Oliver Willis on how many of us need to wake up and stop pretending that those who are sticking with Trump through thick or thin are being "duped" by him or taken for a ride by Fox News.
They are, Willis thinks, truly malicious people who are energized by the cruelty and hatred of minorities:
@wdlindsy this goes all the way back to the civil war. Most northern whites thought most poor southern whites were being manipulated by the planters and would eventually welcome their defeat and understand it as liberation. When nothing of the sort happened they weren't really capable of understanding it, but the fact is most poor southern whites were fine with the slavery system and hated the north and black people so much they couldn't see their own self interest. Sad but really unchanged
@johnshirley2024 I'm inclined more in the direction of seeing most of those supporting Trump as malicious players, not ignoramuses. The term "ignoramus" lets them off the hook for the bad choices they keep making — freely and willingly — because they want someone to target, hate, and hurt.
@wdlindsy Certainly it's true that they're easy to trigger when it comes to encouraging racism, transphobia etc. But those things too are rooted in ignorance and bad information--in lies.
@johnshirley2024 Yet they're pushed from the very top of our society, by the wealthiest people in our society, many of whom firmly believe these racist, xenophobic, and transphobic ideas. I find it difficult to imagine Elon Musk is pretending about what he believes.
@johnshirley2024 I think that if we grant that, if we recognize it, then we'd have to say that many "educated" people including ones who have graduated from the most prestigious universities around are "pseudo-educated."
@wdlindsy They become malicious because they're constantly lied to. They're semi-literate at best. They're in the thrall of Fox news and rightwing radio and websites. We need to work around them, of course, and get the vote out and persuade fence sitters to vote blue and so on. But some of these people could be reached, as I've been suggesting, by well funded PSAs designed to show, in brief, how they're being screwed over by the people they're supporting.
@BigMcLargeHuge@wdlindsy They wouldn't come into the sane group if they weren't actually convinced they'd been wrong. Not likely to happen, this convincing, but it might be possible to get them to not show up for Trump. That would help.
@johnshirley2024 When Trump gained the White House in 2016, the media shopped around a meme which held that he was put into office by "economically alienated" white working-class voters. That meme did not stand up to scrutiny, since economic analysis of Hillary and Trump voters showed that economically struggling working-class voters voted more heavily for Hillary.
Trump's supporters have, all along, had rich representation in the middle and affluent classes of voters.
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@wdlindsy I never thought Trump wasn't getting good support from many in the moneyed class. Anything to lower their taxes, remove troublesome regulations, let them use sweatshops and child labor.
@johnshirley2024 I don't think calling Trump supporters idiots or illterates really reaches to the bottom of the problems we're facing with his supporters and why they choose to support him.
@wdlindsy Well they choose to support him because they're being deceived. They have no critical thinking to protect them. They are foolish enough not to know when someone's pushing their buttons. But see, I think this idiocy is imposed on most of them. It's essentially a lack of educational resources or just being trained --in terms of upper class idiots--to ignore information that doesn't support their biases and the lies their lives are founded on. So it's not congenital stupidity.
@wdlindsy I haven't said no one should be held accountable. We have to hold them accountable. But it's sort of like holding a deer accountable for being run over when it was mesmerized by headlights.
@wdlindsy No it doesn't, you're right. But that doesn't stop them from being idiots even though--as I said--it's a kind of learned idiocy they can theatrically rise above given the chance. They have to be held responsible, sure.
@johnshirley2024 Lots of reports show that those engaging in the insurrectionist riots on Jan. 6 were largely middle-class and affluent people, not working-class people. Trump's voters tend, many of them, to be college-educated. At the very top of society's economic ladder, he has had strong support among highly educated CEOs and corporate leaders.
This is not to overlook his appeal to large groups of white Christians, some of whom are poorly educated and working-class.
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@wdlindsy Some middle class people--but few affluent people. there were some, though. They were the ones with the resources and wherewithal to get there. But having some money doesn't mean you're not an idiot. Evangelicals, some considerable number of them, find Trump to be a convenience. They think of him as like a hammer--a dumb, simple tool, but it drives the nail.
@johnshirley2024 But it's to note that the pattern seen as Hitler rose to power in Germany — working-class Germans did not support him, but church leaders, educational leaders, media elites, business leaders, military leaders did so — is being paralleled in the US in some notable ways now.
To my thinking, the "they're idiots" explanation is far too simple and it's frankly condescending. It also lets those who keep making the malicious choice to support Trump, knowingly, off the hook.
@wdlindsy It's condescending? Anyone who listens to Fox News and Alex jones and gets into Qanon is, at least for now, an idiot. But I am saying that people can learn better. Oh some make a malicious choice, yeah, I never said no one does that. I just think a lot of them are ignorant fools being spoonfed poison. They think they're protecting their family. They're being mis-led. You generalize too much about Germany btw, though I know what you mean.
@johnshirley2024 I'm hardly defending those who are wedded to the Fox worldview. I'm not sure that idiocy or illteracy is a primary reason that they do so. My assessment is that people gobbling up what passes for news at Fox and its ilk are frequently wilfully ignorant — like a couple I know who are among the richest folks in my state, both with Ivy League educations who drink in everything Fox says, knowing they're making a mockery of their educations, but determined to do just that maliciously
@wdlindsy You aren't being charitable by saying "don't mock their education" etc. You are assuming they're responsible for their education or lack of it. Whatever sort they receive--whether the sort that Donald Trump got (or pretended to get) or home schooling etc, is imprinted them in a way that is hard to get around. Told the same lies over and over,taught to buffer away your empathy for immigrants (for example) all your life...well, is it your fault? Is a puppet to be faulted for its strings?
@wdlindsy Yes they're willfully ignorant...if you can be conditioned to be willfully ignorant. I think you can. But we still have to hold them responsible.
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