Political Memes

If you see pop-up shops selling Trump merch, they're often run by immigrants. Money is money.

My baby insanity wolf self already does a variation of this.

When my conservative family and acquaintances give me gifts, I donate the gifts to charities or political groups that I know those folks would hate to support. Uncle Ben gives me a debit gift card? That's going to Bernie Sanders and the ACLU. Cousin Jen gave me a digital photo frame? That's getting sold and the money's going to Planned Parenthood.

The fact that I repeatedly tell these people not to give me any gifts and yet they still do is the icing on the cake.

Honestly there could be really simple autodocs like the ones from the OG The Fallouts but if they do exist they are extremely simple prototypes that can probably stitch up a wound real good at best. Something I've noticed about conspiracy types be them creationists, Alien nuts, or maybe big foot enthusiasts is that they will take the plausible and make it implausible.

Though some of them do accidentally break the programing because they either gain the requisite knowledge that starts to disprove the conspiracy element or because they are shown enough evidence to the contrary. A good example is Lore Lodge who used to be all in on bigfoot years ago but now think that it's just wildmen, hermits, or crackheads.

You don't have to be stupid to follow an authoritarian. In fact, your characterization is a huge driving force in their radicalization. People with legitimate grievances watched globalization leave them in the dust in pursuit of a multicultural, pluralistic society. This left them vulnerable to narratives that espoused their "historical" superiority amongst other groups and their subsequent entitlement to world primacy. It's more a function of a lack of diverse perspectives as a result of continued divestment from public services and goods, as well as geographical concentration of wealth and resources and other confounding variables.

I agree that the world before Trump was marginally better for these voters than the alternative they've elected, but your heirarchical paradigm is condescending, reductive, simplistif, obnoxious, short-sighted, and exemplifies why so many people swung that way to begin with.

Also, I can't underestimate how incredibly dumb and dense you have to be to consider that the previous paradigm was good for anyone outside of the West who was not already someone of considerable financial means.

You nailed it though. They lack the ability for introspection and self reflection

That's too easy and excuses us from the work needed to rescue these people, content in our own moral superiority.

In modern day America, it seems like 99% of artists are anti-Trump. That isn't really surprising because fascism is about conformity and falling in line, whereas art tends to be about self-expression and challenging norms. So, it seems like in the modern world, very few artists or other creative people are willing to work with the Trump admin. I wonder if back in Hitler and Mussolini's time that wasn't the case.

I wouldn't know how to look it up, but I really wonder what the average German or Italian who didn't support the fascist governments thought about them. Did they see the governments as strong, organized and competent, but didn't support them because they trampled on people's rights, etc? Or were Mussolini and Hitler seen as clowns and their supporters as tacky idiots?

As someone who wasn't alive back then, and who doesn't know anybody who was (at least not in those countries), it seems like they were probably seen as competent, powerful and organized. But, I really hope everyone knows that outside of the MAGA movement, they're seen as tacky, incompetent, weak, stupid and embarrassing. I would hate for a historian in 2100 (assuming humanity survives long enough for that) to be writing about MAGA saying that their aesthetic was powerful and intimidating, when it's much more reminiscent of a circus.