My uncle was under the impression that if Kamala Harris won, straight white men would be rounded up and thrown in jail. How can the American left combat sheer nonsense?
Their own media bubbles are convincing them of nonsensical things and they use these fears of the maybe-could’ve-might’ves to justify doing it to “the left” first.
ETA: The only way to combat it is one on one conversations with questions like who told you that, why do you think that, who said that was going to happen, and why would they lie to you about it.
>My uncle was under the impression that if Kamala Harris won, straight white men would be rounded up and thrown in jail. How can the American left combat sheer nonsense?
That’s a tough one.
Maybe you could introduce him to online betting markets? Encourage him to bet on things he believes, so that he can see how often his beliefs are supported or disproven?
Clearly by supporting more tax credits for businesses, embracing crypto deregulation, and running away from anti-trust enforcement and universal healthcare. And towards Cheney endorsement and the centrists.
/s
Dems have been responding to polls instead of shaping public opinion for many years now. We need to replace the rudder of the Dem party so that we can get back to shaping public opinion.
I say what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Counter his nonsense by telling him that in reality it is Donald Trump who wants to round up people and throw them in jail.
There is no point arguing with him. He both believes this and doesn’t believe this. It is the perpetual war that fascists promise to justify their own cruelty. You must be continously under threat by an enemy who is both weak and degenerate but also such a threat that what you do them is justified.
Your uncle has just fallen into fascism and unfortunately the lesson from Germany, Spain and Italy is that it is almost impossible to get them back out again. Germany Nazis who survived the war stayed as quiet Nazis until they died.
You certainly don’t do it by arguing with them or presenting evidence or rational arguments.
The only thing you can do is make sure they don’t get into power again.
You have to destroy the content and propaganda networks that disseminate those narratives and then up media literacy as a national product across the board. Especially with AI coming fast this problem is only going to get worse.
Step one, connect through empathy and share common ground.
Step two, explain how fucking silly that idea is.
Step three ask them how this fantasy would be facilitated? What organization, who pays for it? How is progress tracked and updated?
Step four, explain how fuckkng silly those answers are.
Step five, ask if all of this is sp silly and has no real mechanism to work … what exactly is he afraid of? That is is or will happen or that it could?
How did he phrase that? I have had colleagues who I respect immensely and are or clear state of mind who believe in things like the “thin blue line” — that we would all just resort to anarchy if the police did not maintain their current role in US society. They are otherwise normal people who are well-functioning members of their community despite believing something that is both nonsensical and also very obviously underpinned by racist paranoia. To this end, I could see this just being your standard “I don’t like DEI because it means other people will take my job!” taken to an inscrutable extreme.
My own feeling is that you can’t convince these people out of irrational beliefs but, for the exact same reason, you can pretty much just paper over them because the people who believe them aren’t really paying that much attention nor can they reliably tie their beliefs to the real world. Someone had talked about using MAGA branding while running progressive policies. It seems likely that this is a tranche of voters who would easily fall for that. They will fall for anything that is packaged in a spectacular enough way.
It’s not enough to just call it out you have to basically “interrogate” it. You have to call him a liar and ask for a shred of evidence that this is true.
You probably won’t since this is your uncle, but this is the way to handle this. Don’t just call someone an idiot and let it fade into the aether. Hold them to it and don’t quit until they answer you or rage quit. These people KNOW they’re lying and we need to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just stupid. They know.
A starting list of straight white men who would almost certainly not have been thrown in to jail while she was POTUS:
Her husband Doug Emhoff. Even if their marriage is for show, he did father two kids through his first wife, and there is no indication of IVF. Maybe Jews would get a pass?
California state governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime friend and political ally of hers. If Kamala were to call for a round up of “the most white Republican looking people in America”, she’d have to start with Gavin’s wife and four kids.
Me. I voted for her twice for California Attorney General, and was quite happy with the result. Nobody came knocking on my door looking to round me up as a straight white dude. So far as I know, they didn’t come after any other straight guys either. Not so thrilled about her presidential run, but that’s a different story.
Is she going to round up Joe Biden too? Come on, man.
Not sure where your uncle’s coming from with this stuff, but it’s quite easy to refute if taken literally. Honestly, it would be hard for me to take it even seriously, much less literally.
Well, just point out that he’s safe because it’s gay and/or dark colored skin men who are being rounded up and thrown in jail. Phew. He dodged a bullet with that vote. /s
> “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
> – Jean-Paul Sartre
Your uncle is mocking you. He does not genuinely believe that. He is making a straightforward call to racial violence. He is saying “They want to do violence against us based on our race.” to justify the violence he wishes to inflict on a racial basis.
My husband had the same sentiment. He said under Kamala we would all be under martial law. My head almost exploded when I heard that. He also said my FDT sticker on my water bottle was sending our daughter the wrong message. He said he likes Trump because he would uphold the constitution 😳, that Adam Schiff r*ped and killed a young man in Thailand, that Michelle Obama is a man, that all 20 something of trumps accusers were lying for attention, the list goes on and on and on. He would have said all the protesters are paid if he didn’t have to witness me making signs and protesting for free. This man has a high paying job, and functions well in society. No clue how we’ve gotten here but it feels like I’m taking crazy pills
I feel like we literally live in different dimensions or something. It’s the weirdest, loudest “shift” in society I’ve ever witnessed.
How is it nonsense when they are doing exactly that to brown people? of course he believes that we would do that, because that is exactly what they are doing.
OMG…this tickled me so bad! How did he even COME to that conclusion…how, Sway??
How do you combat something so inane? I paid pretty close attention to the Harris/Walz ticket, and “concentration camps for WM” was not on my bingo card.
There was a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church several years ago, and a young woman whose parents disowned her, kicked her out of the house, and never spoke with her again said, “I’ve come to terms with it. Some people lose their parents to cancer or a car accident. I lost my parents to a cult.”
The anger from right wing news is addictive. And right wing news is now so massive that it drives main stream news cycles – especially during an election. I don’t know how you overcome that.
It’s not the “left wing” that needs to solve that.
It’s a human and spiritual problem, not a political one. What I mean is that the fears he has go deeper than political. What him and many others are experiencing is a loss of control of their own life for many reasons: anything from not being happy with their family life to being squished to death by finances or even the loss of a famil member.
Political parties can amplify this problem because they are more likely to tell you what your problem is without talking to you or getting to understand your problem. They couple this with antagonism because they view everyone that slightly disagrees with them as the opposing party.
The opposing party just adopts all the voters that were rejected by the other party for something intrinsic to them
That line of thinking is just bizarre and I don’t know how to convince someone that this idea they have in their head is actually ridiculous and makes zero sense. What do you say to someone who insists that the sky is green every single day even though they can see it’s blue?
With cult deprogramming techniques working from the knowledge that the generation voting Trump is likely affected by long term exposure to lead from gas.
Check out this answer in this very sub: /r/AskALiberal/comments/1jypo2i/how_have_you_dealt_with_trump_supporter_friends/mn19xwj/
I saw a debate on Instagram and the one person said “is there ANYTHING I can say that would change your POV?” The other person said no. The debate ended.
So that’s where you start. If someone genuinely thinks they’re right and everything you say is wrong or fake news or misinformation, you should not bother. Critical thinking isn’t in the room with us.
The trouble is that every accusation is a confession. They legitimately believed that that’s what Kamala would do because that is legitimately what they planned to do. And now that they’re actually rounding up and deporting brown folks to death camps with no investigation, oversight, or review, they believe it even more strongly because it is what they are doing.
You can’t convince them the left won’t do it, because at the end of the day, they live in their own heads, and they did it.
I dunno… if they’re at the point where they believe something like that, I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. That’s serious levels of brainwashing
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Even scarier — he is a high school civics teacher. I wish I was kidding.
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Their own media bubbles are convincing them of nonsensical things and they use these fears of the maybe-could’ve-might’ves to justify doing it to “the left” first.
ETA: The only way to combat it is one on one conversations with questions like who told you that, why do you think that, who said that was going to happen, and why would they lie to you about it.
No wonder kids don’t know anything about how the government works.
I would cut ties and see if you can have the state education board review his teaching license.
Okay so like immigrants are now?
The real answer is that he needs to be involuntarily institutionalized for psychiatric treatment if he is that delusional and detached from reality.
America hasn’t yet admitted to itself that half the country is batshit insane
>My uncle was under the impression that if Kamala Harris won, straight white men would be rounded up and thrown in jail. How can the American left combat sheer nonsense?
That’s a tough one.
Maybe you could introduce him to online betting markets? Encourage him to bet on things he believes, so that he can see how often his beliefs are supported or disproven?
What? How?
Clearly by supporting more tax credits for businesses, embracing crypto deregulation, and running away from anti-trust enforcement and universal healthcare. And towards Cheney endorsement and the centrists.
/s
Dems have been responding to polls instead of shaping public opinion for many years now. We need to replace the rudder of the Dem party so that we can get back to shaping public opinion.
Write your uncle off as a potential political ally and move onto someone who isn’t permanently compromised. There are some left
“Remember what the black one was supposed to do to you too? Yeh well the woman won’t either”
^How’d ^he ^find ^out?
I say what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Counter his nonsense by telling him that in reality it is Donald Trump who wants to round up people and throw them in jail.
You don’t bother trying to combat crazy like that.
You can’t convince everyone.
More nonsense black people were stealing pets and eating them
There is no point arguing with him. He both believes this and doesn’t believe this. It is the perpetual war that fascists promise to justify their own cruelty. You must be continously under threat by an enemy who is both weak and degenerate but also such a threat that what you do them is justified.
Your uncle has just fallen into fascism and unfortunately the lesson from Germany, Spain and Italy is that it is almost impossible to get them back out again. Germany Nazis who survived the war stayed as quiet Nazis until they died.
You certainly don’t do it by arguing with them or presenting evidence or rational arguments.
The only thing you can do is make sure they don’t get into power again.
he’s either being facetious or you need to contact his doctor. this is no one else’s problem to solve.
You can’t. That’s why Dems lose. They move right, alienating their base, and winning nobody over.
You have to destroy the content and propaganda networks that disseminate those narratives and then up media literacy as a national product across the board. Especially with AI coming fast this problem is only going to get worse.
Stop babying middle class white men into thinking they deserve more than their already get
Step one, connect through empathy and share common ground.
Step two, explain how fucking silly that idea is.
Step three ask them how this fantasy would be facilitated? What organization, who pays for it? How is progress tracked and updated?
Step four, explain how fuckkng silly those answers are.
Step five, ask if all of this is sp silly and has no real mechanism to work … what exactly is he afraid of? That is is or will happen or that it could?
How did he phrase that? I have had colleagues who I respect immensely and are or clear state of mind who believe in things like the “thin blue line” — that we would all just resort to anarchy if the police did not maintain their current role in US society. They are otherwise normal people who are well-functioning members of their community despite believing something that is both nonsensical and also very obviously underpinned by racist paranoia. To this end, I could see this just being your standard “I don’t like DEI because it means other people will take my job!” taken to an inscrutable extreme.
My own feeling is that you can’t convince these people out of irrational beliefs but, for the exact same reason, you can pretty much just paper over them because the people who believe them aren’t really paying that much attention nor can they reliably tie their beliefs to the real world. Someone had talked about using MAGA branding while running progressive policies. It seems likely that this is a tranche of voters who would easily fall for that. They will fall for anything that is packaged in a spectacular enough way.
It’s not enough to just call it out you have to basically “interrogate” it. You have to call him a liar and ask for a shred of evidence that this is true.
You probably won’t since this is your uncle, but this is the way to handle this. Don’t just call someone an idiot and let it fade into the aether. Hold them to it and don’t quit until they answer you or rage quit. These people KNOW they’re lying and we need to stop giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just stupid. They know.
In this country, when have innocent white men ever been rounded up and thrown in jail?
You can’t combat mental illness with policy and rhetoric. Your uncle needs real medical help.
So it’s okay when it’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because he’s not white?
If a person is willing to believe something so outlandish, it’s a wasted effort trying to persuade them, tbh.
You can’t.
A starting list of straight white men who would almost certainly not have been thrown in to jail while she was POTUS:
Her husband Doug Emhoff. Even if their marriage is for show, he did father two kids through his first wife, and there is no indication of IVF. Maybe Jews would get a pass?
California state governor Gavin Newsom, a longtime friend and political ally of hers. If Kamala were to call for a round up of “the most white Republican looking people in America”, she’d have to start with Gavin’s wife and four kids.
Me. I voted for her twice for California Attorney General, and was quite happy with the result. Nobody came knocking on my door looking to round me up as a straight white dude. So far as I know, they didn’t come after any other straight guys either. Not so thrilled about her presidential run, but that’s a different story.
Is she going to round up Joe Biden too? Come on, man.
Not sure where your uncle’s coming from with this stuff, but it’s quite easy to refute if taken literally. Honestly, it would be hard for me to take it even seriously, much less literally.
Maybe try the Socratic method? Ask questions that might lead them to the absurdity of their premise?
Well, just point out that he’s safe because it’s gay and/or dark colored skin men who are being rounded up and thrown in jail. Phew. He dodged a bullet with that vote. /s
> he is a high school civics teacher
This is the problem. American public education is woefully underfunded and inadequate.
> “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
> – Jean-Paul Sartre
Your uncle is mocking you. He does not genuinely believe that. He is making a straightforward call to racial violence. He is saying “They want to do violence against us based on our race.” to justify the violence he wishes to inflict on a racial basis.
My husband had the same sentiment. He said under Kamala we would all be under martial law. My head almost exploded when I heard that. He also said my FDT sticker on my water bottle was sending our daughter the wrong message. He said he likes Trump because he would uphold the constitution 😳, that Adam Schiff r*ped and killed a young man in Thailand, that Michelle Obama is a man, that all 20 something of trumps accusers were lying for attention, the list goes on and on and on. He would have said all the protesters are paid if he didn’t have to witness me making signs and protesting for free. This man has a high paying job, and functions well in society. No clue how we’ve gotten here but it feels like I’m taking crazy pills
I feel like we literally live in different dimensions or something. It’s the weirdest, loudest “shift” in society I’ve ever witnessed.
Call him a dumb bitch and move on.
How is it nonsense when they are doing exactly that to brown people? of course he believes that we would do that, because that is exactly what they are doing.
I don’t know how you fight this level of stupidity
He’s lying. He’s just racist.
OMG…this tickled me so bad! How did he even COME to that conclusion…how, Sway??
How do you combat something so inane? I paid pretty close attention to the Harris/Walz ticket, and “concentration camps for WM” was not on my bingo card.
There was a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church several years ago, and a young woman whose parents disowned her, kicked her out of the house, and never spoke with her again said, “I’ve come to terms with it. Some people lose their parents to cancer or a car accident. I lost my parents to a cult.”
You probably can’t. That’s his fantasy. You’d have to change what he wants, change his fantasy. But I don’t see that happening.
The anger from right wing news is addictive. And right wing news is now so massive that it drives main stream news cycles – especially during an election. I don’t know how you overcome that.
You can’t. When people believe that sort of thing—even when shown that it’s not true, they are way beyond all help.
Rounded up and imprisoned on what charges?
It’s not the “left wing” that needs to solve that.
It’s a human and spiritual problem, not a political one. What I mean is that the fears he has go deeper than political. What him and many others are experiencing is a loss of control of their own life for many reasons: anything from not being happy with their family life to being squished to death by finances or even the loss of a famil member.
Political parties can amplify this problem because they are more likely to tell you what your problem is without talking to you or getting to understand your problem. They couple this with antagonism because they view everyone that slightly disagrees with them as the opposing party.
The opposing party just adopts all the voters that were rejected by the other party for something intrinsic to them
Well that exact t hi bc is happening to non white men now. It’s called projection
That line of thinking is just bizarre and I don’t know how to convince someone that this idea they have in their head is actually ridiculous and makes zero sense. What do you say to someone who insists that the sky is green every single day even though they can see it’s blue?
With cult deprogramming techniques working from the knowledge that the generation voting Trump is likely affected by long term exposure to lead from gas.
Check out this answer in this very sub: /r/AskALiberal/comments/1jypo2i/how_have_you_dealt_with_trump_supporter_friends/mn19xwj/
I saw a debate on Instagram and the one person said “is there ANYTHING I can say that would change your POV?” The other person said no. The debate ended.
So that’s where you start. If someone genuinely thinks they’re right and everything you say is wrong or fake news or misinformation, you should not bother. Critical thinking isn’t in the room with us.
The trouble is that every accusation is a confession. They legitimately believed that that’s what Kamala would do because that is legitimately what they planned to do. And now that they’re actually rounding up and deporting brown folks to death camps with no investigation, oversight, or review, they believe it even more strongly because it is what they are doing.
You can’t convince them the left won’t do it, because at the end of the day, they live in their own heads, and they did it.
Your uncle might just be a schizophrenic lol. Ive never heard that rumor in my life.
Lean into it and start throwing straight white conservative men in jail.
No idea how to combat that, but does uncle realize that Kamala’s husband is straight and white?
Same way people deal with “the left” saying they’re all racist and sexist and every decision they make is based around that
You cannot combat nonsense.
Because your uncle is in a cult
I dunno… if they’re at the point where they believe something like that, I’m not sure there’s anything you can do. That’s serious levels of brainwashing