Here’s a little cartoon that nicely summarizes my attitude towards all those people who voted for Trump.
Get the fuck out of my life. Don’t ask me for anything, not even sympathy. Don’t try to tell me it was nothing personal, you just wanted lower grocery prices (I have news for you — you won’t be getting them), that I’m bad for letting politics interfere with friendship. It’s you that stabbed me and all my friends and a few million innocents with your politics.
That goes for NPR, too. They have a story about a couple in which the wife leapt down the MAGA rabbithole.
Late one night in June 2020, Katrina Vaillancourt lay awake in her bedroom, overwhelmed by the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unable to sleep, she pressed play on an online video series that a friend had sent.
The videos’ narrator promised to reveal “evidence of an elite plan so evil, so all encompassing, that people will be shocked to the core.”
The dizzying 10-part video series was called Fall of the Cabal. It promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory that society is controlled by a satanic cabal that is abusing children. Vaillancourt would later think back on this moment as the point at which her beliefs radically changed overnight, rupturing her closest relationships — including the one with her then-fiancé, Stephen Ghiglieri, who was asleep beside her.
This is a horror story. It couldn’t be worse if instead, she had a debilitating stroke. This was a devastating, near instantaneous transformation that would have warranted an emergency trip to the hospital. NPR treats it as a mundane change of opinion, though.
As Vaillancourt watched, her initial skepticism gave way to a feeling of devastation. She was relieved when the final episodes claimed a group of government insiders was working on a plan to take down the cabal with then-President Donald Trump’s help. The narrator called the president a “genius, a 5-D chess player, a man with a huge heart.” A “golden age” was on the way.
“I felt nauseated by the sight or the sound of Trump prior to this particular night,” Vaillancourt said. But at a time when the world felt chaotic and uncertain, the message in the series gave her hope. “My fear dissolved,” she recalled. “I felt this beaming of love” and “like the curtain had been thrown wide open.”
Dear god. Was she poisoned? Was she always this gullible and delusional? Don’t worry, though, she got “better”.
Vaillancourt voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. even though he had dropped out of the race. Trump has picked him to be part of his administration, which she says has given her a reason to feel optimistic.
“I have been of an opinion that’s different than Stephen’s [her husband],” she said. “And that’s a difficult thing for me to even say right here. I don’t share the fear that so many people around me do. That’s difficult to acknowledge too.”
This lunatic woman and her husband have reconciled…and NPR treats this as a happy ending. See, they just have different opinions — she may have voted for a manic anti-vaxxer, she may see a wanna-be dictator who wants to deport millions and deny health care to women, but love will find a way and she will face no consequences from her insane views.
She sounds like the kind of person who loves NPR.
Is that a real thing? The video cartoon, I mean. All this apologetic desire to be liked?
Can’t say I’ve ever experienced it.
Far as I know, most people who support Trump are quite unapologetic about it, even brag about it.
‘Owning the libs’ is the point, no?
(I’m in Oz, I suppose in the USA it’s like 1000x more intense)
This Bukowski poem, A Challenge To The Dark, keeps coming back;
I lost two friendships thanks to Trump, and honestly I couldn’t be happier. One of them was an entitled, philandering dick. I had to set up a message filter that shunted his email to a folder and marked it as read, as he was constantly sending me links to stupid conspiracy theories that could be debunked by a 30 second google searched.
I think our friendship started to die a few years before that when I realized that his primary goal in life was to make himself feel good.
The other was a more subtle philandering dick who get huffy the moment even mild criticism of right wing politics, or the catholic church was spoken.
John @1:
Ah well, “far as you know”. That probably means bits and pieces you’ve read or heard in the media. Thing is, the most visible/audible people in the media are the ones who are the most extreme. Surely you’ve noticed this phenomenon? If you actually talk to people “on the ground”, rather than depend on what you see or hear on TV or the internet, you can get a very different picture.
Yeah, I’m not going to touch NPR, again.
Voting for Trump is beyond the pale. End friendship, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
I was raised on NPR, so my disappointment is especially acute.
Rob:
Day after the election, a good mate messaged me to gloat about it.
Happy as larry stocks were up, figures it’s gonna be great.
(What, you imagine I’m an eremite?)
People on the ground are in Australia, where I live.
(I’m in Oz, I suppose in the USA it’s like 1000x more intense)
—
But fine, it’s the people on the ground who are supposedly apologetic, not the people on the media, best as you can tell.
I have no knowledge of NPR of course, but on one thing I can agree: this sort of awful choice is way more than a simple “difference of opinion”. Those are appropriate for matters of taste, sports, esthetics and similar.
Here we have scads of people in front of an obvious choice and choosing the worst possible outcome AND feeling clever about it.
Like, what’s better? Stubbing your toe or falling headfirst into a lava lake? And waddyathink, they go for the lava, and try to convince you they are not insane, toes are way sensitive man, and lava gets a bad rap all the time, it’s all those socialists’ fault for badmouthing the poor lava.
And when they go up in flames, it’s never their fault…
I’m an asexual. From what I’ve read, the people behind Project 2025 want me labeled a sex offender, along with all my LGBTQ+ friends. Any one who says they voted for Trump knows they voted for that, and I’ll be quick to remind them if I encounter one.
Fuck Trumpers’ feelings. They voted for uncivilized consequences, so they should face the consequence of being excluded from civilized society.
John @7: Nice anecdote. And sorry about your choices of good mates.
No biggie, Rob. A couple are actually religious, and I know a Pastor, too.
(You know how I feel about religion, and it’s not like my friends don’t know that)
I wonder if it’s worth becoming estranged with the friends who are sorta apologetic and still want you to like them. Those who gibe and gloat, well, fair enough. Those who are kinda reaching out?
—
The sentiment is ‘don’t forgive, don’t forget’, right?
Cut them from your life. They are dead to you.
Good way to winnow your circle of acquaintances so that those who remain are only those who share your political views. Or so I suppose, I’m not into that sort of thing, I have rather stricter standards.
The only happy ending to a “my friend/relative voted for Trump (or any other modern Republican” story is “my friend/relative started/resumed taking their medication, which worked effectively, and they fully and eagerly renounced the idiocy and malevolence of their previous actions.”
Endings that include “and we never interacted again” can, but don’t necessarily, involve improvements to one’s state state of being about which one should be happy, but are more “be thankful for avoiding worst case scenario” endings than they are happy endings. Losing a good person who turned into a bad person is still a sad story, and even a “they finally broke the camel’s back, forcing me to see what they were and take appropriate action” story is more of an empowering learning opportunity than something happy.
John @11: I don’t demand that my friends share my political views. I simply demand that they not be fucking clueless gullible idiots*. But by all means, maintain your own strict standards!
*Maybe you think all theists are fucking clueless gullible idiots? We certainly part ways there.
This would be the year of my 50th high school reunion, and I had good friends back then, ones I’d like to see again. I don’t think this would be a good time for that, though, because I’m sure there’d also be awful people as well. Years ago, I dropped out of Facebook specifically because I had so many Facebook friends who were constantly revealing that they were assholes.