Trump Voters Are Already Complicit In Evil
They don't get to burn their red hats when this over. No hiding for Nazis.
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I’ve mentioned this before and I will certainly mention it again. Back in 2016, after Trump “won,” I went on Facebook and explained, in no uncertain terms, that if you had voted for Trump, I did not want to know. Even if I knew you were a Republican, we would maintain the polite fiction that you had not voted for him.
If, on the other hand, you insisted on letting me know that you had voted for Donald J. Trump, that was the end. You would be dead to me. Permanently. You had voted for someone who openly appealed to people who would murder me and my children in a heartbeat and for that, you could fuck off forever.
The next day, Debbie’s mother, my mother-in-law, called Debbie to brag that she had voted for Trump. In all the years I had known her, she had never told Debbie who she had voted for. But she was so excited to vote for Trump, she had to tell Debbie about it.
I haven’t spoken to her since. Debbie didn’t understand why and I explained to her that even though Trump had run a campaign demonizing Muslims and undocumented immigrants, it would only be a matter of time until they got to the Jews. They always get to the Jews. Those were my exact words to her: “They always get to the Jews.”
Ten months later, the Tiki Torch Nazi “Unite the Right” march occurred and ended in the murder of Heather Heyer. As Debbie and I watched the news, I told her that this is why I would never speak to her mother again and that’s when she, as a non-Jew, started to understand what was loose in America.
Did Debbie’s mother understand what she was voting for in 2016? Maybe. Maybe not. 63 million people voted for Trump and the press spent 4 years pretending they really didn’t know he was a fucking Nazi.
But then 74 million people voted for him in 2020 and that bullshit went right out the window. After four years of evil, 11 million more scumbags rushed to their polling site to pull the lever for a man they knew for a fact was a fucking monster.
And still, can we really know that these are bad people? Peter Wehner at The Atlantic has been wrestling with this for some time:
I have struggled to understand how to view individuals who have not just voted for Trump but who celebrate him, who don’t merely tolerate him but who constantly defend his lawlessness and undisguised cruelty. How should I think about people who, in other domains of their lives, are admirable human beings and yet provide oxygen to his malicious movement? How complicit are people who live in an epistemic hall of mirrors and have sincerely—or half-sincerely—convinced themselves they are on the side of the angels?
Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.
Wehner is far more polite about this than I am. Clearly, I wrote these people off in 2016. Don’t get me wrong. People who voted for Trump in 2016 and then were very loudly anti-Trump in 2020? People who voted for Biden and stayed in that camp because Trump is that repulsive to them? I’m fine with that. Some people did, in fact, make a mistake.
But anyone who voted for him in 2020 and are still with him after he tried to violently overthrow the government of the United States? I’d be perfectly fine if those people caught a bullet between the eyes from the National Guard when they try it again. America knows how to deal with terrorists and traitors. Ask Ashli Babbitt. Oh wait, you can’t because she’s dead. C’est la vie.
Wehner, for his part, is no longer quite so ambiguous about the complicity of Trump voters. He applies some logic to the problem and, honestly, I wish more people in the fucking media would do it:
One of the criteria that need to be taken into account in assessing the moral culpability of people is how absurd the lies are that they are espousing; a second is how intentionally they are avoiding evidence that exposes the lies because they are deeply invested in the lie; and a third is is how consequential the lie is.
This is really important because while Republicans can and will convince themselves of any lie if it means they don’t have to face the monster they’ve become, not one of us is required to do the same.
Nazis went home after a day of slaughtering Jews in the death camps. They were good fathers. They loved their children. Hitler liked dogs. They were still Nazis. They were still genocidal monsters. Every single one of them deserved to be put down like a rabid animal for what they did. From the ones to conceived the Holocaust to the guards “just following orders.” None of them were innocent no matter what lies they told themselves.
And so it is with Trump voters.
In 2016, they could pretend they didn’t know. In 2020, they could keep lying about the children being tortured in cages and the hundreds of thousands of dead from Trump’s deliberate inaction on Covid. But now? In 2024?
In 2024, there can be no justification.
After the 4 years of Trump in office, the half a million dead from Covid, the attack on the Capitol, 34 felony convictions, the stolen classified documents, the adjudicated rape verdict, the promises of concentration camps and dictatorship and using the military against protesters and arresting all of his political enemies and suspending the Constitution and mimicking Hitler and and and. All of it is right there and there’s no pretending it’s not. Trump voters are out of mulligans.
Wehner says as much:
Some of them are cynical and know better; others are blind to the cultlike world to which they belong. Still others have convinced themselves that Trump, although flawed, is the best of bad options. It’s a “binary choice,” they say, and so they have talked themselves into supporting arguably the most comprehensively corrupt man in the history of American politics, certainly in presidential politics.
Whichever justification applies, they are giving not just their vote but their allegiance to a man and movement that have done great harm to our country and its ideals, and which seek to inflict even deeper wounds in the years ahead. Many of them are self-proclaimed evangelicals and fundamentalists, and they are also doing inestimable damage to the Christian faith they claim is central to their lives. That collaboration needs to be named. A generation from now, and probably sooner, it will be obvious to everyone that Trump supporters can’t claim they didn’t know.
It’s obvious now. We, as a society, are still fumbling our way to this because we, as a society, have a strong aversion to holding Republicans accountable for the terrible things they do. But they crossed a line with Trump. They became so vile, so toxic, so lawless and violent and evil that we stopped looking away. We stopped giving them a pass. Now we hold them accountable. It’s driven them to even greater levels of violence and atrocious behavior but it hasn’t stopped us.
Trump voters are complicit. They know who they’re voting for and they know what they’re voting for. They’re voting for fascism. They’re voting for violence. They’re voting for concentration camps and murder and terrorism and, eventually, genocide. All to preserve their fading power and hurt the people they hate.
This is something else I’ve said before and I’ll never stop saying it: The Germans of the 1930s did not understand what was happening to them. they had to be led to atrocity. Today’s Republicans know exactly what is happening and they are sprinting with arms wide open. When this is over and fascism has been beaten back yet again, they will try to burn their MAGA hats and proclaim their innocence. Over 70 million monsters will deny they were excited to burn America to ashes.
Fuck them. Fuck them forever. No forgiveness. No forgetting. They don’t get to erase their crimes against this country. Their crimes against decency. Their crimes against everything good and kind and what makes us human. They have to live with this shame forever and if they don’t like it? Too fucking bad. They should have thought about the consequences of being a Nazi before gleefully voting for one.
There are 139 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
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Here! Here!
I, for one, am sick and tired of being told I need to “understand” Magas.
Not anymore. I am sick of THEM.
I’ve avoided friends who I know voted for TFG. I want nothing to do with them. There’s no damn excuse anymore. Unless they’ve been living on the moon, they know exactly who and what TFG is. It doesn’t matter what station they watch or what programs they listen to. They are willfully ignoring all the evidence against TFG.
A lying, treasonous, 2x impeached, top secret document stealing, emoluments violating, grifting, 4x indicted, 34 counts felon, convicted tax and business fraud, and convicted rapist.
“Suckers and losers”, “ I don’t get it, what was in it for them”, “he knew what he signed up for”, “ he’s a war hero because he was captured”.
This a vile man. A horrible individual.
Enough already. His voters can all go to hell.
So much of this goes back to how the Seditious South was handled during Reconstruction.