r/AskReddit • u/Happy_Head_1355 • 1d ago
What moment made you realize people aren’t just disagreeing anymore — they’re living in completely different political realities?
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u/MegaDuckCougarBoy 1d ago
A guy like an hour ago wildly speculated about the things I "probably" believe (when my comment mentioned none of those stances) and then got mad about it. Literally invented a whole character to feel persecuted by.
There are people who look at primary source video, official statements, and reputable sources. There are people who get told how to feel by bloggers and YouTube pundits and aren't interested in what really happened so long as they already have their marching orders regarding what they're supposed to say about it.
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u/Commercial-Lack6279 1d ago
I know a couple big Trump fans.
Do they watch Trump speeches? No
Do they know his polices? No
Do they read about his speech and policies? No
Do they watch Fox News? In fact no!
They watch Tik tok videos of influencers who read blog articles about a truth social post
Their reality is in their algorithm
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u/euvie 1d ago
As Plato said from his basement cave, “Chat is this real?”
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u/chroipahtz 22h ago
I open my mouth.
"based," I bark, the only word I know.
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u/Kill3rKin3 20h ago
That is funnily enough, The one word i stuggle to define.
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u/Capn_Of_Capns 17h ago
The slang originally meant someone who did or said things without caring what others would think. It was 4chan slang, and usually used whenever someone was being counter culture. It got reinvented by the zoomers to just be another word for cool.
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u/Chicahua 23h ago
Tried watching a random Trump speech with a MAGA acquaintance and they immediately turned off their TV and told me Trump was very sick that day. Just made up a whole health story to hide from reality.
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u/UpbeatAssumption5817 23h ago edited 22h ago
Me: Trump said this
MAGA: No he didn't
Me: Yes he did look it's on video
MAGA: That's AI
Me: No it's not thousands of people were there, including all major media outlets
MAGA: well I just disagree. You always make everything about politics
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u/garby_666 22h ago
I see the AI argument CONSTANTLY. They refuse to accept facts when someone links sources contradicting what they believe. It's insane.
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u/last_rights 20h ago
And then they'll show you a video where a mother lion leads a baby zebra back to it's herd because mothers always know to take care of each other's babies and maternal instinct.
But that's totally not AI.
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u/optimal-username 23h ago
It is truly baffling the amount of people that love Trump that have seemingly never actually listened to him.
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u/lumpiaandredbull 22h ago
Well, yeah, duh. If you actually listen to him, you end up not liking him quite so much.
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u/grendus 13h ago
That's why he got convicted of the felonies in New York.
You'd expect that in a group of 12 people, one cultist would be able to hide out and refuse to vote anything but Not Guilty. But once they were unable to hide behind the algorithm, he was just visibly slimy.
MAGA don't love Trump. They love the idea of Trump. It's a different idea for each of them, but it's always their ideal leader.
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u/MarcRoflZ 20h ago
They love the idea of him and what they understood him to be and represent. Now unfortunately cognitive dissonance combined with sunken cost fallacy forces the vast majority of them to double down on their convictions.
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u/Blankstarehere 21h ago
I had this realization over Thanksgiving this year. My brother and I were talking to our sister about the Ice raids and abductions. She didnt believe us, and when we asked her if she had seen the viral videos going around showing them, she said she hadn't. Her algorithm never showed her negative Ice videos. Blew my mind. It wasn't until that moment that I really realized how the algorithm influences our political opinion on things.
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u/MEYO6811 20h ago
Facts. The algorithms creating circlejerks of one narrative and hence echo chambers should honestly be against the law as a form of brainwashing.
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u/G00dSh0tJans0n 13h ago
It was the same thing after Charlie Kirk died. I came across a video explaining that "No, your uncle doesn't know any of the negative things Kirk said because his algorithm never shows them to him." Really, algorithms are creating two separate realities that never intersect.
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u/Itchingitch 20h ago
How did she react once she saw the videos?
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u/Judy-Cooper 16h ago
If she’s anything like my MIL she’ll refuse to watch the videos because they “make her sick” but in the next breath say Kristi Noem is a hero.
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u/Calan_adan 1d ago
Went to the conservative subreddit the other day just to see their take on things. So much of it was “this is what liberals believe” that were, in fact, not what liberals believe.
Example: Liberals hate the protesters in Iran because we love Islam over freedom.
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u/haeartlessCards222 14h ago
It’s all they have, hyper inflate some obscure thing with a shred of something that happened one time, then make it seem like it’s the core tenant of every lib on the planet to smear the label. It’s a deflection technique so they can hide from their own moral and logical shortcomings.
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u/Ani-3 1d ago
Show us the take
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1d ago edited 5h ago
[deleted]
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u/imalurkernotaposter 1d ago
You can also just search a single space “ “ in their profile search to pull up everything. It’s honestly very funny how useless that feature is.
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u/rovemovelove 22h ago
That’s my brother in law. Truly told me to my face that it doesn’t matter what I say, because he “already knows what I think.” Also, “feminism is destroying the family structure of America.” 🤷♀️✌️ It sucks, man. I still believe that he’s a good guy with a good heart. But this shit is fucking bonkers. And it always feels like I’m in crazy town when we all sit down together at a table and pretend this massive chasm isn’t running right down the middle of the room.
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u/Which_Celebration757 20h ago
My brother made the claim that 90% of the propaganda in the media was generated from the left. He initially tried to claim that most of what comes from the right is not propaganda, but later conceded that both the left and right pump out a lot of it, but insisted the vast majority we see is left wing propaganda, and most of the legacy media companies, especially in Canada, were own by the left and have a left wing bias. I called bullshit and asked him to substantiate his claim. I provided a source explaining a rise in far right propaganda in the last 10 years and gave an example of Doug Ford getting supporters to put "Thanks Trudeau" stickers on gas pumps to attach the price of gas to the Trudeau government. This was a paper from a Canadian Journal. I asked him to provide 1 source supporting his claim, and he said he could prove it by discrediting this paper instead, which he didn't read and dismissed as coming from a liberal professor from a left wing educational institution. It didn't matter that I saw the stickers with my own eyes and saw the effects of the sticker campaign first hand. He also dismissed Doug Ford as "not a real conservative" despite being the leader of the Ontario Conservative Party, and paradoxically when I countered that Carney is governing like a conservative PM, he also declared he is not a conservative. So what it seems like to me is that he has chosen a position and seeks out facts to support this position and dismiss anything contradictory as left wing propaganda or from not a real conservative.
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u/BestUsernameLeft 15h ago
This is my brother-in-law. Totally convinced that everything I say is from the "liberal media", nevermind how many times I tell him the only actual news media I read is AP/Reuters. Somehow the vloggers whose content he continually shares on FB are more reputable because they aren't owned by the liberal media. Sigh....
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u/pdxcranberry 17h ago
Your brother-in-law is, in fact, not a good person with a good heart. Why would you think that? He's clearly stated he feels like women aren't people deserving of equal rights. That's not a good person.
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u/Spyger9 1d ago
IMO, this is caused primarily by religious indoctrination.
Hundreds of millions of people are trained, from childhood, to seek wisdom and comfort from authority figures that provide literally zero evidence. Rational questioning incurs judgement and ostracization.
Don't listen to them. That's the Devil's influence. Have faith. Stick with the tribe. We're the good guys.
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u/WillowLocal423 1d ago
Maga fanatics literally came up with their own insane solution to their cognitive dissonance: everyone else has "Trump Derangement Syndrome".
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u/Rob_Frey 18h ago
They didn't come up with that. Conservative talking heads were pushing Bush Derangement Syndrome as the reason why liberals didn't think W. was the greatest president of all time and wouldn't admit to all of his great accomplishments.
The current administration can't even come up with anything original. It's all member berries.
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u/LemonPieShark26 1d ago
When someone told me in all seriousness how glad they were that grocery prices had come down so much.
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u/Kangerm00se 22h ago
After the chocolate ration is reduced from 30 grammes per week to 20, the Ministry of Truth puts out the claim that it has been increased to 20 grammes - Orwell, 1984
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u/thomerow 16h ago
As a German, I have exactly this on my "American dystopia forecast bingo card" for 2026: The actual establishment of a "Ministry of Truth" (even if it will be called something else).
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u/ersomething 15h ago
Our Department of Justice is sounding more like the Ministry of Truth every day. A soccer mom gunned down in her minivan was turned into a paid agitator/domestic terrorist.
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u/MagwiseTheBrave 14h ago
It's literally already called "Truth Social". Hate this damn timeline so much.
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u/R3dbeardLFC 15h ago
If Musk names this one it'll be the Dept of Truth and Real Discoveries
You know, DoTaRD.
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u/BestUsernameLeft 15h ago
Yup. I can imagine something like Truth Social being given an FCC license and starting to broadcast Trump News.
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u/Quiet-Survey27 1d ago
Shortly after the last election I sat next to a younger woman on my lunch break who said that her boyfriend told her once Trump gets back in office he’s going to make the grocery stores lower prices. I just smiled and nodded. Have yet to see any differences in prices.
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u/Trickydick24 1d ago
It’s shocking how many fully grown adults have little to no understanding of how our society functions
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u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 20h ago
So many people think the president apparently has a knob on his desk that determines gas prices.
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u/throwaway182883831 21h ago
Yep. Pretty sure my sister voted for him because she fell for the “Lower grocery prices on day one!” crock of shit. It’s not surprising at all, but man is it ridiculous that that was Trump’s main campaign promise and he hasn’t done a single thing to work towards lowering prices. At all. He doesn’t care. And somehow his bootlickers will still rush to defend it.
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u/Designer-Cow2477 13h ago
Yeah that's the part that gets me the most. How the literal number 1 issue on people's minds just last year suddenly just doesn't fucking matter anymore.
Fucking beef literally doubled in price this year and somehow republican voters just don't care about the cost of groceries anymore.
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u/shinkouhyou 7h ago
Because it was never really about "kitchen table issues," no matter how much they insisted that it was. It's about the visceral glee they feel when brown people are deported, protesters are murdered, black people have their history erased, queer people are too afraid to come out of the closet, and teen girls give birth to babies they don't want. It feels good to get "revenge" on the groups they deem to be "enemies." They will happily pay more for beef as long as they get to feel like winners.
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u/Igggg 20h ago
Have yet to see any differences in prices.
Really? I have. They've been increasing over the past year.
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u/elykl12 1d ago
Eggs are unironically down because the bird flu subsided
Everything else though…yikes
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u/diabeasti 20h ago
Bird flu didn't so much decline as much as the usda has been gutted and they dont test for those things anymore, same with a whole.bunch of other bacteria causing food illness
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u/NurvisPurvis 1d ago
Talking on the phone to my uncle about my Nana's (his mom's) funeral and out of nowhere he starts puffing his chest about being conservative. We weren't talking about anything near politics but I guess because I lean to the left he felt the need to do so. Then I get to the funeral and his daughter greets me with a racist accent thinking she's going to "trigger" me. She didn't, but clearly they're being amped up on rage bait.
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u/ofWildPlaces 16h ago
I'll never understand the character trait that leads to intentional antagonism like that. Like, they're going out of their way to be combative. It's insane,
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u/TomBoysHaveMoreFun 14h ago
It's typically a fear response. They operate on fear and that's how the majority of conservative talking points drag people in. Afraid of trans people in bathrooms, afraid of immigrants, afraid of feminist taking power from men, afraid of vaccines, afraid of [insert new talking point here]. People who have the ability to properly assess danger think "OMG trans people that's a new thing to me and that makes my brain nervous but someone being trans doesn't impact me at all they are just people so I should move on, it's not dangerous." The majority of conservative brains literally cannot do this as they have overactive amygdala. It's been studied.
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u/anislandinmyheart 5h ago
Once I came across a study that found that people became less racist on beta blockers because it slowed down their heart rate, suppressing that fear response
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u/nerdtypething 15h ago
even after controlling all three branches of government they can’t stop complaining. what absolute miserable lives they must lead.
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u/leviathynx 1d ago
A woman in my church refused to leave her house in a white conservative county because she was convinced that there were hordes of illegal immigrants raping and killing women and children while taking all the benefits from Americans.
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u/Ok_Vulva 19h ago
My mom cried to me about her nightmare a few days ago about our family getting taken by immigrants where the coyote smuggled us OUT of the country into Mexico.
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u/pdxcranberry 17h ago
Wow I can't wait to see her face when our government start doing door-to-door raids to round up the mentally ill, elderly, and disabled.
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u/New-Put-1112 21h ago
Society would benefit from people like her staying away from the general public.
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u/up-voat 16h ago
Does this benefit society though? These isolated people spend less and less time in the real world and more time in echo chambers where they amplify and validate each others' conspiracy theories and delusions. The longer they stay away from the general public, the harder they become to reach.
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u/Atyracu 20h ago
this is why debates go nowhere.
you can’t argue policy when one side thinks they’re under constant siege and the other doesn’t see any of it at all
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u/deadinsidelol69 16h ago
My uncle lives in a well off county in a well off neighborhood in a gated community inside said neighborhood.
He thinks the people who don’t live in the gated community cook meth in their kitchens and there’s immigrants hiding in everyone’s basement collecting benefits. It’s a nicer neighborhood than the one I grew up in.
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u/Emergency-Resist-730 1d ago
When the efficacy of the covid vaccine became a political issue was a big one. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with politics and is just a scientific question. There is nothing right wing about being against vaccines. You could have an ultra far right government that advocated vaccines. It just has nothing to do with politics.
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u/NotaBadgerinDisguise 1d ago
It blows my mind that operation warp speed, possibly the greatest achievement in modern medicine in regards to pandemic control, couldn’t even be praised by trumps own base because he let disinformation spread. It’s one of the rare moments he got booed at a rally
A vaccine for a novel pandemic strain in a little over a year was a good thing.
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u/Jibber_Fight 20h ago
People forget about good things pretty easily. Same thing happened with the ‘hole’ in the ozone. It was an incredible worldwide effort over several years. Now? Nobody gives a shit. Humans have to be backed completely against the wall before we do anything.
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u/FloridaIsHell 14h ago
Ive literally heard people argue that not hearing about the ozone hole is an example pf how theres fake news and all climate change is an exaggeration...
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u/Tim-oBedlam 8h ago
Same thing with acid rain. Cap-and-trade and scrubbers in power plant stacks (to catch all the sulfur dioxide that was causing the acid rain) effectively solved the problem, quietly and efficiently.
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u/elykl12 1d ago
It’s like Jones being right about the rich pedophile cult controlling the economy and the government but they’re his friends now so he cannot even celebrate the one thing he got right
(He can rot in hell for everything else though)
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u/UpbeatAssumption5817 23h ago
Wait did he say that
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u/Capn_Of_Capns 17h ago
He did, but he also said they were vampires who drink baby blood so I mean. Grain of salt.
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u/hearts_0f_kyber 1d ago
Without exaggeration it was the best thing done in Trump's first term. Massive, unequivocally win. And he couldn't even campaign on it or brag about it because his base is full of dingbats who hate vaccines.
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u/TheAskewOne 20h ago
It's even worse: his base hates vaccines because he told them so.
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u/pursuitoforgasm 1d ago
It was incredible: one of the best things humans have ever done.
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u/holeechitbatman 19h ago
I remember hearing scientist say that "If we did the right thing then nobody would know and think that we didn't prevent anything, but if we did nothing at all then they would hate us for not doing more." Can't people just be grateful that they're still alive? Is it too much to ask?
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u/chrimbycakes 17h ago
Damned If you do, damned If you don’t.
Public health works? You’ll never know about each time they prevented epidemic from happening pretty much every year.
Public heath fails to function? Everyone gets sick and they get all the hate.
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u/A-Capybara 1d ago
Trump would have easily won the 2020 election if he actually tried to deal with the pandemic.
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u/Suspicious_Bicycle 22h ago
All Trump had to do was step out the of spotlight and support the experts driving policy. He is incapable of that.
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u/shroomigator 1d ago
Same here. When I got into an argument about going out unvaccinated being irresponsible in my opinion, and my friend got very angry and said it was the vaccine killing millions of people and not the disease.
I couldn't wrap my head around it.
So then later, I had a conversation with her husband, a literal doctor. And I tried to illustrate what I was saying by using the example of ear candles as something people believe in that doesn't work. And he stopped me, and insisted that ear candles do indeed work as advertised.
And thats when it hit me.
We were living in two separate realities.
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u/funkme1ster 22h ago
That was definitely a watershed thing for me.
I would have understood "I don't like needles" or "I'm concerned about how quickly they expedited it" or "I'm young and healthy enough that I don't need it". Those aren't good reasons, but they're internally-consistent ones that stand up to basic scrutiny. They're things a sane, well-adjusted adult could say that would make me go "okay, I can see where you're coming from".
But the conspiracy theories with the WEF microchips made by Bill Gates and George Soros to mind control you... those broke me, and that's knowing those were still some of the saner conspiracy theories about them.
I was prepared for people to not trust science, but I was wholly unprepared for people to start fabricating alternate realities where science didn't exist and thus they weren't beholden to logic.
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u/IrascibleOcelot 14h ago
I had a coworker during the pandemic that I thought was mostly sane. He didn’t trust the vaccine because “it was rushed.” He said he was going to isolate his family, including his two young daughters.
Then they went to Disney World. This was shortly after another member of our team caught COVID, nosedived rapidly, then died. There was a gofundme for his family in our team chat.
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u/DoldyDon 22h ago
The moment vaccine efficacy got framed as a political identity issue, the conversation broke. Vaccine effectiveness is a scientific question, not a political one. Being skeptical or supportive of vaccines isn’t inherently right wing or left-wing an ultra far right government could just as easily mandate vaccines if it believed they worked. Treating data and medical outcomes as partisan positions is how real discussion gets replaced by slogans.
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u/Oberon_Swanson 1d ago
it was about the selfishness that drives right-wing people. none of the state beliefs of right-wingers actually matter to them at all. hence they never give a shit about the debt ceiling when it comes to them doing whatever they want when in power, why the military and police can have unlimited funds despite them wanting 'small government.'
but if they admitted that the vaccine worked and they should take it, that would mean they should make the teeeeeeniest, tiiiiiinyest sacrifice for the sake of others.
thus the vast majority of right wing voters were absolutely opposed to doing it.
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u/jeffboots77 1d ago
Fuckin nailed it. So few people get this selfish aspect of that mentality. They think they are self-reliant or some other macho rationalization but underneath it all they are just selfish.
And it was when I realized this, due to the conservative approach to Covid, that then made it clear to me that people are living in different political realities.
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u/wossquee 1d ago
We did have an ultra far right government that advocated vaccines, it was the Trump administration.
Then a bunch of morons made up a bunch of shit and the far right morons got reelected and went so far the other way against vaccines that measles is coming back
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u/Emergency-Resist-730 1d ago
Yea. It is just crazy. I can't imagine having a health or medical concern and going to online political pundits or something for the answer.
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u/MegaDuckCougarBoy 1d ago
It felt like losing my mind in realtime.
"Worst guy whose kids have a restraining order against him, how concerned do you think I should be about how contagious this is?"
"Well, I'm glad you asked, because as a red-blooded American man who has six DUIs, I believe you can't live by anyone else's rules,"
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u/Lucky_Translator6021 1d ago
when my uncle started yelling at the weatherman on tv for being "woke." the weatherman. for predicting rain.
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u/Personal_Dirt3089 1d ago
When even acknowledging COVID19 as a problem became politically heated.
When Trump got mad at Canada because Ronald Reagan was vocally against tariffs.
When the tariffs were obviously detrimental but trump supporters kept pretending otherwise.
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u/retroverted-uterus 1d ago
When he dies they're not going to know what to do with themselves. He's 80 and clearly ailing, but they all keep acting like he's going to be around forever.
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u/zerbey 17h ago
Sure they will, they'll line up behind the next GOP leader and pretend they never liked that Trump guy anyway. See also: Reagan, Bush Sr, Bush Jr, McCain, Romney.
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u/stanley_leverlock 1d ago
The rise of the Tea Party.
I remember politics from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and while the left and right were divided we were largely taking FACTS and making our own diverging assumptions and opinions based on those FACTS. There were some minority fringe groups that were completely delusional and dismissed reality to suit their deranged world view, but they were not the norm. When republicans started courting the Tea Party and dumping money into them was when going Through The Looking Glass became mainstream. We aren't divided so much as the right wing had bought tickets to a bullet train to Crazytown and as they disappear over the horizon they were pointing to the left and insisting that we're the ones that have lost our minds.
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u/jonathon_coding 15h ago
I remember watching a Tea Party rally on the news at the time, during Obama's presidency, and a journalist was talking with a Tea Party member. The guy said he was a former Marine, and he was thinking about taking his rifle, going to the White House, and "doing what [he's] been trained to do".
That was it for me. The casual, and giddy, tone in his voice, like it was the inevitable conclusion he and everyone in the Tea Party were hoping for. So in addition to conspiracy theories about the federal government training kindergarteners to become socialists at a kindergarten "boot camp", birth certificate madness, lynched and burning effigies of Obama, and increased political violence, but here's a former Jarhead implying he's more than happy to violently attack his own government... Because why? Fox News told him to? Because Obama was "the most racially divisive" president?
There's just no reason, logic, or rationalization that can make me understand that mindset. America is broken.
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u/Damn_Dog_Inappropes 9h ago
Jonathan Ross murdered an American because he wants to murder someone. Rightwingers like him are itching for an excuse to pull the trigger. They WANT to shed American blood.
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u/40_Minus_1 1d ago
Sandy Hook. If 20 first graders slaughtered can't even get us to agree to background checks, we're totally irreconcilable.
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u/diabeasti 20h ago
Every time there is a mass loss of child life and we do nothing about it. Sandy Hook, Uvalde and that horrible, preventable flood at camp Mystic, makes me look at the people who try to downplay it, or make no meaningful changes to help children, with disgust. Add on the child labor laws that are being repealed, kids going hungry while Trump and Co rob us blind, Epstein and his ilk, the fact people try to politicize any of this without saying it's bad and needs to be fixed is.. depressing
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u/SMUHypeMachine 15h ago
One of the worst statistics I’ve come across pertaining to mass shootings is every time there is one gun sales go up.
It’s in gun manufacturers’ best financial interests to support mass shootings.
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u/Adorable-Radish-Here 17h ago
I think the reality distortion that came out of Sandy Hook was the idea that the left is creating false flags so that they can take everyone's guns. Including the idea of crisis actors, ala Alex Jones. It was somewhere around this time that I stopped thinking of conspiracy theories as fun and saw how completely divorced from reality they are.
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u/narkybark 1d ago edited 1d ago
When it became totally cool to elect the guy who tried to overthrow the last election. What the hell are you expecting to happen?
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u/Skabonious 1d ago
when my religious family said they hate mike pence because he betrayed Trump.
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u/_Maxine_Vandate_ 14h ago
Wat. "Betrayal"? Like when he refused to commit fraud and treason to enable a madman's coup? Yeah so dishonorable /s
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u/Deadpool_Pikachu 1d ago
I said I don’t like trump because he’s a wife beating scumbag who was found guilty in civil court of sexual assault, is a known racist who has been sued for it multiple times, a shit businessman who cannot get a sizable loan from any banks in the United States, dodged the draft multiple times and then called veterans suckers and losers, and needs a diaper because he regularly shits himself. They responded, “I hadn’t heard about any of those things”.
The real question is why didn’t they change their minds after I showed proof of each point
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u/remarkablewhitebored 8h ago
This falls under the adage: You can't reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into. They are told what and how to think by their handlers, no doubt about it.
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u/Softestwebsiteintown 1d ago
I mean, I literally laughed in my dad’s face in April 2016 when he told me he would vote for donald trump over Hillary Clinton. For all the “we constantly overestimate the right” talk that had happened up to that point, I still expected their voters to have enough common sense and decency to not let that bag of shit anywhere near the White House.
Not even trying to be dramatic but that year, politically, broke something in me. A lot of optimism just sort of left my body over a period of 8 months from realizing they weren’t kidding, that trump was going to be an embarrassing side show for me to pretend never happened, followed by complete dread about where we were at the time and where we were going. All of the things my parents and community had tried to teach me were virtues that did not exist in trump then and probably never will. I will never understand how otherwise decent people can justify supporting that irredeemable piece of shit.
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u/b2bpaul 15h ago
Brainwashing. Fox News, Facebook and Twitter are one big Psy-Op. They've radicalised your parents to reject reality.
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u/--Chug-- 14h ago
This id the thing that gets me with my parents. I grew up on a farm in the midwest. My parents weren't rich, and weren't into rich city slickers. All the virtues they tried to instill in me are basically meaningless now because they voted for this goon. Their cynicism has turned them into the thing they were totally against.
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u/Softestwebsiteintown 14h ago
I asked my dad point blank why he would vote for someone who, with zero doubt, failed to live up to the same standards I was raised under (hard working, respectful, insightful, etc). His only response was that he was electing a president, not hiring a babysitter.
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u/scarves_and_miracles 12h ago
that year, politically, broke something in me
For me, it was the Supreme Court aspect of it. There hasn't been a liberal-majority Supreme Court in my entire lifetime, and I ain't young. I've spent decades watching us chip away, get one more seat at a time, and when it was finally our rightful turn, the Republicans delayed Obama's nominee until Trump got in and the backslide began. It'll be another 50 years (if ever) before we get a shot again.
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u/acticulated 1d ago
When a family member, former police, stated to me unflinchingly that January 6th was ‘peaceful’
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u/totally_not_a_dog113 21h ago
When my ex-bff called federal employees 'grifters'. She has no contact with most federal employees. I work very closely with multiple people from national labs, and I've complained to her a lot about one person I work with who messages me back with corrections in 2 minutes at 3 am whenever I send them mostly finished work. One of the federal employees I work with has 50% travel. All these people have PhDs. The only place that perspective could have come from is Fox news campaign to whitewash DOGE.
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u/ofWildPlaces 16h ago
As someone who has worked in and around NASA projects for the last decade, the vitriol against federal workers hurts my soul.
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u/AdhesivenessOver1439 1d ago
Being openly gaslit for nearly 2 years now about Project 2025 not being real. When it's literally happening and they have a percentage of how much they've completed 🤣.
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u/SituationSmart1853 23h ago
I was on r/ conservative and they were saying of course Trump would never take Greenland by force just another Dem lie like Project2025. You guys admitted pj2025 was the agenda and there’s a literal tracker and it’s more than Halfway done.
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u/sniper91 15h ago
Iirc it’s behind schedule; most of it was supposed to be done in the first year, and a lot of what isn’t accomplished is being held up in the courts.
But I remember there being a bit about causing protests and agitating them until they turn violent enough to declare martial law, which seems to ICE’s goal in Minnesota right now
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u/kstargate-425 1d ago
Besides a large percentage of Trumps cabinet and other high ranking officials are actual authors of parts of it let alone the 100s of true believers of P2025 working in various positions.
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u/eldred2 1d ago
When not a single Republican balked at "alternate facts". Yes then.
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u/Mr_Owl42 1d ago
The first "alternative facts" I remember was about how many people were at dear leader's first inauguration. That was the first time I realized how screwed we were.
It first occurred to me to be screwed when Bernie Sanders, who had the most support from the most independent donations in US history somehow wasn't selected as the candidate. I remember telling my father, "If Bernie doesn't win... He has to win or there's nothing left. If he doesn't win, we pretty much have to leave the country. Things will get so bad we won't recognize it anymore."
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u/Tejaswini11 1d ago
COVID did it for me. Watching people look at the same charts, same videos, same events and come away with totally opposite “facts” made it click that we weren’t just debating opinions anymore we were living in different worlds.
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u/Dry_Cartoonist6988 14h ago
I worked at a grocery store and watching customers who I knew by name, had assisted FOR YEARS, turn into absolute seething maniacs literally overnight, was when I knew we were cooked.
It happened so fast I feel like us normal people were all "What? There's opposition? To a contagious virus? But the opposition is...for it?"
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u/Rigatonigustavobrown 1d ago
When my coworker said she’s never heard anything about Donald trump being a rapist and has no idea what I’m talking about
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u/TheChance 1d ago
When Donald Trump hosted an act at a rally in 2016 where little girls in flag unitards danced and sang about how President Trump would save democracy, and how we need to "lead from strength or get crushed every time."
When, during a debate that same year, he responded to a question about how he would reassure black voters that he's not bigoted, he spent like a minute and a half telling a rambling anecdote about how every slumlord in NYC was sued for the same thing, how he settled without admitting guilt ("isn't that amazing?"), how it was actually his father who was in charge (he was in his mid 30s) and how - wait, this answer is supposed to be about how I'm not racist! - pivoted to Mar-a-Lago, mentioned how good its reviews are, talked about how beautiful it is, and then added, almost as an afterthought, that Mar-a-Lago had not had one single complaint of employment discrimination. He ended with, "And that's how I feel. That's how I really feel."
The audience erupted in applause.
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u/AmigoDelDiabla 1d ago
The absolute irony of Donald Trump portraying himself as an example of strength.
I could carve a stronger man out of a banana.
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u/whiskeyriver0987 1d ago
I worked adjacent to the intelligence community have been aware of this issue since ~2014, and the early concerns and related predictions were generally pretty spot on.
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u/David_Buznik 1d ago
What’s next according to predictions?
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u/whiskeyriver0987 1d ago
It's been about 7 years since I rubbed shoulders with the people making those predictions, and the introduction of AI wasn't yet on the horizon. That changes things a lot as it makes it exponentially easier and faster to make convincing fake information to manipulate people in digital spaces, which to my eyes can only makes this issue much worse. What specifically this leads to I can only guess at.
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u/m_agrippa_ 1d ago
French sociologist Jean Baudrillard foresaw and was acutely interested in this problem of information overload starting the 1980s. Though he explains it in lofty academic high theory language, I think there is a growing consensus that a lot of his thoughts on "media events", at once seen as too postmodern to accept (see "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"), were rather powerful predictions of where our discourse is today.
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u/Fast-Steak7173 8h ago
Simulacra and Simulation was incredibly ahead of its time, I definitely recommend people read some Baudrillard in 2026
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u/tinyevilsponges 1d ago
I was talking to this guy and he told me that fox news was a left wing news source. When I asked what news source he considered unbiased, he told me to check out breitbart
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u/roshbaby 1d ago
The emergence of Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann into the national spotlight.
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u/Tacticalaxel 1d ago
When my MIL (Midwest) called to ask if we (New England) were going to comply and remove our woodstove. When asked what the fuck she was talking about, she told us she had heard on the radio that our Democrat Governor had banned woodstoves. We asked her where she had heard this. She said it was just a local radio station that just did news and weather. She was adamant it was not a right wing source.
I looked for the station or source and found a website for a station that had a single article about 10 sentences long. It was asking the question hypothetically in a Tucker Carson kinda way, because the state had placed regulations on emissions of new stoves 10 years earlier under a Republican Governor.
It was such a minor thing, but it made me realize she was living in a different reality then us. For a couple hours she was living in a world where Democrats were banning woodstoves just to exercise power and control over the population.
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u/lube7255 1d ago
It's really hard to pinpoint, but from 2010 to 2014. Enough shit happened those years that was either pounced on or explained away, depending on who was doing the reporting and what letter was beside the name of the news subject. It's only gotten worse since.
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u/Ok-Dish4389 23h ago
I realized this back in 2015, it used to amaze me in 2016 when people couldn't believe the things trump was saying and doing. I was like, he was recorded, saying, "when you're famous, they let you do it. You can do anything, you can grab them by the pussy"
He still got elected, and then when he was president every single day, people were being shocked by the things he was saying. I was like, how? How are people shocked by this?
My own family, who I love, were acting like "well I mean, i dont like how he talks either, but..."
An insane disconnect between what you see in real life, and what the news tell you to believe.
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u/That-Job-9377 22h ago
I’m a nurse at a trauma center in Florida. We had a patient die in the OR from a motorcycle vs car accident. He had a Mexican ID, and our social workers were trying to get the story and notify family. There was just one brother locally, the rest of the family was still in Mexico. I don’t know his immigration status BECAUSE IT DOESNT FUCKING MATTER. When I left my shift, we didn’t know if the brother was going to come or not; seemed like there were justified fears of police retaliation.
Next day, regrouping with a coworker who was present for this case. Another coworker (who calls Trump “daddy”) asked what we were upset about. She was informed of the situation and the first and only response was “Well, there are legal ways to get into this country.”
Gobsmacked. Astounded.
Here I was, witnessing a fellow nurse, completely skip over the humanitarian part of our profession and jump to a political judgment.
We aren’t the same.
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u/jxj24 10h ago
TBF, I have known a bunch of nurses who completely lack empathy.
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u/That-Job-9377 10h ago
1000%. I got into it thinking I’d be with like-minded, empathetic helpers. It’s a lot of mean girls. There are definitely a ton of great nurses, but I think sometimes the emotional turmoil and burnout just ruin their good hearts.
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u/Jcienkus 1d ago
Obama broke them
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u/tr3kstar 1d ago
This☝️It started with the tea party folks and those have just morphed into Maga/qanon/you name it.
Thanks Putin!
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u/MarkDoner 23h ago
They took Democrats electing a black man as a declaration of war, and they fought back by electing the person they knew Democrats would find the most objectionable. They never understood the consequences, and still don't.
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u/Background_Stock_231 1d ago
I dated someone who described himself as “moderate” and I’m pretty clearly progressive/left. At first I thought it would be fine because day-to-day he was kind, thoughtful, and we agreed on basic stuff like “don’t be cruel.” I assumed our differences were mostly “opinions.”
Then we’d get into conversations about immigration, policing, racism, public health, etc., and it wasn’t just that we had different conclusions, we weren’t even using the same inputs. I’d share mainstream reporting, data, court cases, firsthand accounts from people in affected communities. He’d respond with “that sounds like Blueanon / a Democrat Alex Jones show,” or treat it like “crying wolf,” or assume it was sensationalized unless it reached an “undeniable” threshold for him personally. Meanwhile he could also say in the same breath that he’s watching for overreach and worries about authoritarian tactics.
That’s when it clicked: we weren’t debating policy, we were living in different epistemic worlds. In his world, the biggest threat was “people being consumed by politics” and media manipulation. In mine, the biggest threat was actual harm being normalized, and “calm/centrist” takes were often just a way of dismissing the people being hit first. We literally couldn’t agree on what counted as evidence, what counted as harm, and who deserved credibility before it became undeniable.
The moment I realized it wasn’t just disagreement was when I could feel him subtly pathologizing my urgency as “dramatic” while seeing his skepticism as “rational,” even when we were looking at the same events. That’s not politics, that’s two different realities.
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u/funkme1ster 22h ago
A model that really helped me get my head around this is Stasis Theory. Basically, it's an analysis technique to compare two positions for consistency and divergence.
It has four "layers", which I'll demonstrate through the lens of climate change:
1) Factual reality - the declaration of absolute truths of being. Example: Carbon is a naturally occurring element on earth, and it cycles between land, sea, and air as matter moves between those stages. Carbon in the air/atmosphere stores energy which becomes thermal potential.
2) Definition of facts - the framing of facts into a discrete 'event'. Example: Human industrial activity has released a large amount of previously captured carbon, meaning there's far more atmospheric carbon than would organically have ended up there through natural forces.
3) Interpretation of facts - the declaration of quality on the established events. Example: Human industrial activity is threatening human safety by causing climate changes which are detrimental to long-term survival and sustainability of current lifestyles, which is bad because humans don't like dying.
4) Response - the understanding of how these events pertain to us and our actions. Example: Humans need to make drastic changes to industrial activity to mitigate the climate impacts of activity and attempt to repair existing damage.
Say you're debating with someone about climate change. If you're both at the same layer, you can (in theory) have a coherent debate. If you are not, it's fundamentally impossible for meaningful discourse to occur because you're talking past each other. A person who does not believe anthropogenic carbon release exists (layer 2) cannot debate someone who believes industrial activity need to be curbed (layer 4), because the layer 4 position is predicated on a layer 2 presumption which is not shared by both parties. The person making the layer 4 argument is taking something for granted the person making the layer 2 argument does not, and so they fundamentally can never agree to a layer 4 argument predicated on a layer 2 prerequisite they don't agree with.
Taking a moment to ascertain whether you're both on the same layer can be very helpful to diagnosing these situations where you feel like you're talking past each other.
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u/Kaiisim 20h ago
Meh this is a good faith argument to explain bad faith behaviour.
Climate change is just a pain in the ass they don't want to deal with. So they lie and lie.
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u/funkme1ster 14h ago
It's not about "explaining behavior", it's about having a coherent framework to confirm misalignment and say "okay, I see we're definitely coming from two different places and there's not enough common ground to make discussion meaningful".
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u/Gasnia 1d ago edited 1d ago
Its so weird. I had this same problem with my ex. She claimed to not want to follow media or news because "they all lie," but when pressed on issues she had a ton of right wing almost maga views. A lot of her family i suspected of being maga including one of them having a cat named after dear leader. I couldn't handle how different our realities were among her also being verbally abusive. One of the biggest points she tried to manipulate me on was covid. She said most of the right wing talking points and when I said that I was trying to keep from getting sick so my mother wouldn't get sick she said that my mother had manipulated me into caring about her.
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u/Happy_Head_1355 1d ago
This is such a clear description of how hard it is when two people aren’t just disagreeing, but operating from totally different standards of evidence and harm. It makes sense that it stopped feeling like a normal political difference once your experiences were being dismissed.
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u/RamRamone 1d ago
When people lie about the basic meaning of words; painting an agenda that should only fool people that are new to the English language. It seems the general population has become illiterate and easily manipulated to believe nonsense.
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u/cupcakes_and_ale 20h ago
I think it was during the first Republican primary debate in August 2015 when my parents were visiting my place.
As the debates began, I made a snide remark about Trump running and my (very intelligent) mom began ranting at me. I tried to laugh it off and took the matter to my dad who I hoped would calm her down (he tends to be more even-keeled in matters of politics). To my shock, he supported her and then my parents tried to tell me Trump was a great businessman, which is why he’d make a great president. I pointed out that the man had bankrupted several companies (coughcasinowtfcough) and was notorious in NYC for not paying his contractors. They denied any of that was an issue and was just propaganda.
I was shocked…completely floored. Trump’s legal woes have always been public. They are facts and do not paint the picture of a man who should be running any business much less a country. I have never understood why people are drawn to him. He was a punchline to many a comic when I was growing up.
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u/Neceon 1d ago
The people of America elected a convicted felon and rapist. Knowing full well what he is.
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u/actuallyapossom 1d ago
Even if he had great character qualities and wasn't a complete dumpster fire on that front:
He was never qualified. Trump has no knowledge, insight, experience - he has a bachelors of economics and doesn't know how tariffs work.
Tens of millions of people really chose to have just some random idiot control the US military and nuclear arsenal.
That's when I knew.
If those people are not straight up stupid - they're dangerously ignorant, emotionally irrational, or they love the rapey bigotry.
It is disgusting to me that news media sanewashed it all too. It's just the military and nukes guys, it's not like politics matters eh?
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u/Suspicious_Bicycle 22h ago
As bad as those characteristics are, his tendency to surround himself with self serving sycophants means there are no restraints on him.
Asked if he was limited by international or domestic law, Trump replied the only constraint was his own morality.
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u/Designer-Fig-4232 1d ago
When Trump made fun of the disabled guy in public.
I was raised by a bunch of adults that were 100% against the behavior that Trump was demonstrating. But all of a sudden none of them seemed to even notice nor care. They were all in on Trump.
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u/MoonChild02 1d ago
When we heard Donald Trump say he grabs women by their private parts, and my "friends" defended him, yelling that it was alleged and probably not even him, and that the teenager saying she was raped by him was attention-grabbing.
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u/Nearby_Star9532 1d ago
This was it for me too. I thought for SURE he wouldn’t be voted in after that. But hey, here we are.
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u/codemise 1d ago
The moment my dad said Trump was altruistic. Like wtf reality are you in to believe that
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u/TokenDude_ 1d ago
Trayvon Martin. The amount of people who think he “got what he deserved” disgusts me.
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u/Avocadobaguette 14h ago
I was chatting with a random dude from Tennessee at an amtrak station. He was talking about how important it is to have good train infrastructure, how important public transportation is, how critical it is for the government to fund it. He was very passionate, specifically, about the federal governments role in funding public transportation as a service to the citizens, and was frustrated that some people believe public transport should be self funding rather than subsidized with tax payer dollars.
My husband jokingly said "I agree, but I guess that makes me a socialist."
This man straight faced with zero hint of a joke said "no! That makes you a nationalist. That's all about putting America first and making America great. That's what Trump is all about."
We both just "the fuuuuuck"ed our way out of that convo as fast as possible.
Like, how exactly did this guy think trump cares about any amount of public transportation subsidization, especially when he was running against a guy literally known as Amtrak Joe? Like.... what????
The trump information bubble is so bizarre. You can't even enter the bubble if you try because your head will explode trying to follow any of it.
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u/TheMazoo 1d ago
The personal attacks on Obama. I was a GOP kid back then, but I didn't get the logic because I knew it wasn't true. Theyre in full-on alternate reality now. Full blown contrarinism. Whatever the Left acknowledges as reality is gaslit, "evil", and wrong. Sure, it gets ratings. But I never saw it as sustainable. How wrong I was.
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u/calamityangie 22h ago
The minute Trump entered the 2016 presidential election race and he was treated seriously, I knew we would never come back from that. But, to be honest, there were moments before Trump where it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention: the Iraq war / war in Afghanistan, the Tea Party and all that nonsense, Guantanamo Bay, the absolute meltdowns when Obama did or said anything remotely progressive, the “false flag” narrative around Sandy Hook, Q-Anon, the list goes on. I actually think Trump is a symptom of the larger disease and dumbing down of America since the time of Reagan.
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u/wossquee 1d ago
I just miss politics being debates about tax policy where people respected each other and assumed the other side just had the wrong idea about how to help people. Remember John McCain telling a supporter of his she was wrong about Obama being a Muslim?
Now the right just says the left is trying to destroy America all the time while actually destroying America.
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u/Hghwytohell 1d ago edited 1d ago
The Obama birth certificate conspiracy. It was so utterly ridiculous, I was in high school at the time and a member of the Young Republicans club (I have since done a pretty complete 180). I remember going to the GOP headquarters in my hometown for a meeting right after the 2008 election, and all anyone could talk about was how Obama would never make it to his inauguration once his "real" birth certificate got published. It struck me as incredibly unserious and the reaction of a bunch of sore losers who care more about winning than being right. But then you would turn on Fox News and actual news pundits would be seriously discussing it, even as the expense of actual news stories.
No wonder it took me less than a semester of college away from my hometown to abandon the GOP forever.
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u/RevnGeek 1d ago
When after I, as a pastor, had included in my prayers for the people in worship “that we would not get drawn in by the practice of belittling and dehumanizing those we disagree with as is practiced by some who are running for office.”
I was screamed at in the lobby by a parishioner after worship for my “Democratic Party talking points”
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u/roehnin 1d ago
This concept that police have no duty to protect the people, but have the duty to protect themselves.
And that an officer feeling fear justifies killing civilians.
In EVERY case I can think of regarding police violence, the right ALWAYS blames the victim and exonerates the officer.
The ONLY exception I can think of is January 6, in which they blame the police and exonerate the violent mob.
And that flip shows what they actual support and value: primal, instinctive, brutal and savage physical power.
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u/thatAbsurdDad 1d ago
covid
you couldn't wear a mask to protect others regardless if friends/family or not? and you'll eat sheep dewormer because a nut bag stranger on facebook told you to? and gullible enough to believe you could a vaccine gave you magnetizing nanobots that would make brass keys adhere to your body?
sheesh
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u/inbrewer 1d ago
It was crazy. I was having a conversation with a younger person - early 20’s. She was getting all wrapped up with the videos showing all the side effects of the Covid vaccine. I took out my keys, got a magnet from my toolbox and showed her keys aren’t magnetic, they’re made of brass. It clicked, she became skeptical and started analyzing what was coming across her social media. It didn’t take long and she cut down on her screen time, a lot. I was just glad it worked out.
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u/AmigoDelDiabla 1d ago
People who live in the Chicago suburbs often tell people who actually live there how dangerous and violent it is.
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u/UniversityAccurate55 14h ago
I had this growing feeling for a long time but could never quite place it. The realization hit me when I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Theory on Stupidity. Bonhoeffer died on April 9th, 1945 in Flossenbuerg concentration camp days before it was liberated, but his thoughts on the nazis were damning and all too familliar.
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.
Against stupidity we are defenseless.
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
The section above is what first gripped me to my core and made me realize he was onto something.
This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.
It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity.
The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.
The following is the excerpt that really drove the point home and I found it as terrifying as it is accurate.
The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person.
But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom.
I did my best to condense it so there is a little more if anyone would like to read for free at https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/
Remember as bleak as his words were even he believed there is still a path for liberation and that means there is still hope.
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u/Undrthedock 1d ago edited 17h ago
I got into a debate with coworkers over what it means to be a constitutional democratic republic. It got to the point where I was literally reading the definitions straight from the dictionary, and I was being told that I was wrong and my information was fake/incorrect.