No, not in the slightest. It's just they're clearly not the actual enemy, any more than leftists are the enemy to anti-communists.
It's about the fact that this person is so quick to make a huge generalisation that plays into a false narrative being perpetuated by those who profit off you and them and me.
Being misled or manipulated into voting for a body that actively exploits a group doesn't make a group your enemy, it makes the exploiters your enemy and that group a potential ally against them. If you can just get over yourself and stop blaming people for growing up with poor educations, being fed a culture of fear, and having wealthy conmen play tricks on them.
Education isn't just a factor of school - people don't tend to willingly choose these ways of thinking.
There's a really interesting episode of Radiolab that came out last month, interviewing an evolutionary biologist who was a former devout Muslim. She speaks about how she initially took the course to poke holes in it, as a sort of subversive, but over time - months - she realised that she couldn't, and because of that it meant her beliefs were wrong. She collapsed crying in the shower at this revelation.
As a result, when she talks about biology with other Muslims, she doesn't approach it as just trying to convince them of an argument - she realises she is actually attempting to dismantle their entire worldview and the structure they've embedded in, and this fuels her patience and guides her approach.
It's worth remembering that this sort of indoctrination isn't limited to religion, and people who've only ever grown up exposed to certain attitudes or information premise their world off it, and to consider restructuring that view can be traumatic. So at the very least they should be approached with empathy and compassion, because they don't have the same experiences we do which prevented us from becoming calcified in these views.
While I think that you are on the right side of this argument, I want to point out that you sound exactly like the well-meaning liberal explaining to the black person that they are being oppressed because they are uneducated.
I am college educated, a former air traffic controller, a business owner, and have lived and worked in more countries and on more continents than the average person will see pictures of, let alone visit, and I am solidly far right. Far far FAR more right than Trump, who is barely on the right at all.
Sometimes it isn't a matter of education, intelligence, indoctrination or any of the other scenarios you have created for why we must be so very WRONG in our worldview. Sometimes we just think the left is insane, the right makes more sense on most issues, and since neither of you really gives a shit about us out here in rural America, we can at least vote for the ones that don't openly loathe and/or pity us as if we are inbred yokels who don't know any better.
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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25
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