Summary
Recently terminated federal workers face not only unemployment challenges but also hurtful reactions from family members who support the government cuts.
Luke Tobin, fired from the Forest Service, and Kristin Jenn, whose Park Service job was frozen, describe relatives celebrating their job losses as necessary to “make the government great again.”
Former Park Service employee Riley Rackliffe encountered social media comments calling him a “glorified pool boy” despite his Ph.D.
Some workers report family members unfriending them on social media or dismissing their positions as “waste.”
Although I don’t think much will get through to MAGA people, the hypocrisy is what gives me the most hope. Trump’s mind is so unlike his voters’ that he doesn’t deserve to represent them.
Like, I wake up earlier than my wife. She has back problems, but I like to keep the kitchen nice for her and not remind her of it. So every day I unload the entire dishwasher, carefully putting away every plate, knife, glass without making noise. I don’t mean it as a virtue-signal, we all probably do little things like this. I just mean, can you even imagine Trump doing something like that? Imagine him caring about someone other than him that much? Imagine having to live so intentionally and carefully for any reason at all?
That should get through to them, right?
The problem is that’s not the Trump they see. They see a hero story told through YouTube, podcasts, angry Facebook/Twitter posts, MSM, Discords and such. It’s immersive. It’s engrossing/triggering enough to turn on family.
I can’t stop saying it. The root problem is the information environment, and no amount of policy or studying or empathy or signaling or even hardship is going to change squat until that is turned on its head.
And I’m more militant about that now. Big Tech is beyond fixing, it needs to be fucked up.
You are 1000% correct, half the continent lives in an entirely different reality. That’s why very visibly and loudly protesting and demonstrating at key. It FORCES the dissent into public view where it would otherwise be hidden.
Anything we can do to fight with their control of the narrative is deeply important.
Protests can be deprioritized and warped too! Heck, people are turning on their own kids, so what’s protest on TV or the street gonna do? It just confirms what people were served.
I really hope there’s a tipping point where people pour out of Big Tech, or maybe a giant hack to spur things on.
part of the real value of ai bots is it keeps the rubes in the big tech media bubbles by giving them “people” to interact with as REAL people exit
Very few of them are indoctrinated that way. It’s far more Sinister than that. The majority of them I would say get their indoctrination through their local broadcast evening news. The same local broadcast evening news that their parents and grandparents trusted, watched, and relied upon. It’s never been fully trustworthy. But even back then it wasn’t fully owned by Sinclair as it is many places today.
Attacking them for swallowing the Fox News or whatever online Source hook line and sinker. Only pushes them away. Because that’s not what a lot of them are doing. They aren’t seeking the radicalization out. It’s being permeated throughout their environment without them even trying. Go to some of these places where all local Outlets are owned by sinclair. It’s like stepping into an alternate reality. Where Up Is Down left is Right black is white. And you are the crazy one. Because you don’t believe what they’ve been told. Trump is lionized in daily mandatory propaganda segments. All failings or setbacks are because Democrats, DEI, trans, minorities, or any other groups they don’t have regular contact with.
It’s easy and a cop out to think these people are stupid. They aren’t. Or are ignoring the information we’ve seen. They haven’t. Through no intent or effort of their own. Their local controlled media has indoctrinated them into a fascist death cult.
“This is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”
Unless we can turn them against their local broadcast stations or plant the concept among them. That their local broadcasters are part of an actual conspiracy. It’s game over.
IF we can reach them they would be our allies. Unfortunately no one has figured out how to do that. Despite the massive parallels to Nazi Germany 100 years ago. This sort of media control is literally how the Nazi party manufactured support early on. Spinning fantastic lies about minorities to the general public.
MAGA people are not capable of empathy.
They are a delusional death cult.
Maybe its possible to convince one of the few remaining Trump critical Republicans, but MAGA people are gone.
I no longer talk to my family because of this.
They only understand pain that personally affects them, and even then, they’re quite likely to delusionally invent a new element to their conspiracy theory cluster fuck that consitutes their worldview/religion.
Maybe they’ll wake up when they, personally, are now homeless and the entire economy around them has collapsed… but maybe not.
MAGA are inconvenienced
millionairesgrifters.I suspect a lot of them wouldn’t even be able to understand what you’re doing or why. And that might make them slightly uncomfortable, so they’d judge you just in order not to have to think about it.
“Those are made-up words!”
Like people have been saying for nearly a decade now: “I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people.”
I remember when I was a teenager and starting to question religion I talked to my sister about it a little. She was certain that if we didn’t have Christianity that everyone would just be going around raping and killing each other. I was super confused at the time (cause I was a child) but a little later realized oh, she has no empathy or morals, no internal sense of right and wrong…and she doesn’t know that other people actually do. The convo was confusing because at the time I didn’t understand her at all when she asked things like ‘without hell what would stop you from killing people?’. A little later I started thinking about how many people thought this way and if it was possibly enough to f up a democracy. Anyway here we are
Lol