Former President Donald Trump’s supporters say they hold him as a source of true information over their family, friends, and religious leaders, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll out on Sunday.
Former President Donald Trump’s supporters say they hold him as a source of true information over their family, friends, and religious leaders, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll out on Sunday.
I’m talking about years of cultural division and social neglect which have helped construct a funnel on top of the populist to fascist pipeline, into which an entire generation of young midwestern men are being dumped.
I know these people, they are my family and friends. Many of them started out as promising future-socialists. Then they looked to people who were supposed to be their allies in coastal blue states, and were immediately met with ridicule and derision. This provided a chance for fascists to swoop in and say “fuck those assholes, come roll with us and we’ll change the system together”. A lot of young men naïvely took the bait, and were radicalized in short order.
Christian fascism relies on a persecution complex, and you(collectively) have been helping feed into it.
You’re not pointing at anything.
I’m from the fucking Midwest. Any “young man” that ate the fascist bullshit ate it because they were fed it from their friends and families. It wasn’t the scapegoat “coastal elites” or the “globalists” or the “bankers,” it was a learned behavior. My dad eats that shit and tried to feed it to me and my siblings. My grandpa eats that shit and fed it to my dad and aunt.
If you want to blame anyone, blame Fox for making it so easy for anyone to feast 24/7 on fascism talking points where you turn your brain off. My dad is a smart guy, no question about that. Lots of Republicans are! But that never stopped him or any of them from being a dumb piece of shit loser. Because he chooses to ignore the facts as they are presented to him. He chooses not to know what the 16th Amendment is. He chooses not to understand the costs of education. He chooses to believe the lies that are said to him when you give direct video or picture proof otherwise.
Because if he didn’t, he’d be wrong. And I think he can’t accept being that fundamentally wrong.
I’m not blaming any one thing for the rise of fascism in America. There are a myriad of factors which have built up over the past 50 years to bring us to this point. MY point, was that ONE OF THESE FACTORS OUT OF MANY HAS BEEN AN INCREASING HOSTILITY BETWEEN GEOCULTURAL REGIONS OF THE UNITED STATES. This has helped, in addition to the aforementioned other factors, to reinforce a sense of political isolation, and political isolation mixed with economic desperation and preexisting prejudices breeds extremism.
The only people to blame for fascism are fascists and those who profit off of them. It just so happens that I chose to bitch about this one specific element in this specific comment thread because it is one that I feel is often overlooked, you absolute mollusk.
You were the one that assumed I wasn’t from the Midwest, not I you.
The increasing hostility isn’t the cause of “coastal elites,” though, so it is still misplaced rage. The only one you can reasonably blame for that would be the upper class, which, regardless if you understood it or not, is not the same thing. The term “coastal elite” is a loaded term to target certain types of people. It is, as you already put it, another way to isolate, but also one used by fascists themselves., which is why I put heavy emphasis on your usage of it.
But, yes, I do agree that I am typically a slug of some sort and that my mucus trail is both far and wide.
Firstly, I never made any assumptions about where you’re from. Secondly, I didn’t say “elites”, which is a far-right dogwhistle for jews, I said “elitism”, which is something I have absolutely experienced.
My fiance is from Phoenix, I’m from Ohio. When I first met his (lower middle class) friends they treated me like I was amish or some shit. I received countless, condescending explanations for simple things, as though they thought I’d lived my whole life in a cornfield. I finally had to explain to them that, while no, I hadn’t ever seen a skyscraper as tall as that one, or street numbers as high as those, I still knew what a city was. I don’t blame them for not understanding when they’ve been told their whole lives that gestures vaguely at middle america is all flyover country and that’s where farming or whatever happens, but it was still a patronizing experience that left a bad taste in my mouth. I can absolutely see how someone more steeped in reactionary or fascist rhetoric would take it as confirmation and reinforcement of the idea that “they’re all a bunch of snobs who don’t understand us REAL folk”.
Those are not my experiences talking to people throughout the US. No one has ever snobbed me for never visiting a large city like New York or even Chicago or even for not knowing something obvious or speaking funny. But, I generally avoid talking to shitty people, so perhaps that is where I went wrong.
I have had other Midwesterners shout slurs out of their car windows at my friends. Multiple times! I went to a school that had real problems not drawing swastikas on synagogues. I’ve been asked weird questions by complete strangers about my black friends. To have those experiences would also suggest to them that the Midwest contains bigoted idiots, and they’d be right.