06-12-2021, 08:35 PM
(06-10-2021, 12:05 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: I'd love to really explore what you think is a "maga type" and who exactly you're referring to when you say a "middling" amount of his supporters would like to send people to camps, incinerate people, and would be totally ok with deaths if they were strangers, and many even with family and friends.
Off the top of my head, I think Trump got around 70 million votes. What percentage of those votes would say fit your description?
Are all MAGA people the same? And what is a MAGA person exactly? Is it simply someone who voted for him? Is it someone who had a Trump sticker on their car and/or a sign in their yard? Is it someone who gathered on the side of the road in a large group with signs? Is it reserved for those that attended the rallys? Is it smaller pockets of all the above? Or is it just the miniscule amount that showed up on January 6th?
I think some of these answers may be helpful for me to understand your position. Because quite honestly, your post earlier came across as incredibly offensive and, to be honest, a little bit scary. I'm not sure this one is fairing better in my mind either.
I really hope (if you answer this) that I'll get something like "less than 1% of the 70 million votes are who I was talking about". Because if you think there's millions upon millions of people in this country that would be ok with what you've previously stated, and they're all indivudually worse than the those individiuals that made up small anarchist group that tried to kidnap the governor, then I think these last 4 years may have broken your brain. And it's depressing (seriously) to think that this country is now this divided.
I will add this as well; taking the worst of the worst and applying it to larger group is incredibly dangerous. It would be ridiculous for me to say that everyone that is a part of BLM, or has marched or protested with BLM can be diredtly associated with the worst behaviors seen at these events. I would think it would only be fair to extend the same logic to the MAGA types. When you're talking about groups this large you're going to get an array of personalites, both good and bad. Liberal thinking used to support this logic and I hope most still do. You can't pick and choose when to use a broad brush.
Happy to help. Any person who believes that the 2020 election was stolen qualifies. Statistically, that's the majority of Republicans right there.. Any Qanon follower absolutely qualifies. Anyone who turned on McConnell, ie the biggest contributor to Republican power in modern history, when he spoke out against Trump qualifies. Basically it's anyone who started out being a Republican in 2015 or so and somewhere in between decided that being a fan of Trump was more important than party platform.
Fact is, the great majority of my friends and co-workers are indeed MAGA types. Much of my opinion is based on shit that they say freely around people they trust. The Qanon movement is particularly disturbing, as I can name at least 4 people who are hardcore believers that I never would have predicted with unlimited guesses. These people literally believe that Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey are harvesting baby brains to get high off of them during orgies.
Perhaps my problem has more to do with my previous inability to imagine how far gone people could get in this country. It's like in a year, everything I saw as impossible civilly in our society became possible.
If DJT can order his followers, and as you said a small group of them, to take the US capitol then walk away as they actually try to do it, then what prevents him from ordering them to be violent against political adversaries who don't happen to be government officials? Better yet, what prevents the people he orders to do it from acting on them? The oddest thing to me is that the entire party (well, not Liz Cheney, lol) is spending more time acting like it never happened in order to allow a beaten candidate to remain in power and set the agenda in the GOP until he decides he doesn't want to.
You're right about it being sad. There are friends I once had, including even the roommate that introduced me to my wife, that I will not deal with anymore. Another of my best friends from college falls into the category. Like brothers at some point. I never fought with them or yelled at them, they're just dead to me. They are not the people I thought they were plain and simple. My mom voted for him, but snapped out of it during the pandemic when he was telling people to drink fish tank cleaner and bleach. I never argue with her about politics, but hearing her call him a stupid asshole was a relieving moment for me. Oddly, I respect more of the hardcore righties that I knew before the MAGA thing began. Many of my 2A gun collector friends hated him just as much as any government official. I can respect consistency. I have a corporate accountant brother in-law that I argued with about Obama (he hated him) for 9 years. He's left his party and his church, both because of Trump's influence there.
It's almost as if before Trump you had a hard right in America that was something different. They wanted lower taxes, less regulation, gun rights, individual freedom, and the prospect of blowing shit up in third world countries. Then you had people in the middle who could vote either way and had varying policy views, but were conservative cumulatively. Maybe they smoked weed or favored gay rights. Maybe they were against they war. They were the cool conservatives who you could have good discussions with. Here's the messed up thing: those are the ones that bought in to the worship of the figurehead reality show host. They are the ones joining Qanon and they are the ones who are more populist than conservative. Now hard right is less about right wing policy and more about doing whatever Trump told them was patriotic.
As for the question about the MAGA types vs the militias, my view was already explained. Trump's followers, politically, anyway, have existed for maybe 6 years. Miitias have existed since the nation was born. They've had a lot more time to do crazy shit than the Trumpers, but generally have sparse incursions on civil society. What will the people who believe the 2020 election robbed them of their god-given right to elect Trump to be their leader be doing in 20 years? What will the people who wantonly call political adversaries pedophiles and child-killers be doing in 20 years? My guess is it won't be finger painting. It's going to get even worse as the long promised "browning" of America inevitably advances and they begin to view white culture as under threat from various cultures that aren't theirs.
