fellow man is not evil or indifferent to evil as long as they benefit. Right wingers think leftists are elitist and leftists hope that right wingers are dumb because being dumb is still better than being actually cruel.
I was a republican until I moved from the Midwest to the south.
They’re completely underselling it, the south fought a war against America to keep humans as pets, then after they lost just kept doing it anyway.
Hitler wrote about Jim Crow in Mein Kampf as an example for Germany to follow. Black GIs came home from fighting fascism to be lynched for being uppity, and they still worship their heritage of brutal genocide with nostalgia.
The only thing the south ever, EVER cared about was that at least they were better than black people, they were hardcore socialists Ala Huey Long till LBJ passed civil rights, then they immediately switched to the GOP who welcomed them with open hoods.
Please don’t talk about things you haven’t experienced first hand, you people have just had the luxury of ignoring them until now.
– sincerely, a brown person who escaped the south
Trump amplifies and justifies the way they have always felt. If it wasn’t MAGA it would be something else.
They need mass therapy.
Maga is their form of mass therapy, you could never, ever convince them they were wrong about anything ever.
This is the whole reason we have education, to teach people they could be wrong about something complicated, that it’s not the end of the world, and that they could learn and grow from the experience.
Can’t teach people who think being wrong about anything means they aren’t the perfect, chosen of their God.
