Not giving enough of a shit to learn about… in some cases, seemingly anything, doesn’t mean you get to later claim “oh I didn’t want this, how could I have known?”
I’ve given a lot of leeway on that stuff over my life, and after this last election, that’s over. Anyone who doesn’t get it at this point has raised stupidity to such an art form that they’ve achieved immorality. That’s aside from the ones who just outright want bad things to happen, which is a lot of people.
One of my “friends” on Facebook who is a devout evangelical Christian that I went to school with between elementary school at a private Christian elementary school, a magnet middle school and she was one of the few white people at my majority black high school and even one of the fewer that didn’t segregate herself and made friends with everyone claimed that Charles Kirk was a good Christian and said I was insensitive for quoting his words after his death.
I honestly had never heard of him before he was shot and looked up things about him thinking from all of the things said about him by her and other conservatives was that he was a traditional pre 2016 Republican who I might disagree with around the edges. But I could have a beer with him.
I then looked up some of the things he said, showed her with links to videos, verified sources etc and she refused to even read the links because they would have forced her to confront her cognitive dissonance.
For the record, she isn’t one of the fire breathing conservatives and 99% of her posts are quoting scriptures and family oriented.
I didn’t realize until after social media how a lot of people’s whole lives revolve around the community of the church and how lost they would be without their church community. That’s not by itself meant to be an insult.
But I saw it in real time with her. Everything I knew about her as a person was at odds with her support of the current MAGA movement. I thought she would be bemoaning that Republicans didn’t choose another of the candidates last year like Pence who was a traditional religious conservative Christian and she would at least admit that she held her nose and voted for Trump because she thought Kamala was worse. I could have respected that if not agreed with it.
I do have a good friend who is slightly on the other side of the aisle than I am. But he doesn’t demonize anyone. He is the good ol’ boy that I could have a beer with.
Yeah well my experience is a lot of conservatives seem completely normal until you start dating a black girl. That's when you see how racism/tribalism works.
Try a fun experiment: ask your guy friend about ARPA-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E
They usually love that government program after learning about it. Then ask him about government investment into education, and watch his tune change. Education is one of the highest ROI govt programs, just below like roads and plumbing. Way higher than ARPA-E. But no, they only see poor black people using it.
Hope I'm wrong about your male friend specifically, but overall there's a reason Trump is the president. Your female friend's perspective is usually how it goes in my experience.
My stepson was 14 when we moved there but had been living in the burbs all of his life. The outer burbs where we stayed saw a lot of development and had become one of the most affluent parts of Atlanta and was still conservative. But not MAGA conservative. There were only around a dozen other black kids in his entire high school. He is 23 now. He’s dated exclusively White girls - that’s all who has been available - and we have met plenty of parents. There has never been a problem with parents. He’s actually engaged to a white girl now. I haven’t met her. But my wife has a couple of times when she flew back in town and they talk.
We have since moved - he is still lives around the same area. Not because of any discomfort. We downsized in 2022 after he graduated in 2020, I started working remotely and we wanted a change of scenery from GA and moved to a state tax free state with better weather.
You didn’t need “sources of information”. Trump was in office for four years before he was re-elected. It’s copium to think that people aré ignorant when in actuality, they are actively hostile to minorities, non straight, the college educated and non Christians.
They would rather feel the fallout of Republican policies as long as it doesn’t help or actively hurts people not like them. In my former home state GA, the Republican governor spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to get the Hyundai plant to GA that would have created 8500 jobs directly and no telling how many indirect jobs.
ICE invaded the plant and the opportunity is now lost potentially. The governor still can’t bring himself to criticize the President and the Republicans in GA are cheering the raid. The engineers from Korea were training Americans.
I think it's rather the choice we are given at this moment in history. But I may be wrong.
If you abstract away any other problems and boil it down to environment, health and work protections on the one hand, and restriction of unlimited immigration from countries with very different sets of values no matter the sociological developments that will likely follow you can only choose one.
I just tried to summarize what we hear and see from voters in analyses as fairly as I could, not present my own opinion. If that did not work out, let me know.
But in this case you choose the one problem that appears bigger or makes you more angry probably.
You're giving something away by suggesting that a balanced framing is: (1) destruction of our world, health, and lower/middle classes vs. (2) brown people bypassing an insane bureaucracy that prevents us from effectively receiving the tired, poor, huddled masses that we explicitly invite on the country's figurative doormat. You can be against the latter, sure, but suggesting these sides are anything close to equal is a choice.
I actually think he was telling the truth (from his pov). Conservatives see the world in a very us-vs-them fashion. Makes it very hard for them to even notice nuances like in-group enemies (nevermind actually deal with them). It sounds like an oxymoron.
Democrats correctly understand that immigrants are out-group benefactors. But they have blind spots too. We all do.
