No Stupid Questions

I’m going to go on a less extreme take. They’ve been told from childhood they live in the land of opportunity, yet they work in dead end jobs or working fields.

They see money flying away every paycheck they live week to week on while being pumped propaganda (that people in suburbs and urban areas don’t see) that shows people who look different from them getting gov’t housing and getting programs funded with their tax dollars.

The same party they now demonize supports ridiculous looking gay parades that show a mentality they don’t understand, so they begin to hate. They wake up morning after morning in the same place with no change, and they stew and stew and stew.

So now they basically give up and see a hyper-masculine wannabe saying all the things against those who are different, and the long encrusted anger starts spewing out.

Most of the comments here are ignorant and hate filled against the wrong people. It’s not the MAGA supporters that did this, it’s the system. We need to stop polarizing ourselves with hatred and point the finger at those truly responsible. Not the poor (literallly) voters who are so dejected and living in decay that they just don’t give a rats ass anymore.

The more you hate the other side, the less you see the truth. The goal is to make you hate them. The goal is to make them hate you. You can’t define an entire person in a paragraph.

They are children developmentally. They dont think. They have emotions and react based on those emotions. Any words are ad hoc rationalizations of those emotions and those reactions. Excuses. If you want a look into the maga mind look at 7-12 year olds.

Revenge. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve wondered this exact question. How does any of this evil fascist shit benefit the average Trump voter.

Trade tariffs just make things like durable goods more expensive.

Deporting migrant workers is going to make food more expensive.

Killing all references to Trans people doesn’t do anything but hurt the Trans folks.

Killing all references to climate change is just going to eventually destroy the whole planet (well just our existence on it.. the planet will be fine eventually).

Killing the Dept of Education is just going to make us all dumber.

DOGE is just a meme dept whose soul purpose seems to be to let Elon enact his revenge.

RFK2 gets in charge of all the countries medicine and vaccines and bans it all just in time for Pandemic 2, Electric Boogaloo.

So basically things get a lot more expensive, the rich get richer, lots of people die, and the world becomes a generally more shitty place. Yay!!! Let’s Go Brandon!!

OP is asking an interesting and important question. While I don’t claim it as definitive, there was an insightful article written in 2016 that attempted to address the question head on: How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind

A MAGA I know told me this is all worth it because he doesn't want his son to know gay people exist and wants revenge on the people who told him he can't say "Merry Christmas" anymore...

They will 100% sacrifice their own happiness and rights if they know it’s hurting people who live their lives is ways they don’t like.

This isn’t an exaggeration.

It hurts people they think are lesser, such as LGBTQ and people of color. Racism and bigotry are very much alive in the USA. They would eat a shit sandwich if they thought a lib would smell their breath. Hate is all they know.

I normally do not talk politics with people I know, but this one person said they like trump because: “all I know is when he was president, I did good financially”.

I tried to tell him that the government is slow to enact things so he did good because the previous president. He didnt want to hear that and dismissed it.

Remember that they accurately believed the DNC were horrible. They stopped Hillary. They stopped Biden and Harris. Good for them? Kinda, not really though.

... We know Trump is worse. Far worse. But they saw a legitimate threat, a group of people who were not going to make their lives better, and they took some kind of action to stop them.

And then lots of bigotry. Can't forget that.

Check r/conservative and you get a fair idea.

They say it all the time. You just have to hear, and more important, listen to them

About 70% of reps think the government deficit is too high. About 45% of Dems think the same. Both have been, interestingly, increasing yearly.

Widespread, 60% of voting age adults in USA think the government spends too much "on shit nobody cares about". My quote.

Because people want the spending on medical care, education, science, social security, helping the needed and so on. Polling shows it.

But this has to come at a cost.

Dems want a bigger state apparatus behind all this.

Reps want an efficient, smaller one behind this.

Interesting as well , a lot of people, like 40%, want more spend in security forces.

they want to be openly fascist

"We made people we don't like fucking miserable for a bit"

Ultimately the kind of person that goes all in on a cult like MAGA could lose everything to shitty policy or because their great leader started a war or smth -- But they'll still reason it was worth it because all those s were put in their place.

if you ask a hundred of them..

you will get a hundred different answers.

they voted because it made them feel good and addressed their anger. not for any rational reasons. it's why they are so surprised at what is going on.

they had NO IDEA what they were voting for or why they were voting.

Crabs in a bucket. They don't care if things get worse for them as long as they inflict the same suffering on everyone else.

MAGA doesn't know.

They're fearful, hateful, instinctive idiots who are more afraid of being proven wrong than anything. The definition of ride or die.

They think all of the gov'ment was corrupt and bad, so they're cheering for the destruction of all gov'ment.

Many years ago, I was at a friend's house and his parents were watching Bush on Faux News. Friend said, "We're loyal Republicans. We'd rather have an idiot in office than a Democrat."

Edit: Before the inauguration, I got back in touch with another Friend who went to a few protests but converted to maga because he started listening to the JRE podcast and whatever the algorithm also recommended. We know the type of influence that jre guy has on vulnerable minds. The podcast host literally twisted his mind 180 degrees.

Edit 2: I'm not sure that I consider them friends anymore as they would rather have their guy in office and not care that people like me get screwed over.

I've talked to friends that were very excited Trump won. Recently tried having an open conversation with someone that left my community afterwards over the conversations because I didn't come to his side.

They just believe it'll be better. What better? They don't know. They can't verbalize, because they're told it's terrible now and will be better.

They believe Trump isn't a criminal, didn't incite violence on Jan 6, the woke people are out to get them, etc. I've literally asked people to define "woke" for me when they use it that way. They can't. They don't know. They're not bad people, they're brainwashed at this point.

The way it is playing out in my family has led me to have to totally reevaluate my perception of my own father.

He is a generally kind man. He stayed with my mom for two decades as she declined with Parkinson’s. He took good care of her when so many people might have ghosted.

But based on his inability to see the danger here to things he himself values, I can no longer think of him as a good man. He has always valued knowledge and reason yet he swallowed the cat-eating crap out of Ohio in spite of the clear bullshit of it.

He is Mormon and very faithful. So I don’t know what he gets out of this all, except that it has required me to grieve him before his passing.

He is not actually a good person I am afraid, but he is very obedient. Learning that distinction is very painful. He does not possess the moral clarity to know the difference between what is legal/popular and what is right.

I always idolized my dad as a child because he was in so many ways a good father. We will probably never speak again.

Why, the same thing everyone gets from voting: stopping the other side.

Hurting their perceived enemies.

Causing a complete collapse of society to own the libs.

They don't all agree on anything. Logic and reason aren't part of the requirements for MAGA.

They're too deep to take it back now they gotta go full nazi and act like everyone else is the problem