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Living in a country full of Trump supporters [1]
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Date: 2023-01-02
He commences:
A similar thing happens to me on many mornings lately. My eyes open and I suddenly become aware that I’m awake. My mind quickly begins assembling the first few seconds of my day (making plans, organizing my checklist, contemplating dinner already), when a terrible interruption breaks in and reminds me: People actually still support that unhinged madman. They admire him. They look up to him. They feel affinity with him. They are fighting for him. The realizations turn my stomach and I consider going back to sleep but know that I can’t. I replay conversations in my head with people from the day before and I scan my timeline and I think about the family members I no longer speak to and I struggle once more to make any sense of it all. I see people regurgitating fictional Fox News talking points and hear them parroting back conspiratorial nonsense and I watch them pass by with his name affixed to their heads and attached to their bumpers in cultic adoration—and it grieves me to know how far gone so many around me seem to be. I no longer recognize the place I’ve always called home.
I have to agree.
I’ve had the same experience. I wake up, and I feel like I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what decade, country, or multi-versal reality I’m currently living in.
How the fuck did I end up here?
Weren’t we celebrating Obama’s election a minute and a half ago? What the fuck happened? Who are these fucking people? Why are they so angry? They want to elect WHO? For WHAT?
Jesus fuck. It all seems so reductive and sad.
It’s simply demoralizing sharing a country with people who think Donald Trump is someone worth emulating: to be surrounded by that kind of moral inversion every single day, to be continually encountering such cruelty. It’s a source of profound and sustained grieving to believe that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and afforded opportunity—and to know how many simply do not share that belief. I don’t hate these people but I am deeply saddened by them. It isn’t just the reality of the despicable human being who allowed to ascend to the Presidency that brings that sadness, though that would be reason enough for despair. It’s the ugliness we’ve seen in our neighbors as he’s made his way there, and perhaps even worse now following his departure: the doubling down despite all we know about his reckless and incompetence. It’s the sickness that the America we love has shown itself afflicted with: the weight of every horrible reality about our nation; all our bigotry and discord and hatred set upon our chests, hampering our breath. But it’s much closer than that, too.
Simply put. He’s a thug. A bully. An authoritarian. A narcissist. A liar. And a fraud. He’s a complete and total phony.
We now have access to his tax returns and everything he ever said about them is bullshit.
Yes, indeed, he did only pay $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017 just like he was asked by Chris Wallace during the 2020 campaign.
x WALLACE: No, Mr. President, I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017?
TRUMP: Millions of dollars.
WALLACE: So not 750?
TRUMP: Millions of dollars. And you’ll get to see it. And you’ll get to see it. pic.twitter.com/Tz1IY3kyWl — Acyn (@Acyn) December 30, 2022
He claimed he paid “MIllions in taxes” those years.
“Millions in taxes.”
He did not. There is factual evidence that he did not. We know — because of facts and truth — that he did not.
But we also all know your basic Trump supporter will react to this news.
“New York Times Lies!”
“The MSM Lies!”
:blink:
Fucking really?
Like, seriously?
This information doesn’t come from the NYTimes or the MSM — it comes from Trump’s. Own. Tax. Returns. It comes from independently verifiable documentation.
He’s another example. Here is a right-winger who is claiming that Hammers kill more people than Guns. He fact-checks this man, to his face — and yet, he keeps going with the lie even when shown that this is not the case.
x x YouTube Video Jason Selvig of The Good Liars recently got the opportunity at the NRA convention in May to confront people about gun violence in America. And when one man tried to claim that hammers kill more people per year than guns, Selvig didn't hesitate to look it up right there and give the man the truth. Unfortunately, this is the kind of misinformation that we have to fight against on the Right, and Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why that is so difficult.
Selvig quoted Google that said 8,000 died that year from guns, and only 300 people died from hammers. And the guy goes:
To answer your question: The second amendment is still my right and it's still important to me.
This is every conversation with just about every right-winger in the country.
They take a position, you show how that position is factually weak, and they stay on their path anyway. It’s uncanny. It’s sickening.
This is why we can’t have a nice country. This is why America is NOT #1 in almost anything. Not in education. Not in science. Not in human rights. Not in freedom. Not in justice or civil rights.
We are the best at having prisoners and just about nothing else. This is why America had the greatest number of Covid-19 victims — by more than 2 times the next worst country — despite the fact that *we* were the first to develop effective vaccines against it. How does shit like that happen? We have a solution but some of us just won’t use it? Because why? Rumors?
And it’s people like this who helped make things that way, and keep things that way.
But Pavlovitz is not totally without hope.
It is the same in these days for those of us who feel cheated out of a kinder, more diverse, more decent America than the one we now have. Individually and collectively we will have to be the daily, bold, defiant pushback against all that feels wrong here. This pushback will come in the small things; in the art we create and the conversations we have and the quiet gestures of compassion that are barely visible. It will come in the way we fully celebrate daily life; having dinner with friends, driving through the countryside, playing in the yard with our children, laughing at a movie we love. It will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and our neighbors. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness.
I’m a bit less optimistic than Pavlovitz, but it's nice to see someone who has hope.
I pray that he’s correct. I pray that we can heal the giant festering wound down the center of the country.
But I really don't know if that’s the case. I really don’t know if this can be solved.
This is where faith matters because it’s only through almost blind faith that I can continue to have hope that this country — probably outside my lifetime — will ultimately solve these problems and heal these divisions.
I really don’t know. Truly I don’t.
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