taxpreparer said:
ttu_85 said:
Sea Speed said:
I'll start with this one, which is pretty mild. I'm sure this threads gonna get lit, though.
Seriously these people are nuts. IF they were this "scared" why would they be living in a "deep Red" state. Lib are truly ******ed.
They are not nuts. I am sure this is a fabrication showing the absurdity of the lunatic left. Think about it. A Karen married to a beta-male, with two trans daughters, living in a deep red state.
I personally know many people exactly like this. And I don't mean I know OF them, or that my mom's friend's cousin works with a daughter who is like this. I mean I have known them, personally, for years; have been in their homes, to their weddings, funerals, birthdays, to their kids' school recitals. They tend to be very active Internet users. Their social groups are quite narrow, so their only perception of the world outside their monoculture comes from reddit and bluesky and msnbc and npr. Over the past 20 years they have conflated "anti-traditional" with "diversity", which was sorta true in the 1980s and 1990s. But now they believe because they are "different from the Norman Rockwell Beaver Cleaver imagery from the 20th century" that different=diverse, when in fact their social groups are extremely homogenous. Everyone around them is "different" so they think they are diverse. But everyone around them is simply different THAN another way of being, but they're all different in the same way.
You cannot fully comprehend the reality they are living in. It is truly reality, for them. I have heard from many of them this week expressing a sincere belief that they are under imminent threat of being attacked, jailed, and murdered come January, and that "we will never have another election in America" because DJT will somehow wave a red light saber, dissolve parliament, and order his apprentice JD Vancewalker to go murder all the trans kids.
When I try to gently and non-confrontationally ask them why they believe this time will be so drastically different from 2016-2020 where nothing particularly bad happened other than the usual political stupidity both parties display at the national level, they talk about the first Trump administration as a horrible time when rights were being destroyed. When I ask for specifics, they get a kind of glazed vague look (this is where the brain's defense mechanisms kick in to escape facing cognitive dissonance between contradictory truth-states) and their responses stop being about actual policies in the USA, but switch to being about THEIR psychological state during that time. You see, what they remember is their fear and anxiety. And because that's how their memories of Trump's presidency are encoded, that's how they're retrieved. Some of them will make an attempt at saying something about how the catastrophe of 2016-2020 was the secret plan to stack SCOTUS with judges who will overturn everything since Dred Scott and who will declare Trump to be President For Life.
I assure you I am exaggerating none of this. It's not that everyone who voted Democrat is this distorted, but social algorithms have greatly multiplied the number of distorted minds, because the social platforms only make money when they show you what you most want to see, because that's what keeps you scrolling and clicking. It's not all Democrats, but it's way more than just 8 years ago. We're now seeing the first generation of full-grown adults in their early 40s who've spent most of their adult lives in Internet bubbles. And many people under 30 who've never - from infancy - had significant, broad engagement with the world outside their platform bubbles.
