Below are some quotes that I took from the Facebook page of a trump-supporting acquaintance. I do not include the full post - it's too long. And I am not responding to this person. The post I am quoting from here is similar to many others, and there honestly doesn't seem to be any point to engage.
So why bring up this particular facebook post at all? My main question is this: how is this possible? Some of this stuff is clearly divorced from reality. So it occurred to me to put some of these words up in front of the Dkos community and see what kind of feedback they received. I put some commentary of my own below, but I'm interested in additional points and perspectives on a basic concern: how can this happen?
"2018 claims: 'Trump is gonna jail minorities and gays, he attacks women ... He’s a horrible racist...'
Trump supporters: of course not ... In reality, he’s the most open minded modern president we’ve had. His is the first admin pro same sex marriage and has put more women in positions of power than anyone else. We don’t stand for or believe in any of that."
Of the many comments that I could make, I'll try to stick to some obvious facts. First of all, Trump quite clearly is not the first pro-same-sex marriage president. I believe that our current president (Biden) was in fact the first Vice-President to publicly endorse same-sex marriage (a quick google search indicates that the year was 2012). Both Obama and Biden have since made many similar statements. Obama praised the Supreme Court decision recognizing same sex marriage as a right. And these are all well-known facts.
Similarly, several decades of previous Presidents appointed more women to their administrations than Trump. This one requires more actual digging, but the Washington Post reported in 2018 that both Clinton and Obama appointed far more women to important roles than Trump. It's not even close. And I can forgive someone who might not know this without looking it up, but why not look it up before posting false info on the topic onto facebook?
“2021 claims: 'Biden and Harris are pushing for mandatory buybacks and banning any and all semi auto weapons. They want to install compelled speech laws forcing you to deny science and misgendering or hate speech should be worthy of fines or imprisonment. You should be canceled if you don’t obey the leftist groupthink. Criticizing definitional terrorism should cause one to lose their job and face possible imprisonment. Diversity quotas are a good thing. Police should be abolished. You should be banned from travel or employment if you don’t comply with unconstitutional scientifically unsound guidelines from the Chinese Disease Center and the Chinese Health Organization. You should be forced under threat of imprisonment to take an untested “vaccine” that might or might not kill you and leave you infertile. Oh and open borders.'
Biden supporters: I know... I voted for all of that. We are on the ‘right’ side of history
One of these things, is NOT like the other. It’s time to break up."
Where to begin? It's difficult to engage at all. And with some of this stuff, I don't even know what it means. Why would someone "criticizing definitional terrorism" wind up losing their job? How does one even respond to that?
But, to state a few points that would seem obvious: There are no Democrats that I know of trying to "install compelled speech laws;" Biden has come out forcefully and repeatedly against abolishing the police; no Democrats that I have heard about are asking anyone to comply with guidelines from a "Chinese Disease Center" or a "Chinese Health Organization;" and, as far as I am aware, there have been no "untested" vaccines released to the public, and no one is threatened with jail time for not getting vaccinated.
How does one not just come to be convinced of these things, but to feel so strongly about them that they publicly publish them on Facebook? And what to do with a segment of the population adhering to whatever sort of nonsense this post represents? How does this happen? And what can be done?