The Confederacy of Donald J. Trump: A Confederacy of Dunces

I think the first group are essentially cult members and should be treated as such. They can be “rescued”, but its hard and requires a specific technique. Neither yelling at them or arguing reasoned points with them will work though.

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That reminds me. My dipshit cousin posted some article about how impeaching Trump was treason. All I did was click the :joy: emoji and she took it down within minutes LOL.

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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1326920264203046915
( twitter | raw text )

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That’s your own personal values. Which figures for a guy whose like to post ratio is absolutely insane without even leaning on memes. A lot of people secretly think they are stupid and resent the smarter people. A lot.

I hate that I have to say this to you of all people because I’m afraid it’s going to sound really shitty, but a lot of the people on this board work in knowledge fields and haven’t talked to anyone genuinely stupid in a long time. That’s not you, because you work in commercial banking and rub elbows with idiots all the time, but a lot of the posters here haven’t spent much time around dumb fucks since at least high school.

The right wing assholes you meet in commercial banking are hopeless full stop. You’re not misreading that. They’re not a good target and we shouldn’t care what they want or what they think. They’re the people we’re going to get the less well off Trump supporters to hate given enough time.

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I don’t know how sound this is. It’s clearly true that this was a high turnout election where the Republican overperformed and that’s basically not supposed to happen. So it’s either that the rule was wrong or this election was just different somehow. Given coronavirus, I think the possibility that this election was different can’t just be discounted. We have decades of high turnout being bad for Reps.

I don’t really know how to go about considering it properly. I’ll have to think about it. My faith in polling is shook to the point that I doubt I’ll be making a firm call either way before '22.

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Nah dude. We had COVID at our backs, huge turnout, and our opponent was Donald Trump for the second time. We’re never going to get a more favorable setup for high turnout. We might never see turnout like this ever again and that might be a good thing. It’s true that higher turnout has favored us in the past, but that might just be because that’s what it looks like when we win an election. It’s very obvious that they have almost as many of the low info low turnout crowd as we do this morning.

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Fair enough. I’m just saying conservatives aren’t exactly making it up when they say that liberals questioned the legitimacy of the 2016 election in ways that went beyond the Electoral College argument.

His Twitter ravings bring me comfort.

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This actually aligns pretty well with my belief that many “reachable” deplorables, if there are any, are reached using the techniques used on cult members. People are usually pulled out of cults by constantly talking to them about all the things that the cult is promising them, until the cult member realizes that none of those things are actually happening for them.

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Yeah that’s really the focus of what I want my work in politics to be about honestly. I lost a brother and one of my best friends to different flavors of online misinformation over the last 3 years. These people are being brainwashed exactly like cult members are. I want to bring some % of these people back so that we can win elections that aren’t even close.

We need to convince ground level Republicans to see the world through a different lense so that our politicians don’t have to convince GOP politicians to do the right thing. I know which of those two tasks is more likely, and I don’t think it’s close.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1326926226888544256
( twitter | raw text )

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I’m actually loving the right wing voting machines are the problem line. I’d love to Judo the GOP into a national ban on anything but paper ballots here. We have elections every 2 years or something. Automating that process with computers when we already have scan tron machines is really irrational and begs the question why we ever thought they were a good idea.

I don’t like worrying that the reason politicians thought they were a good idea was to steal elections. I know who is going to do the stealing. I cannot fathom why saving time on vote counting would ever be more important than accuracy and legitimacy. There’s no logic I can summon that explains electronic voting from a logistical perspective. You want to automate stuff that you do a lot where some error is acceptable, not automate something you do once every two years and accuracy is everything.

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And it feels like it would be so simple. Just replace “pedophile dem politicians” with “actual billionaires” and the rest of their messaging is basically accurate. There really is a small cabal of people trying to keep you down, stealing your excess productivity and making your life miserable. It’s just not who you think (well it’s probably them as well to be fair but they’re aren’t the important ones).

Of course the actual billionaires own all the printing presses so that is really the major problem.

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I see Trump is on a tear retweeting people dumping Fox and switching to Newsmax and OANN. So he’s going to sign a contract with one of those after an election? Smart!

Agree Coronavirus was at our back as far as winning an election but not so sure that was the case for a dominant performance. Even among people I know, there was definitely a sizable contingent that was “done with the Coronavirus.”

“Open up the schools safely, even though there is no possible way it can really be safe” was becoming the strong majority position in my circles this Fall until Trump came out hamfistedly and aggressively in favor of it, and that made anti-Trumpers reflexively weaken their position on the issue, lol.

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The fact that we somehow didn’t conclusively win the messaging war on COVID is not a point in our favor. To me it suggests that nothing we do in the real world will make any political impact until we open a line of communication with people we don’t engage with currently.

EDIT: And obviously also Pelosi sucks so bad at her job it makes me nauseous in real life when I think about it.

I think COVID helped Trump electorally. The vast majority of the people who hated his response were already voting against him. Lots of OFB and OFS people aren’t frequent voters and came out to pull the lever for free refills and all you can eat buffets.

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Again this doesn’t make the case that turnout will help us, it makes the case that roughly half the population is only hearing from the other side… and they vote accordingly.

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I think it just makes the case that this was a weird election and may not be very predictive of future high turnout elections, if they happen.

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