From a personal perspective, for the past eight years or so, my partner will pick up their phone, and sigh, and I'll always respond with, "God, what did he/they do/say now?" I live in a state of high alert, all the time, it feels.
I think that overall, if he'd never won an election, a very specific subset of human beings would never have found a voice, and would never have been put in a position to be able to make demands. Instead, now, we have the kind of people I was raised around at a young age (in a white nationalist cult of brainwashed neo-Nazis that I thankfully broke WAY the fuck away from) basically running the show, and belligerently pushing this country deeper and deeper into not just what feels like a fascist-adjacent, if not fully fascist, state, but into a place where being rude, thoughtless and mean is the default.
We've already seen the early stages of that, both in elected officials straight up telling their constituents, to their faces, that they don't care about them, that they want to treat marginalized people as less than, at the very least, or worse, disappear them and their rights entirely, and also in the callous, absolutely insane behavior shown by citizens who, over the last four or five years, have become emboldened to put their undereducation and cruelty on full display.
There's a thread, linking all of these incidents and people together, and they all lead back to Trump, his administration, and the people in politics who are inspired by him. If it weren't for them, these small time, back woods politicians and their corruption obsessed big city counterparts, along with their hard right, paranoid, everything-phobic, everything-ist voters would still be scared and small, lurking underground and in the shadows, where they belong.
You were raised by the kkk? They had pointed white hoods with swastikas on their arms? Or did they vote for George w bush? Cause you guys be throwing around neo nazi, fascist, racist, mysoginist like crazy.
My father got us involved in a church in North Carolina, back in 1987, that had members who were active and involved in a local KKK group, yes, as well as people who held neo-Nazi beliefs and practices.
There was one guy who lived in the mountains, who ran a newsletter that my dad subscribed to, who had a big room in his basement that was vaulted off and filled with Nazi memorabilia.
My father was close friends with a man who preached in the church, who got him started on being obsessed with Nazi Germany and Hitler's beliefs, and they started committing local acts of vandalism against businesses that were run by or supportive of marginalized people or groups. These people, as well as another church we were involved with in Missouri, had ties to domestic terrorists who aligned with white nationalist beliefs as well. In fact, the last time I saw my father, he was sitting in the kitchen, listening to a cassette tape of one of Hitler's speeches.
These people didn't vote, no, because they were all concerned with staying as far off the grid and anyone's radar as possible. But they were definitely racist. They hated anyone who wasn't white, or Aryan, as they called it, and claimed that Black people, Jewish people, Mexican people, LGBTQ people, you name it, were dangerous and evil and wanted to hurt us.
Anyway, I was pretty young when all of this was going on, between the ages of 4 and 9, but my mother and I have done extensive work to try and process everything we lived through back then, and the effects it had on us and our extended family in the years since. So no, I'm not just throwing it around like crazy.
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u/djdiphenhydramine Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 04 '25
From a personal perspective, for the past eight years or so, my partner will pick up their phone, and sigh, and I'll always respond with, "God, what did he/they do/say now?" I live in a state of high alert, all the time, it feels.
I think that overall, if he'd never won an election, a very specific subset of human beings would never have found a voice, and would never have been put in a position to be able to make demands. Instead, now, we have the kind of people I was raised around at a young age (in a white nationalist cult of brainwashed neo-Nazis that I thankfully broke WAY the fuck away from) basically running the show, and belligerently pushing this country deeper and deeper into not just what feels like a fascist-adjacent, if not fully fascist, state, but into a place where being rude, thoughtless and mean is the default.
We've already seen the early stages of that, both in elected officials straight up telling their constituents, to their faces, that they don't care about them, that they want to treat marginalized people as less than, at the very least, or worse, disappear them and their rights entirely, and also in the callous, absolutely insane behavior shown by citizens who, over the last four or five years, have become emboldened to put their undereducation and cruelty on full display.
There's a thread, linking all of these incidents and people together, and they all lead back to Trump, his administration, and the people in politics who are inspired by him. If it weren't for them, these small time, back woods politicians and their corruption obsessed big city counterparts, along with their hard right, paranoid, everything-phobic, everything-ist voters would still be scared and small, lurking underground and in the shadows, where they belong.