I’ve been talking to a lot of Republicans lately because I don’t want to feel like I’m in a bubble, so what better way to counteract that than engaging with a group of people who statistically speaking all believe the exact same things.
Many of them feel under threat for their beliefs. They feel as though they’re being persecuted, that their words are being twisted, that they’re being silenced – that they may not speak their minds for fear of being labeled a racist or a xenophobe just because they say and do racist and xenophobic things.
That is not fair to them, they posit.
This newfangled War on Christmas is nothing new, and the culprits are the same – the elites, the liberal media, the new Communists (ehh, maybe kinda the Jews, if you get some Schnapps in them.)
I find it fairly ironic that these whiny bitches have the nerve to call easily offended liberals snowflakes while actively demonstrating the sniveling spoiled brat mentality being livingly embodied by their savior, Donald Trump – a sad old man who married a Slovenian hooker, whose daddy gave him a real estate empire and who routinely throws temper tantrums on Twitter.
He probably shits his pants, also.
You want to call progressives entitled, do you? Yet you think people should listen to your opinion on something even though you don’t have any facts to back it up? What do you call that, if not the ultimate form of entitlement?
The majority of the time these people open their mouths in a political discussion it is to assert some sort of concrete piece of disinformation meant to counteract a factually verifiable criticism of their party.
Here’s an interesting behavioral study to run on a Republican:
Tell them that Trump is being impeached because he for a fact withheld foreign aid to a country because he for a fact wanted to get dirt on his political opponent, and for a fact every foreign policy decision he has made for a fact benefits Russia and for a fact he has spoken privately to Putin 16 times since being elected and for a fact has without fail spoken glowingly and refused to criticize Putin, which is strange because Putin for a fact oppresses his own people for he and his cronies’ financial gain and for a fact Putin aspires to annex Ukraine and for a fact these things are all connected, hence for a fact seven of Trump’s closest associates have been convicted of crimes associated with Russia and the Trump campaign or Trump administration.
Speak to them calmly and slowly, and beg them to read a few articles explaining all of this, and to simply keep an open mind about it. The following process will transpire:
- In keeping with their general factually contrarian modus operandi, the Republican will scoff, smugly look at you as if you are sadly misinformed, and proceed to attempt to debunk whatever it is you’re saying to them.
- Unfortunately, the Republican won’t be able to rely on facts, as he has none, so he will then proceed with a few vague generalizations in order to justify his support for the Republican Party – an impromptu rambling which he hopes will morph to a crescendo, or at least will allow him to drop the mic and walk away and change the subject. This can take many forms, but it’s usually what about something, often times the Clintons, or how all politicians are dirty, or, as of now, Joe Biden’s shitty son.
- Once you inform the Republican that all of this is irrelevant and could he please address the substance of the actual discussion, he will begin to grasp at a few common misconceptions. These aren’t full blown conspiracy theories, those will come later, but things that have been proven “mostly false” on Snopes, which he will of course tell you is liberally biased. You should be able to quell any of his protests with a quick google search.
- Now he will then reel and move onto hugely macro discussions about Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, and how both parties are the same. He will begin to broker a peace with you, to distract from the fact that he is an idiot who doesn’t know what he is talking about, and act like you and him are the same guy, the common man.
- When faced with plain documentation about his lack of understanding of the subject he is talking about, the Republican will then pull the fake news card, and attack any source which disputes his (completely) un-sourced yet immutable stance, and ramble about the liberal media.
- When you then find a Fox News article which explains the exact same thing except spun a different way and couched in friendlier terms, the Republican will suddenly turn into Nietzsche and ask you, “How can you really know anything, what is truth, anyway? How can you really prove anything?”
This last step is annoying as hell when a ten year old does it, or some high school freshman brat, but for a grown man its a rather sad and ugly sight to behold – especially when he is condescending about it.
We’ve all had things we didn’t want to admit were true; such as professional wrestling isn’t real or that it’s really easy to learn the chords to songs we once thought were pillars of virtuosity, like Yellow Ledbetter, or in the case of a Republican, Glycerin by Bush.
Instead, your average Republican now fancies himself a member of the president’s spin team – a noble soldier whose duty it is to present their talking points to those who need convincing.
I’ve experienced some real mind fuck type of moments when dealing with these people: one Republican told me Trump can’t be involved with Russia because it’s too obvious. If he was involved, why would be make it that obvious?
I’m not sure how you can respond to that, except for to walk away. Imagine anyone on the left, or just any respectable human being, making this argument; that they couldn’t have stolen your car and smashed it into a telephone pole and then be seen walking away from it, because, if they were going to do it, why would it be that obvious?
The whole flipping it back onto you style of arguing is not only frustrating, it’s the mark of someone who can’t support their own opinion.
I recently spoke to a swath of people who support the Proud Boys, which is an alt-right group who label themselves as “Western Chauvinists” and seek to “Promote European values.” Aside: Maybe you should move to Europe then, cocksuckers? If you don’t love it leave it! MAGA!
I’m not going to do a whole retrospective on how the Proud Boys movement started, here is a good one, but the group’s founder, Gavin McInnes drummed up support by constantly saying things like this:
“Well, at least they’re not niggers or Puerto Ricans. At least they’re white.” – Speaking to the New York Press in 2002 about his fellow residents of Williamsburgh, Brooklyn.
A fairly difficult sentiment to misinterpret, and to anyone with an ounce of reason, there is no question as to what the Proud Boys are – a white nationalist organization.
Yet, in talking to many Proud Boys, most of them are quick to call anyone who calls them racist, well, racist.
7. I know you are but what am I.
This is a group who marches in uniform at rallies throwing up a hand symbol that they claim means the classic A-Okay. They actually claim that they are trolling people who think they are racist because people think they are racist.
8. He started it.
The buffoonery of their argument is rarely worth addressing – people don’t march in unison at political rallies to signify that everything is A-Okay, and neither these people or anyone opposed to them truly believes that.
What they do believe is that they are instituting a buffer around themselves, a have your cake and eat it too mentality, where as they can unequivocally stand for racism while not admitting to it, and in fact espouse the opposite for the sake of ambiguity.
Several of them sent me a meme of their new apparent charter which starts with:
“You call us racists, We scratch our heads, You call them black, Hispanic, and people of color, We call them our brothers.”
This tactic isn’t new; obvious racists calling their critics racist, just as calling documented facts which don’t flatter your regime fake news isn’t either, I think Goebbles did it best.
I think what is new about this is that the people under the spell of this propaganda – instead of merely being fooled – are being fooled into thinking they’re fooling other people – that they’re in on the joke, that they’re a part of the spin team.
Populist movements pre-internet were based so much more on hard criteria: Blacks are bad. Gays are bad. Now it’s, we welcome blacks and gays, as long as they are cool with us talking shit about gays and blacks.
It’s not genius, it’s not even clever. But it’s clever enough to dupe a hefty segment of the population – people who want to be clever but don’t really want to put in the effort to allow for it, lazy people who want to blame their problems on someone else, posers really, people who watch Fox News and repeat the talking points as if they’ve been up all night thinking deeply to form their unique opinion.
These people are so accustomed to being fed misinformation that they not only find it persuasive, they think this is how to communicate.
These people have been fed so much misinformation that they think misinformation is an effective rhetorical technique to someone who’s not in their cult.
They don’t realize how utterly ridiculous they appear with their fifth grade fallacies, but the scary thing is that the cult is growing.
You’re probably not going to change their minds, and they probably won’t realize how stupid they look, but you owe it to yourself and the Greek philosophers to tell them that they are coming off as incredibly stupid and to shove it up their ass.