The Thing I Despise Most About Trump Supporters Might Surprise You
Their violence scares me, their intolerance infuriates me, their weakness exhausts me, but there’s something even worse…
Trump supporters are terrible people. This is simply a fact. The people you see driving around in their pickup trucks with Trump flags, running other drivers off the road, belong in jail.
They’re entitled and they’re reckless. When you call up the police to report them, the police shrug and say, “There’s nothing we can do.”
There actually is something they could do: their job. But they don’t want to arrest these guys who are brandishing weapons at schools and committing vehicular homicide because they’re related to them or they’re married to them, or they’re the ones doing it.
I have frequent run ins with Trump supporters on social media. Most of them just insult me or send me death threats, but there’s a whole spectrum of harassment I have to endure. The ones I despise the most are those that pretend to be educated and send me personal manifestos in the form of comments or private messages. They try to explain in painstakingly detail why I am wrong, but they never offer any facts or support for their opinions.
The look of entitlement that is most common with a Trump supporter is a slightly bemused grin of dismissal. I encountered this look back when I was a teacher in a Physics classroom. When you try to explain basic laws of motion, your students will often give you a bemused look like you must be crazy. With the smart ones, the light bulb goes off, they pass the test, they get good jobs, and they vote Democrat. The dumb ones sit there laughing at you, fail the test, become an anchor on society, vote Trump, and blame you and everyone else for the tragedy of their lives.
The bemused look
Part of achieving wisdom is to have the courage to reexamine your most deeply held beliefs. In my experience, Trump supporters absolutely refuse to do this. There are a set of things they KNOW to be true, and they think anyone who says otherwise should be treated with scorn and dismissal.
This is how you get flat-Earthers. They look out the window. The world seems flat. When you say otherwise, they give you a bemused look. Once somebody starts thinking something is funny, you can’t get them to engage their logic anymore.
“That’s absurd! I can dismiss your idea because it’s absurd!”
“But there’s evidence!”
“Ha ha ha, you’re hysterical!”
Go back and watch all the Republican debates you can stomach. Whenever they get cornered on a point, the Republican candidate resorts to laughter and mockery.
“Look at how unhinged my opponent is!”
Mitch McConnell sat there laughing like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.
“700,000 Americans dead!”
McConnell: “HA HA HA HA HA HA!”
Folks, that was the winning debate. You just have to laugh in the face of facts. You have to laugh at people who have lost their loved ones. Laugh at them. Grind their lives beneath your boot heel. That wins. That works. That’s America!
The model of the abusive relationship
When somebody is in an abusive relationship, it’s very hard to get them to admit it. Take the Gabby Petito video for example. She’s hysterical and between sobs she keeps insisting that her boyfriend is great and everything is her fault.
I’ll often encounter people like this at a less extreme level in the comments section of my articles. For example, I wrote an article titled ‘Our Educational System Tells the Same Lies About World War II That it Tells About Slavery.’ The point of the article is that there was a lot more support in the United States for Nazi and Hitler than our current history textbooks let on.
This article isn’t just out of my imagination. There’s a book called ‘Hitler’s American Friends’ that walks you through it. There are other books that show how the Nuremberg Race Laws were based on the cruelty and oppression of Jim Crow laws in the American South.
The fact that people are still stomping around the US with Nazi flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags, and Trump flags should be something of an indication. The Nazis have a very strong support group in the US to this day.
But what brainwashed “educated” people will do, is comb through our current history text books, the ones with the propaganda I’m trying to combat, and use those same texts as evidence that I’m wrong. What kind of cognitive issue must you have to publish that kind of absurd counter-argument under your own name?
“The things that you’re saying is wrong proves that you are wrong, therefore your theory is flawed.”
If you say something that’s too much in conflict with a person’s sacred beliefs, their minds just short circuit. They start laughing. They refuse to look at the evidence.
Conservatism is a mental affliction
I mentioned the example of trying to explain things in a classroom. Your advantage there is that when the kids refuse to accept truth, you can fail them. Oh, they’ll whine about it. they’ll send in their parents to complain. The parents will have Trump stickers on their cars. But too bad, you got it wrong, you fail. Bye!
The problem with real life is that you can’t fail the people who engage in insane beliefs. Make no mistake, conservative beliefs are insane.
Here are the facts. A meta-analysis culled from 88 samples in 12 countries, and with an N of 22,818, revealed that “several psychological variables predicted political conservatism.” Which variables exactly? In order of predictive power: Death anxiety, system instability, dogmatism/intolerance of ambiguity, closed-mindedness, low tolerance of uncertainty, high needs for order, structure, and closure, low integrative complexity, fear of threat and loss, and low self-esteem. The researchers conclude, a little chillingly, that “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and a justification of inequality.” — William Todd Schultz Ph.D.
These people shouldn’t be voting, they should be seeking psychological help.
America listens to the most ignorant people
One of many frustrating things about growing up in the United States is the blatant lack of respect that is shown to anyone with any intelligence. Smart kids are openly mocked and that never ends. Idiots are put up on a pedestal.
Intelligent people with good ideas are forced to debate complete lunatics. The lunatics speak out of turn and make the whole public dumber as a consequence. When the intelligent person talks, the lunatic throws himself or herself to the floor in hysterical laughter.
Then the general public votes for the lunatic.
We shouldn’t be engaging with cognitively damaged people like this. Their counter-arguments don’t meet the minimum requirements for intelligent debate. They say and perpetuate lies that corrupt every aspect of our civilization.
Their steadfastness is the worst part
The thing I despise most about Trump supporters is their absolute refusal to even consider that they might be wrong. The moment their minds are exposed to enough insight that they start to question their most deeply held beliefs, they start to laugh.
“Well, that can’t be true because that sounds absurd!”
Anyone with the discipline to pursue a higher education comes to learn that, at first blush, the truth quite often does sound absurd.
“Oh, the continents drifted? What are you stupid? How is a continent supposed to drift?”
“Oh, you want me to wash my hands before performing surgery? What’s that? You think there are tiny little invisible monsters called ‘bacteria’ that make people sick? Yeah…sure, whatever.”
“Oh, you think smoking causes cancer? It’s just smoke you dope. Do you think campfires cause cancer too?”
Just because something makes you laugh doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It just means that you’re ignorant. Conservatives believe that laughter proves a falsehood like it’s an unquestionable axiom.
Of course they do, because it’s an easy and lazy thing to believe. Unfortunately, it’s not true and it holds them back from ever having the chance to become decent human beings. Their belief has the added consequence of holding the whole rest of human civilization back. I’m sick of tolerating it. We shouldn’t even engage them. They offer nothing.
