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.
it’s not a cult, guys
Not even when they hand out the Flavoraid
I only signed up for the bunk beds and matching sneakers…
When are they going to drink it?
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Pure brain rot, Jesus Christ.
They prefer Trump over HIM, too.
What does an emo band from the mid 2000s have to do with it
If you told me 10 years ago Donald Fucking Trump would be the head of the largest American cult of all time…
Just… What the fuck guys? What the actual fuck.
The only way you can control people is to lie to them.
and…
If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion.
– L. Don Trumppard
At least Hubbard could form a complete sentence.
I heard that towards the end his drug use broke his writing ability. Does that make you feel better?
No, but thank you for trying.
You could have told me 40 years ago and I would have believed it instantly. Ronald fucking Reagan.
Fucking. Morons.
Literal fascists.
If only Smedly Butler had told us.
Their stupidity is a burden on those around them tho
Cult
This is absolutely grade A batshit crazy, not just your average dystopian batshit crazy.
All the lead poisoning is getting into the boomer’s reasoning and reading comprehension skills.
It’s advanced batshit crazy
A lot of words to say CULT
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The part that is fascinating to this Canadian, is that a lot of his supporters’ hardships are increased by the policies of the GOP. The demographic that is the largest recipient of federal social aid in the US is poor white people in the South and Midwest. Yet they continually vote for the party that has a clear policy of eliminating these programs.
Just before 2016, I saw this video that I wish I could find again. This journalist went somewhere in the Rust Belt to talk to these (overwhelmingly white) people. Of course, she got the usual “We believe in God, Guns and Country, and active trying to change that… Yada yada” stuff. But the interesting part was when she had an exchange with some fellow that went sort of like this (from memory):
“So, you’ve voted Republican all your life?” “Yep.” “And in your lifetime, have things gotten better, of worse for you?” “Oh, way worse.” “So… You keep voting for the same party, and your situation never get better?” “Yeah. But it could…” “Right, but it hasn’t. So why not try voting for the other party and seeing?” “Yeah, but it could!”
I’m not sure how you fix this type of “logic”.
I tried finding that video a few times the last few years, and couldn’t. Maybe it’s time to try again.
It is all about messaging.
Republicans are masters are connecting with people and selling them a cart full of lies. These people could sell icecubes to eskimoes.
On the flip side, Democrats couldn’t sell a starving person a free meal. It is infuriating to watch. Democrats can make big wins and they are afraid to celebrate them because of asinine “liberal guilt”… because god forbid someone somewhere might not be doing so good, so we shouldn’t celebrate our successes. It is exhausting dealing with these people. They will suck the fun and excitement out of a room.
The Democratic party should be acting as the “hype man” right now for Biden’s successes as President. Reminding people where we were and how much we have accomplished. They should have been doing this for the last year, but even if they started now, it wouldn’t be terrible. Will it happen? I doubt it. They should also go on the offensive and attacking Trump and the entire GOP but Dems tend to be too spineless to ever do that.
As much as we want to simply call these people “stupid” or “clueless” (which many people in this thread have already one) but it is much deeper than that.
Further, doing so will galvanize their support for their guy.
People like to imagine that making it obviously shameful to follow a guy would discourage people, but if you are open to considering the guy, you just get pissed, dig in, and let your persecution complex run wild. Famously, Hilary Clinton did a misstep in calling Trump followers “deplorables”. Which might have been an apt word to describe his die-hard adherents, but a much broader population took that as an insult, that the perception of “it’s us or them” had been validated. Even if they didn’t believe in Trump “per se”, the culture is absolutely support your guy, no matter what, or else the bigger evil other guy will ruin your country.
No one wants to believe they are being conned, that they are being manipulated. That the person they believe in is so bad. In the rare case where someone admits they were for Trump, but now recognize that he is a bad person, they are still likely to face ridicule for having ever been in a situation to fall for Trump’s shtick.
I agree. Fundamentally, these folks that support him now are not doing well. It’s not the same for everyone. Some are feeling disenfranchised from parts of daily life, some are experiencing undesired change, some are terribly unhappy and don’t know where to point their frustration, etc. Trump isn’t a likely cult leader. He isn’t very charismatic like we normally associate cult leaders. But he came with the right message at the right time and for a very large segment of our population, that message made sense to them. It gave them a REASON for how they were feeling, even if they didn’t understand their own feelings in the first place.
When the day comes that the spell is broken, society must be ready to re-engage with these people in a meaningful way. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat it with the next person to show up and given them another reason.
I don’t want to “study” or empathize with magats.
I want to belittle and (electorally) destroy them into irrelevance.
I grew up in a magat household. They’re magats because they’re fucking morons. I solved the mystery for you - no additional study is required.
I got in a debate once with my mom about the age of the Earth (of course she’s a young Earth creationist). I brought up the speed of light - we see things that are farther than 6000 light years, so the Earth has to be more than 6000 years old. Her rebuttal: “What if the sky is like an Etch-a-Sketch that God is holding up for us to see?” How do you reason with someone that believes something like that? Do you really think I brought up stellar parallax or spectroscopy that would change her mind?
My grandma, I bought her an iPad 10 years ago so she could get on Facebook and watch YouTube and stuff. Big mistake! Now I have to hear stuff about how Hillary Clinton has been arrested and convicted by a military tribunal and is wearing an ankle bracelet and will be put in prison after the 2018 election. Adrenochrome. Comet Ping Pong. Democrats want to chop off elementary school age boys penises. Bamboo ballets. Mike Lindell. Ballots dumps. Obama controls everything. Porn in schools. Democrats are trying to make us eat bugs.
Prior to the iPad I had probably heard her mention politics like less than a handful of times in my entire life.
She wouldn’t get the COVID vaccine… Even though she’s 83 obese, arthritic, congestive heart failure, diabetic, and has had two previous heart attacks. Then she got COVID and almost died, was in the hospital for more than month, now on oxygen at home… STILL WON’T GET VACCINATED.
These are not people that reason or think about anything. The only way to get them on our side would be a propaganda network to compete with Sinclair, Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Hannity, Neck, Levin, Shapiro, PragerU, Crowder, Savage, Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Project Veritas, The Blaze, WND, Candace, Jordan Peterson, The Washington Times, etc… And then pump that down their YouTube and Facebook feeds. Unfortunately I don’t know any left wing billionaires that want to create competing institutions to these things.
Not to mention the right wing message of simple solutions, zero thinking, and your prejudices are actually a good thing is hard to compete with.
You’re exactly why problems don’t ever get fixed because all you want to do is some knee-jerk reaction to a situation instead of trying to figure out WHY something happens.
You THINK you are better than these people, but you really aren’t.
If this was 100+ years ago, you would be the dipshit yelling at the Germans for starting WW1 and would be actively repressing them even further… which of course is exactly why WW2 happened.
And I say all this as someone who is absolutely not the type that believes in forgiveness nor do I believe in “live and let live”. What do I believe in, however, is that when an individual falls for this shit, it is on them. But when we have some 20 to 30 million people who have fallen for this shit, it is a systemic problem that needs to be dealt with by going after the institutional and environmental problems that created it.
I am better then people that think the world is 6000 years old and we don’t have to worry about climate change because Jesus is coming back soon or people that think Biden is going to declare martial law and round up Christians and conservatives into FEMA death camps (although I’m starting to come around to this idea) or people that think Jew NWO lizard people are deploying gay chemicals via aircraft chemtrails to turn people gay to reduce the world’s population.
One thing I’d like a better understanding of is the percentage of people that really are rabid Trump supporters vs the people who just voted for him because he was the Republican candidate. I feel like the polls at this point are worthless and we really won’t know how many of them there really are until the primaries. Maybe we will get a better view after the debates.
Anyway, I’m curious if you or anyone else has stats as to how many cult members there really are?
I personally don’t have a problem with Republicans. l think low taxes, small, government and even religion are a valid world views. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I understand why they do, I just wish they backed someone who respected our institutions.
They claim about 60% of GOP votes. That translates to about 20% of all voters are hardcore MAGAts. Even if that number is rounded up a little, I would say at least 15% are the rabid Trump supporters you are talking about. That’s roughly 25M people. That is not an insignificant number of people. Then there will be a ton of other votes for Trump and the GOP simply because some people will vote for their party regardless.
Now in THEORY I could agree with you that having a party push for low taxes and small government isn’t bad. But the GOP hasn’t believed that in decades. They might still campaign on that message because who doesn’t want their taxes lowered, but there is absolutely nothing “fiscally responsible” about that party and every time they gain power, they prove that.
And that is my personal biggest worry is that if Trump somehow doesn’t win the GOP nomination, some other Republican could step up and start singing the same “lower taxes” bullshit that they’ve been trying for ages but ultimately when they get power they will try shoving religion down our throats, cut abortion rights even further, cut taxes - but only on the ultra wealthy, which will leave the rest of us with even more massive deficits - and increased spending on military programs we simply do not need.
Republicans have proven time and again that they do not deserve support.
One of the most frustrating aspects of this whole situation is listening to the absolute braindead takes I hear from the left. There’s a lot of coastal elitism going around and it almost makes want to side with the magats just out of spite. I hear armchair socialists who have never done a day of physical labor in their lives making fun of farmers while stuffing their faces full of cheetos made from corn grown in Iowa. The few attempts I’ve seen to reach across the isle have been from the patronizing position of “we need to teach these hateful know-nothings in flyover country about their privilege and how to vote properly”, instead of trying to learn why they believe what they do and how best to reach them.
I know that they’re wrong. I know this because I was raised in a stable household by loving parents and was given a good education, but I get why they’re angry. To be honest, I’m angry too.
What the fuck are you talking about?
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.
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trying to learn why they believe what they do and how best to reach them.
Can I upvote this more than once??
This is very, very spot-on.
And the fact that someone here has downvoted you speaks volumes to the very point you are trying to make!
The Left is extremely exclusionary and in many ways has HELPED Trump more than almost anyone else. Yes he’s a piece of shit. Yes he deserves to die in jail, but stop pushing groups away because eventually they could end up falling for MAGA propaganda. We are already seeing reports of how an alarming number of white male teens are joining right wing groups. What does the Left do? Make it worse by calling out bullshit like “white privilege” or calling them “incels” or simply “racist”. These guys are just kids and they hear one side that is constantly degrading males and constantly blaming whites… well what the fuck do you think those teens are going to do? They are going to find a group that accepts them. It is so obviously and yet so infuriating how the Left can’t see what they are doing.
These guys are just kids and they hear one side that is constantly degrading males and constantly blaming whites
I don’t hear that side anywhere. I hear at most maybe a few sporadic dumbasses. Maybe get your ears checked.
I feel like we need some sort of legal protection for circumstances like this. no objective analysis of these people’s behaviour would agree that they’re acting rationally, and probably can’t even be considered to be in their right minds. should we risk individuals so afflicted being able to determine the direction an entire country takes? do they pass out voting forms at mental institutions?
Disqualifying a candidate is the intended legal protection. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that will ever be used effectively if it’s not done to Trump.
that’s not going to work for his supporters, though. they’ll scream conspiracy and the next capital riot might not be such a joke.
Rioting will come and go. Assuming a disqualification is recognized by enough people, then the noise makers will go back into the woodwork for a time.
There’s a lot of misguided people out there who would vote for Trump if he was on a ballot but would not start a civil war if he was not.
I feel like it’s true to say that we are the closest we’ve been to a civil war since the last, but that doesn’t mean that the risk of civil war is high.
As I understood, that was one intent of the electoral college.
I was downvoted for this comment on another thread:
1/3 of the electorate would be happy to have trump rape their kids live on C-SPAN and would line up to suck his asshole as an expression of gratitude.
I stand by it.
Only if their kid was liberal. Then they’d be ok with it.
I got told I’ll get kicked out of my own apartment by someone who isn’t on the lease if I make fun of trump and Republicans out loud lmao.
Me and my mother are on the lease. Her BF who lives with us isn’t . Apparently he’ll kick me out of my own apartment (I’m 25 btw. Not a kid.)
Start slowly adding feces to his food
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Just like cult members. 🙄
Like this one…
Trumpism is a cult
A death cult.
Hopefully they won’t do what death cults usually do, if you catch my drift
If their leader tells them to wear Nikes and have drink of poison because that way the comet will pick them up and maga, I’d say we don’t stand in the way.
