This is one sample visit to the conservative subreddit. It’s an appalling example of the impact of disinformation. When you need to be reminded of who the enemy is and what they think, visit here. You will see that there is no gratitude or mutual respect, and there never was. There was never any concept of mutual benefit. And now, with Trump leading the cult, there truly is no depth to which they won’t go, and no decisions from Trump that won’t be retroactively justified.
These people are dangerous, and they don’t give a shit about any alliances, friendship or partnership. And they control the levers of power.
Edit to add a screenshot. Not sure how to add more, but it doesn’t get any better as you go deeper. What’s clear is that this relationship is over, and we need to move on.
Doubling down on tribalism won’t save us from their ignorance. The degradation of a unified society by means of Us vs. Them thinking is how we got here in the first place and how things continue to get worse.
There are those at the fringes of that style of thinking that can be reached by those of us who are adjacent to them (via family, mutual friends, workplaces, etc.). Those folks at the fringes can reach those adjacent to them. We’ll never get 100% of them on side but we can at least weaken the well-funded machine that continues to keep them uninformed by relating to people as human beings instead of stoking division like oligarchs intend for us to do.
Only thing I said that I think might be worth downvoting is “unified society,” which might have unintentionally implied society was once completely unified. It felt so obvious I couldn’t possibly mean that, it didn’t even occur to me to be more precise there. In hindsight though, what I should have stressed is that we’ve been getting less unified than ever. We’re losing the ability to see the humanity in one another, and have been for a long time.
Folks who sow division want to make it about culture or politics, but it was always about class or more fundamentally, power. The more willing we are to play the hierarchy game, the more power goes to the ones on top.