Serious answers only. For over a year I was told that trump “doesn’t have anything to do with that”.
I honestly need to know from an actual Republican who believed trumps words and is now witnessing p2025 almost hit 50% completion with the department of education getting dismantled.
And with that; how do these people feel that public schools, daycare centers and tech schools all going to cost 3-6x as much as it does now for tuition?
Most are fine with it. Remember the people that died of covid denying it existed the whole time? That’s the type. They’re dumb af.
People who have never experienced oppression just thinking it’s business as usual.
Wearing a mask ain’t oppression either 😂
That’s part of the problem, a lot of people don’t realize they are the oppressors
The other part is the ones that do.
i forgot about that haha.
What do we call the Herman cain award now?
Not quite about just project 2025 but Nate Silver from what used to be 538 has Trump aggregated disapproval rating at 49.8% as of 03/20/25. That up from 40% in 2 months.
Source: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
I live surrounded by republicans and they are super happy with all the good things Trump is doing together with puppet master Musk. Everything that he said during his fake State of the Union was truth and proof of his many victories during the first 2 months of his presidency. I tried once to bring up how the tariffs are sales tax for Americans (making life even more unaffordable), because I thought that would be something nobody could disagree with, and weeks later I’m still getting shit about it. I am convinced that he could launch a nuke on a ‘lib city’ and most of the republicans would still applaud it. In a cult the leader is always right and is never to blame for the bad.
There’s a guy in the news at the moment who has started a GoFundMe for a legal defence for his wife who has been deported. Says he doesn’t regret his vote for Trump.
Complete non sequitur, but i knew someone about 20 years ago that referred to herself as Sara Tonin. Hope she’s doing ok.
It’s crazy. How many Democrats do you know that had Joe Biden profile pictures? I know people can’t tell their in a cult usually. But man they make it obvious most of the time.
I got into an argument with my dad a couple days ago about this exact thing.
I was bitching that despite being given unlimited power, Biden just fucked off and let the carion eaters have their way with the corpse of America. His response? “It’s all Biden’s fault.” He’s being sarcastic and thinks he’s making fun of maga, but he’s right. This shit is Biden’s fault. And Garland’s, and all the other bitches in Blue. He actually thinks I’m defending fucking TRUMP when i point out Dems fuckups. He goes on and on about how politics isn’t a team sport, but then he engages in fucking tribalism, just like the magats.
It’s infuriating.
He actually thinks I’m defending fucking TRUMP when i point out Dems fuckups.
Herein lies the biggest problem. We’ve taken up sides along the single line drawn for us, and are therefore blinded to the fact that this is a class war. You can say “it’s not red versus blue”, and get nods of agreement, and then in the next sentence, they’ll say shit like this, showing they don’t really get it.
yea it seems they are into this idea that manufacturing will come back in the united states. nevermind that the equity growth and low prices of goods these guys are enjoying are due to the united states not manufacturing things, getting things through trade while exporting intellectual property instead. nothing they are doing is going to bring down home prices. it’s objectively a misunderstanding of economics.
Just for some perspective: in 2009 I was a Christian nationalist and I thought Obama was going to use FEMA to imprison conservative dissenters and would turn the US into a communist dictatorship. I hoped and prayed for an explicitly Christian government and an end to most federal programs. If I had the same worldview now, I would be orgasmically happy with the way things are going.
Pray tell what changed your view?
I’m going to test the character limit for a Lemmy comment.
My views on religion and politics have evolved a lot over the years. I hope I remain open enough to continue to change and grow. I can think of several touchstone moments, people, events, podcasts, and books that have influenced my departure from religious fundamentalism and political conservatism. There was a book I read as a child, a skeptical professor in college, a compassionate neighbor, a contrarian friend, a challenging podcast, an insistent and feisty little girl, spiritual slavery, and a God who didn’t listen to a community in pain. It’s a story of exposure to new ideas.
I was brought up to be a fundamentalist baptist. I was faithful to the only baptist creed: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, I’m don’t chew, and don’t run with those who do.” Well, I suppose there were additional “don’ts “ like dancing, swearing, listening to worldly music, and watching rated R movies, but those items don’t fit into a nice little rhyme. Anyway, when I was a kid, one of my relatives had a book called The Handbook of Denominations. I found it and spent an afternoon looking at it, having my mind blown. To that point, it had never really occurred to me that there were Christians who were not baptists. This primed me to pursue relationships in middle school and high school with people who believed differently from me. I thought the heathen kids were wrong and disobeying God’s word, but they were interesting. I had friends who were LDS, Catholic, Charismatic, even atheists. I enjoyed a wide exposure to ideas while my church mates were cloistered.
In college, I took Biblical Hebrew. The professor was a secular Jew. His breakdown of the wild poetic imagery in Genesis 1 exploded my fundamentalist idea that it was literal history. Throughout the class, we were to visit synagogues and report on our observations. This exposure to a different way of worship impacted me deeply. I saw people earnestly believing and praying in a way different from me, yet with the same sincerity and conviction.
When my wife and I started our family, we had an elderly neighbors who were life-long Roman Catholics. Throughout my life, the Catholics I had met only went to church on Christmas and Easter, drank, cursed, and fornicated, and were generally indistinguishable from the heathen around me. I saw them as not-serious idol worshippers, doomed to eternal hellfire. My neighbors were different. They were the kindest, most generous people I had ever met. Even now, years later, I tear-up thinking about their sweetness toward us, a struggling young family. It was like living across the street from Jesus Himself. They brought us meals, helped with home repairs, watched our kids, bought clothes and toys, and so much more I can’t remember. Their love turned the tables on the Protestant reformation for me. I didn’t convert, but I started to realize in every group there can be shitty people, ordinary people, and beautiful people.
During Obama’s first term, as I mentioned above, I was a Christian nationalist. AS far as I can remember, one single comment from a trusted friend and mentor upset my political apple cart. After a Bible study, I asked my friend if he had seen some story about the President on Fox News. He said, “I don’t watch that crap. He’s my brother in Christ, and I don’t appreciate a bunch of talking heads telling me to hate my brother.” That was a watershed moment. My friend was politically conservative and religiously extreme. I respected him and that put a lot of weight behind his words.
Another trusted friend recommended a podcast for entertainment’s sake where the hosts talked about their shared experiences in a fundamentalist religious upbringing and current-day divergence while getting drunk. I saw how two people can keep a close friendship despite holding different views; in this case, Catholicism and agnosticism. They also spoke favorably about Obama and when 2016 rolled around, they were huge fans of Bernie Sanders. I strongly related to their experiences and their left-leaning political views were challenging at first, then contagious. In 2016, for the first time, I did not vote straight republican down the ballot.
In my adult life, I have been a member or regular attender of five different Christian denominations. Some of these changes were quite significant and involved catechism and re-baptism. I’m always searching for answers.
Once upon a time, I was an Eastern Orthodox Christian. For many years. This is a culturally conservative and religiously fundamentalist expression of Christianity. The church has strict gender roles, especially within its rituals. Women are permitted to teach the children and perform domestic duties. In some Orthodox denominations, women may serve as cantors and choir directors. Women are prohibited from serving at the altar. They cannot even enter the sacred space surrounding the altar. After services one day, a few groups of people lingered, talking. They were mostly parents, as there was to be a short altar server class. When the priest announced it was time for altar server class to begin and for all the boys to meet him at the front of the church, a girl, maybe seven years old, declared excitedly, “can I go? I want to be an altar server!” The priest, caught off-guard answered “no, I’m sorry.” “Why not?” “We can talk about it when you’re older,” the priest replied nervously, looking at her dad for backup. This little exchange stuck with me. It seemed inappropriate that a child’s enthusiasm for wanting to feel helpful and important was squashed simply because she had the wrong biological equipment. This was the beginning of the end of my religious fundamentalism.
I had exercised my rights as a male in the Orthodox Christian denomination and performed vital roles in services for many years. I’m going to be brief here because the community is small and I am protective of my anonymity online. I was pressured to serve the church and be available for every service (at minimum three per week) on a volunteer basis. Although I became exhausted and frustrated, to entertain thoughts of quitting was considered spiritual weakness. This was an especially damaging time for my spiritual life.
While I was involved with this church, a tragic incident occurred in a nearby rural community. A mother was home with her four-year-old son and put him down for an afternoon nap. She also fell asleep on the couch. When she awoke, her son was nowhere to be found. She searched the house and property, called neighbors, and eventually called law enforcement for help. By the evening, dozens of friends, family, and neighbors were out looking for the boy. It was spring and the nights were still dangerously cool for a boy in pajamas. Word spread on social media and churches prayed earnestly for the boy and his family. I was especially touched because I had young children. The boy was found two days later, dead from exposure, lying in a ditch just 100 yards from the house. Many people had probably walked right past him. I hated God for that. This was a catalyst for my investigation into whether I believed in a personal God who actively intervened in his creation.
TL;DR: My faith and politics changed over a period of 10-15 years from Christian Nationalist and religious fundamentalist to progressive agnostic through exposure to new ideas, often introduced to me by people I trusted.
Wow… That’s quite the journey. Thank you for sharing it.
It’s particularly enlightening is that the diversity of information presented to you is what helped you change. Not just one “gotcha” quote from some online commenter, one snippy remark about a noticeable hypocrisy. Not one source of disruption, but many. I think that’s fascinating, and extremely helpful for those of us with family who only get their news and opinions and politics from one place.
Again, thanks for telling your story.
At this point, I don’t know why Republicans don’t outright just say they want people who they see as less than them suffering and/or dead. That’s their only consistent political view.
So many of them are in denial about it themselves. It’s very strange indeed.
The older ones are hearing stories of social security being canceled on people like them and they are getting nervous. My vehement Trump supporting co-workers are having trouble backing things he does. The cracks are small and slow but the confidence in their statements of support are getting weaker. I think some support is eroding, but it’s slow. It’s really going to have to affect them more directly for it to fully erode sadly. Though I think it will, the damage the right will inflict in the mean time will change this country for generations.
Trump knows that his supporters are going to turn on him eventually, which is why he’s working so hard to set up an infrastructure that can crush opposition without due process. He’s also testing the waters about ignoring court orders.
If the supreme court lets him use the AEA then that means the president can use war-time statutes without Congress needing to declare a war, which means that he’ll be able to use a different statute to deploy the military on US territory. At that point, US democracy is officially over.
Wait till they officially start calling for a constitutional amendments and they suddenly start losing some of their own rights. But by then who knows what it’s gonna look like.
I have one word:
Eggs.
“Shut up about eggs”
- Trump’s retweet
Well historically, that doesn’t really matter all that much. They just stop talking about it openly and continue to quietly support it and vote for it.
I know a couple life-long Republicans I sometimes briefly talk about politics with (one family, one acquaintance). Neither of them like Trump, but like the idea around Project 2025. One is an evangelical Christian, the other is a Catholic.
The Catholic strongly believes government should be run like a business, and the president should be like a CEO, so he should be able to fire everyone and replace them, if needed, with workers that will execute his plans. He’s also an anti-abortion, and tough-on-crime/immigration type. However, he strongly disapproves of Trump seemingly being pro-Russian now, Trump and his cabinet’s personal lives (he’s always strangely fixated on people’s personal lives, in a moral sense, for some reason), the take-over of the FBI and CIA, and the tariffs hurting his stock portfolio.
The evangelical Christian just doesn’t like Trump as a person, and doesn’t like Russia. He’s a just-world-hypothesis, small government, women are subservient, pro-business type; but also low/lower-middle-class, and has needed, and will need the social services he opposes. I guess his opinions are pretty similar to the Catholic’s, just a little more extreme on the social side, and supports policies that have always hurt him. I mean, Republican policies hurt the (fairly wealthy) Catholic too, but at least they get to say their taxes are lower and there’s less red-tape.
“Government should be run like a business” sounds like a totalitarian religion.
So basically the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted with separation of powers and checks and balances, right?
I thought these people were cosplaying traditionalists.
Yeah, these people are ignorant of and don’t care about civics. The ignorance of the one guy surprised me, because they went to a decent college, but didn’t even know what gerrymandering was. They are un-american, IMO.
And this boys, girls, and the Eldritch entity in my cupboard is why the humanities are so important, if you want other examples go watch the Behind the Bastards episodes on the Zizians.
If you want to understand them more, I think the problem is you’re seeing different aspects to what they do.
‘Large’ government with lots of power might sound more like totalitarianism, overseeing many aspects of life that - in the opinion of many - ought to be left to people’s freedom.
Running the government like a business, on the other hand, implies having pressures on it to do only what achieves its aims, and do that efficiently. And a CEO-president means the power to fix the government without being restricted by bureaucracy.
… Of course to me, by that point, it sounds like a king, exactly as you said. And running a government as a business sounds about as stupid as you can get. But these things aren’t exact, and understanding how a different perspective can make something look good helps us to understand the people with that perspective. It also helps us see things to improve that our perspective might be missing.
But it’s not about the size of the government, or the bureaucracy, it’s about whether anyone can have dictatorial power over life, death, freedom etc of others without any check on the legality of their orders.
The separation and co-equal branches of the 3 arms of government is bedrock. The government and bureaucracy can be huge or tiny without relevance to this.
I understand the appeal of being unshackled by other people’s opinions and interests.
I just don’t know how they reconcile their notional “conservatism” (they is conserving the traditions) with dismantling the actual tradition.
I presume most Republican voters didn’t anticipate Trump wrecking the system of accountability and checks in government, or don’t understand what’s happening. I’m sure many think he really is destroying the bad that’s allegedly entrenched in the system, and a good one will settle in its place.
Interesting. Thanks for the time man.
He thinks the president should hire/fire anyone they want, but they dislike the people the president has been choosing.
Oh no, the lying liar who is best known for lying about literally everything lied and gullible people believed it (or conveniently ignored it, or didn’t care or thought it was just peachy because they thought it wouldn’t apply to them and were perfectly fine with it applying to other people)? Who could possibly have predicted that? Oh wait, I think literally every left wing person in the US predicted that.
Republicans lie. As any fascist party, they don’t have any consistent ideology beyond hurting people. They’ll invent whatever reasoning and justification they need to justify their bullying, and they’ll immediately abandon that reason for another convenient excuse when necessary.
Republicans lie. They knew damn well what Project 2025 was, and they were in favor of all of it. When they said Trump had nothing to do with it, they were lying. Republicans ultimately don’t care what happens to society, or even themselves personally. They would gladly vote to lower the quality of their own lives, as long as the undesirables were hurt in equal measure.
I don’t know any republicans personally but I would not be surprised if, given a choice between admitting fault and feeling bad, or literally any other option including lying or violence, they won’t admit fault. If they weren’t emotionally stunted, they wouldn’t be conservatives.
This is why blaming conservatives or getting them to admit fault doesn’t work. It only makes them become more defensive and entrenched.
A better approach is to appeal to their victim complex. IE: Instead of “Trump is ruining this country and its your fault for voting for him!” try “Dude, Trump is screwing us! This isn’t the great America we were promised!” or some variation of that. Gotta use different tactics.
Yeah, you have to make them see you as a member of a shared in-group. That’s the most important thing to them (and many people, honestly. we’re all susceptible to tribalism and such)
I’m not sure it’s possible to blame Trump rather than his voters when he literally promised to make most of these changes. It might be more effective to say that Trump was misled by Musk.
Humans in general are very hesitant to admit that they were wrong. Cult members doubly so.
It’s so unfortunate too, because so many of our society’s current ills can literally be boiled down to “so and so refused to admit they were wrong”
Yeah I realized admitting fault is kind of a power move. You can just be like “oh! I was wrong. Woops” and what might have been a like hour long argument about some unimportant minutia instead just wraps up. Nothing bad happens.
I have literally stopped speaking to my parents over this and have put the ball in their court, telling them that all they need to do is re-evaluate their position about this one fucking guy and admit they were wrong.
And I guess they’re fine with just not speaking to their son instead.
They don’t think Trump and Musk are doing anything wrong. When quizzed they’ll ask you to name anything they’ve done wrong.
Everything Trump and Musk are doing is guised in Libertarian and Conservative values.So nothing wrong has been done on their eyes.
If you go places like r/JordanPeterson (to ask) and r/Conservative to observe the media landscape - you’ll see that “The Woke” are wrong and have turned violent against Tesla. You’ll see Trump and Musk are thought of as doing great things.
That’s how they think. They’re not in the same media landscape as everyone else is.
That’s how they think. They’re not in the same media landscape as everyone else is.
This is literally the cause of all our issues. Fucking propagandists creating an alternate “reality” for Magoos to exist within where they are the good guys fighting the evil evil communist far left scum.
I can blame a Magoo for being so susceptible to hate filled ppropaganda, but I really REALLY fucking despise the propagandists with every fiber of my being. If there were ever a group of people that deserved a firing squad it would be those like Sean Hannity who know exactly what they’re doing…
But they also think you’re in an alternative reality because of “leftist reactionaries” over blowing things in the media. Some of them would probably go as far to say that “We need anti-propaganda laws against the left wing media”…
…the problem for the left is, the right wing “alternative facts, alternative media landscape” is unfortunately MORE REAL in a legal sense because they own SCOTUS, and SCOTUS want to institute Unitary Executive theory… Which is what they’re doing.
It’s a very clean sounding bunch of words for a kind of fascism.
“Mental landscape”?
Tell them research into women’s medical conditions (like endometrial cancer) is no longer allowed. I’d love to know how they’d spin that one as positive.
The problem is their spin isn’t designed to be positive or have mass appeal. It’s designed to create fervent followers who are desperate for something different and a sense they’re winning.
In your example I believe the response for them would be something along the lines of “Good, women shouldn’t be getting special treatment anyways - END DEI !!!”
Even though this means men are getting special treatment. Because research into prostrate cancer, for example, hasn’t been banned.
Yeah it’s crazy. What’s that line: To the privileged any attempt at equality is going to look like a loss of privilege.
Something like that. I’m pretty sure they just want to harm come to groups they’re prejudiced against. Even more insulting is I’m pretty sure the Trump administration has a lot of drink and drug related parties, Trump spent his youth in nightclubs, Musk is addicted to ketamine and Grimes mentioned them tripping on acod together.
So it’s debauchery at the top, austerity for everyone else. It’s a real let them eat cake they’re doing. Not serious or good people at all. Very little in the way of mprals or ethics, it’s all about power, privilege, politics, and personal gain.
Edit: apparently the part in OP starting “From a Republican…” is not meant to imply that OP is a Republican. As it lacked a main verb, I assumed it was ultimately meant as a relative clause and misassigned it to “I”. Leaving this comment anyway but it doesn’t apply to OP.
I appreciate you taking the time to write this post, and I appreciate you noticing this trend.
But I’ve got to be honest: the writing was on the wall the whole time. Being in the Republican bubble doesn’t really change the fact that you only get here from a lack of critical thinking and a general susceptibility to propaganda. These are things that many people spend time and resources getting educated about. It’s hard to have sympathy when the whole country is now suffering because so many were so sure they knew better.
If I sound angry, I am. I do hope you take it constructively, but you also need to understand: most of the damage has already been done. It doesn’t really matter how you feel from here on out, because the deed (from voters) is done.
I voted for Harris lol, and that was because I thought she was the lesser of the two evils overall. I wish Michelle Obama ran for office.
Then how was it that you “believed Trump’s words”?
Reread the post, or remove the period
I’m really digging the irony of this thread…
What period?
Edit: nm, got it. Period in OP.
What?
You said you thought she was the lesser of two evils. I’m not sure how that is believing Trump’s words, as you said in the original post.
He was not believing Trump’s words, you’re misinterpreting his post
Ah, got it. Thanks.
I took the sentence “From a Republican…” as OP saying they were a Republican who had changed their view (since it isn’t really a full sentence… alas).
Wishful thinking, I guess.
Like it’s their third rail of blow and their homie just picked up another ounce.
Religious conservatives love project 2025. Most Republicans are Religious, so they love it.
Religious conservatives love project 2025. Most Republicans are
Religiousbrainwashed Christofascists, so they love it.I approve of this edit
I still don’t see them as Trump’s actual plan.
I’m like one of three conservatives here, do you really expect a response?
i was hoping for a response yes. and really hoping for an actual intellectual as well.
so what makes you think it isn’t trumps plan? even though you can follow the progress online of p2025 and trump is checking off each objective.
what do you see p2025 as? and do you think it will make america “awesome again”
I see Trump’s plan as Trump’s plan. P25 holds some similarities, some things are just that obvious, like illegal immigrants should be deported, but it’s not Trump’s plan. P2025 is it’s own thing, some wishlist created by some think tank that got picked up by the news because it’s so stereotypical.
I think that Trump’s plan is an attempt to put America back on the right track economically.
Protective tariffs for instance, are a pretty standard way of protecting domestic industry. It’s expensive to comply with OSHA and labor laws, it’s a lot cheaper to make stuff in China and ship it over here. Tariffs make it so that it’s no longer cheaper. Bernie Sanders agrees, even if can’t directly agree with Trump. https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-trump-tariffs/
Does p25 have anything on tariffs? No, they don’t.
P25 does have stuff on things like racial discrimination, which no politician in their right mind would support.
P25 literally does have stuff on tariffs and it’s exactly what is happening right now.
It starts on page 765. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf Like literally the entire section from page 765-783 are just about tariffs and how high to increase them.
And an article discussing it https://seekingalpha.com/article/4769053-what-project-2025-tells-us-about-what-will-happen-tariffs-april-2
Tbh, I only ever read the cliff notes. I never read the hundreds of pages, I had better things to do with my time.
I also haven’t read the hundreds of pages, but it was a simple search away (either a search engine or literally just typing ‘tariff’ into the PDF). You said something that wasn’t true and didn’t bother to check if it was accurate before hand, and it was kind of the base “fact” of your entire post.
I do appreciate that you’re willing to come in here and actually discuss your viewpoint, which is why I tried to react quite neutrally. I would appreciate continuing the conversation because I do wonder if that revelation has changed your view that trump has no ties to P25.
Republicans already passed the removal of DEIA in the workforce. Idk how you feel about that but that can be seen as racial discrimination which a lot of Republicans have shown don’t give a shit about. A lot are pro white power, women are baby makers. i also can’t see how someone would think p2025 or “trumps plan” as a good thing. I see no benefits to destroying government agencies with no though or plan before hand. How many times has he fired a department only for him to go “woops . We actually needed those people” and then rehire them? 3?.. 4?. Like what’s the point? A lot of Republicans say “we are finding the fraud, so much winning”. How do you feel saying that or hearing it knowing that trump is convicted of 34 felonies? Was on tape gloating how he walked on in naked 15 year old girls and is an actual fraud to the country?
How do you feel about our administration literally editing the Internet and leaves of history to remove anyone of color or nationality other than white?
How do you feel about doge finding “wasted tax payer money” but trump plays golf with tax payer money? I’m sorry I just don’t understand and no one has ever answered these questions they just deflect. Like you can’t deny trump is a fucking scum bag monster pedophile
The person i was talking to about it said that he doesn’t want Project 2025 put in place, but also voted Trump and (as you said) said Trump “doesn’t have anything to do with that”.
When I went to talk to them again after the election, he had either deleted his account or blocked me after I ask about Trump appointing many involved with Project 2025.
i am guessing this would the case on an average. thanks though
