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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Look, in many ways I agree with you, but I guarantee that mindset is essentially doomed to failure if you want to win elections in the US where 68% of Americans identify themselves as Christian in some way.

The problem is not so much wanting to coddle up to the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists. It's that a lot of people who used to have what would be considered "standard", middle-of-the-road religious views have been told, again in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that they're stupid. Whether you believe this to be true is not the point. Calling a large portion of the country stupid is a great way to push them into the arms of an extremist.

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This thinking is a memetic poison created by the exact people that need to be shamed out of the public discourse. I used to agree with it, but seeing how it's been coopted by the bigots, I reject the premise entirely.

No one is calling Christians stupid. The nutjobs that want to tear down our secular society and replace it with a white Evangelical ethnostate are telling Christians that their political rivals are calling them stupid. They're the suckers for the conmen, and at this point, it's not worth attempting to rationalize debate.

Well, keep doing what you're doing then. I mean, we really showed them, the religious right is certainly in retreat after all that shaming.

They literally vote for the most insulting person available, again and again. If anything, Trumps winning twice and conservatives in general getting votes is that being polite and nice is completely failing strategy. Democrats and centrists were nice and respectful for years while conservative were increasingly insulting ... and increasingly oversensitive creating outrages over nothing.

This demand for one sided niceness that amounts to submissivity was is is contraproductive.

The meat of the article are actual bad acts. You are just using the tone to distract from the actual accusations.

>Democrats and centrists were nice and respectful for years

This is only really true on the political level, not the cultural/social level. Politicians on the left have been significantly more respectful than their counterparts for a long time now. But the same can't really be said for the sentiments of their voter base or the media/education curated towards them. For a large amount of people what they see and experience in their day to day lives does more to color their beliefs than what a politician says that they have no relation to and might see a few sound bites of here and there running up to an election.

The left has to learn that telling a prospective voter repeatedly that they are the enemy won't make anyone want to support them unless they're already believers. It'll just push them towards the side that's offering to call them an ally.

> Politicians on the left have been significantly more respectful than their counterparts for a long time now.

And that's why they're losing.

I think the biggest problem is that Christianity is a font of power for fascism in America. If we want to change that, people need to start protesting churches the same way they are Tesla. But for some reason, churches seem exempt from political responsibility in the minds of the average non-fascist American.

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