I wanted to say, I probably disagree with you on more or less everything that plagues this nation, but thanks for dipping your toe in strange waters both here and in your judgement of leaders.

The fact you're even willing to talk puts you in a different bracket from the reactionary forces that have co-opted the levers of the conservative party. I live and work in a very conservative area, and the only sentiment I can read is the desire for more actual blood, more paralegal cadres, more shootings, "cleansing" the lawless cities. No conversation extends further than fifteen seconds before a luckless leftist-adjacent strawman is strung up as the prime mover of the ills under discussion, whether it be optics standards or the disintegration of local roads. "We never had any [[redacted]] before they made us do DEI" because of course avionics are, like bears, sensitive to melanin or the presence of menses.

Luckily I have a white face, a cop haircut, and encyclopedic knowledge of war and firearms. I am too much of a coward to whisper anything to arouse suspicion regarding my true politics. Good way to get on the pink slip list.

Wrong. Republicans have been nasty forever (e.g. calling Democratic voters baby-killers who hate America since at least Reagan, redoubling that under Bush, redoubling again under Trump). They still win elections, and Democrats responded for decades by ignoring it.

That is what has led to Trump. What little evidence we have indicates that bullying just works. It's not the only thing that works -- see Obama -- but it does work. Ignoring the bullying doesn't.

> If you wonder how people could ever vote for someone like Trump, I think it’s got something to do with that kind of rhetoric.

So the rhetoric is the problem here, and not the reasons the rhetoric exists?

The rhetoric is in response to the objectively bad actions of this administration. If nothing else, the rank and foul disregard for so much of the Constitution and flagrant disregard for basic human rights and dignity.

Remember the tan suit? The sleepy Joe Biden?

Frankly, it's completely disingenious to ignore the fact that the leader of this movement, gets on his social media and says the most foul things possible every day.. and then you try to indict both sides.

A rando on the internet saying garbage is not the same as the leader of the whole movement, because that just empowers the people who follow him.

Nobody that you should take seriously said anything bad about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

But when the President gets on social media and says he's glad people are dead, or that it's okay to wipe out a civilization, and his base cheers for him, that's not rhetoric and we should just ignore it?

Sorry. That's just completely intellectually dishonest

I'm not talking about decent people, I'm talking about racists and xenophobes and yes, fascists. When Hillary Clinton made her remark about the "basket of deplorables" (to use a well-worn example of the left "ganging up on decent conservatives") meaning the white supremacist and Christian nationalist factions infiltrating and co-opting the Republican Party and conservative movement through Trumpism, she was 100% correct. A Decent person would would recognize what Trumpism is and who it attracts and would rather stop supporting it than lean into the hatred like some comic book supervillain. Decent people aren't so hidebound to a specific political identity that they can only view criticism from the other side as slander against them personally.

Yours is one of the staunchest pro-Republican, pro-Trump and anti-leftist accounts here, so I assume you voted for Trump every time you could and would probably vote for him again if it were possible. But for you to see what Trump and the right are doing, and what American conservatism has become, and excuse it as a rational response to leftists being too mean despite being correct is a wild piece of self-deception (as well as boilerplate conservative propaganda.) I wish that you and people like yourself would learn to read the room before it's too late. Trump and his ilk don't deserve your respect or your loyalty. The left isn't your enemy. You don't have to keep carrying water for these assholes. Whatever you think you're getting isn't going to be worth what you're going to lose in exchange.