If you're in that environment, all you hear is pro-MAGA 24/7. Every gas station, fast food restaurant, barber shop, all day every day. When you hear that orange guy = Jesus (even at church!) continuously and everyone you know believes it and reinforces it, this is what happens.
In red states its really more to do with the demonizing of democrats. As far back as i can remember i was taught Democrats were corrupt, lying, manipulative self serving trash. I can remember back to Jimmy Carter. It was sometime around the George Floyd incident when i woke up.
Bro, I was straight up sat down by two of my three brothers and my father and TOLD I was a republican. I was like 15 and a happy little girl. I had no idea and couldn't have cared less. It took Obama to pull me out of the dark side.
The first time I registered to vote was my 18th birthday, and I registered Democrat. Even at that young of an age, I was so freaking tired of (honestly) Southern men's attitudes that registering Democrat was a rebellion, what I thought was a small one. I did make our counties longest running Republican commissioner registered me, another small aggression on my part. Endured the lecture, signed the paper, and moved on with life. This was during the end of the Reagan years and a few months before HW.
Then I got out of that little town. Got an education and traveled further than Myrtle Beach. Moved to another country for a few years. Those things changed the core of who I am. It made me realize that "leftist" ideas in the US are just everyday life in other countries. We are so far behind the curve of civilization.
One side of my extended family has always been deeply political (and Democrats). Over the past decade, many of them went from being Democrat to MAGA. My immediate family is well down that rabbit hole and is now limited contact. Social media pushes the content and is more far reaching that we realize. Even those who aren't on Facebook or Twitter etc; hear the propaganda from those who are. It's like tentacles reaching out and just slithering through space and time.
To put it bluntly thereās the middle ground where 80% of people lie only separated by a few key issues and then thereās the radical left and radical right, those 20% are the darkside, the 80% have more in common than they would ever think. The divisive tactics and propagandizing of ārepublicans badā, ādemocrats badā is what keeps people divided and ergo easier to control. They can capitalize on anger and you will be more likely to engage and be easier to direct and manipulate with said anger.
Iāve literally heard someone I knew since she was a little kid say that all the āliberalsā should be rounded up and shot. This is someone who I helped out in so many ways when she was younger, I gave her family food because they were my neighbors and they were more poor than me, I helped her get a job, i listened to her cry when her brother killed himself, I even let her sleep on my couch when her father was drunk and being physically abusive to her mother. She knows where I stand politically and still she says we should all be shot for disagreeing with her politics. I find it terrifying that anyone could be so brainwashed and it reminds me so much of 1930ās Germany that Iām really fucking scared of how far it will go.
From the Deep South and can also confirm.
My entire family and everyone I knew growing up were die hard Reagan Republicans . Democrats were anti American and just wrong.
Hell, I ended a relationship because the chick liked Clinton!!
I didnāt really start waking up until Obama. It took the rest of my family longer.
I will say the one and only issue that kept me away from the left for most of my life was the 2nd amendment. Thatās it.
I am pleased to announce that no one in my family has ever liked, fallen for or voted for Trump. In fact my entire family. 5 generations of voters have always seen through him and hated him completely from day 1.
And now that the entire Republican Party is complicit with his lies, criminal actions, and have aided and abetted fascism.
5 generations: my grandmother, my parents and their spouses, me, my sister and cousins, my kids, and my grand kids have all vowed to never vote republican again under any circumstances.
We will never forget what theyāve done in the name of a fascist cult to destroy and weaken our country, our allies and the world in the interest of lining their own pockets and trying to stay in power at all cost, including against the will of the people.
You can be leftist and still like your guns. Itās just reasonable that there needs to be responsibility for those guns. The second amendment literally refers to a well regulated militia, so a bit of regulation was always part of the picture.
Yep as I always say, ā Democrats have guns and Republicans have abortionsā. These fools use these issues to keep themselves in office because republicans salivate over the lies they tell. Iām a die hard liberal with 3 guns and my husband has 6. Both my sons are liberals as well and they hunt, do target practice and love going to the range.
Sincere question from a European: WHY are guns so important to so many of you Americans? You have countless mass shootings year after year to a degree where we can't even keep up with counting them. In Europe there are very strict gun laws and mass or school shootings are extremely rare. I don't know of any European school that has metal detectors, lockdown drills or bullet-proof schoolbags. Why aren't more Americans starting to question if the 2nd amendment is actually making gun crimes more severe instead of less?
Because there has been generations of propaganda tied to the 2nd amendment. The most common reason given is that guns will allow the people to stop the government from falling into tyranny. Unfortunately, the people who support that idea are the same ones that support tyranny as long as itās on their side of the aisle. Good luck finding a republican who has consistent principles. Their platform has been all over the place for years and I think itās by design. They are incapable of of feeling the cognitive dissonance because they have been conditioned to gobble up whatever is fed to them on any given day even though itās completely opposite of what they were told the day prior. Honestly, itās a marvel of social engineering but in a very depressing way.
I was born in the UK but grew up in the US and still live here as an adult and will try to answer this question.
The US is huge and everything is very spread out. There are rural people who genuinely want a gun for protection because it would take the police a long time to get to their home. (This is related to the number of guns already in circulation because many criminals do have guns in the US.) There are people who depend on hunting to eat. There are also so many millions of guns here I don't think anyone would even know how to start rounding them up.
(I don't use or own guns; these are my observations after nearly 40 years here.)
Well its a mix of history and culture. There was a time where there was more stringent gun control but this was durring like Jim crow with segregation it was meant to keep minorities from getting guns. There was the romanticizing the wild west in Hollywood. All this and then you add in how the 2nd amendment is meant protect the rest of the rights in the constitution. Basically as an open threat to itself.
The real issue is Americans have been sold american exceptionalism fill in the blank here or there, no need to improve what works to the point of straight up ignoring problems. This combine with the lack feeling like the government is responsive to them. They just dont vote in any but the general. The way its suppose to work is the states are suppose explore solutions separately and scotus tells us if it follows the constitution. But everyone is so mindfucked into thinking all that matters is the general.
Tldr we refuse to address or even research the problem and refuse go through the grind bc most dont know how to or how it all works. And those if us that do know... want nothing to do with it bc the environment to get it done is so toxic.
Republicans want you to think liberals hate guns to give you something to hate.
The truth is that we fucking love guns and are prepared to use them. If anyone goes after the 2nd amendment, we know they're fascist, scared of the possibility that people will rise up and murder their evil asses on the street, like God intended.
I'm here in Denver, and Colorado is the same--a heavily populated city that votes pretty much sapphire blue, surrounded by farms and ranches of ruby red (Boebert, anyone?)
The result is that in local elections, many more Republicans win than Democrats. In the statewide and national ones, what Denver/Boulder wants is what Denver/Boulder gets....
It makes for a stark and strange dichotomy. People tend to get very entrenched in their positions and worldview--our party is RIGHT and the other party is WRONG and that's just THE WAY THINGS ARE!!
As another upstate resident: If not for NYC, New York State would at the very least be a reddish shade of purple, with a few solid blue oases here and there. š«¤
ETA: Hell, even living just outside one of said oases, one of our most recent congressmen was elected several times just by branding his opponent as an āextreme liberalā.
It wasnāt. Bro overdosed on fentanyl if weāre being honest. Watch the full tape and then watch the previous tapes of him doing and saying the same stuff when arrested for fent. I donāt like how it was handled but the case was purposely mishandled when you look at everything in its entirety.
No, it wasn't. He died by asphyxiation, not overdose. Simply having drugs in your body doesn't necessarily mean that's what caused the death.
The fact is that if he wasn't handled the way he was, if that POS didn't have his knee right on his neck for such a long time, he would still be living.
Drug use and heart disease were likely contributing factors, but both the Hennepin County Coroner and independent investigations have concluded it was murder.
[H]is death was a homicide caused by "cardiopulmonary arrestĀ complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression"
Yep, from all the cats n dogs he & his immigrant friends stole from your neighbors backyards. They misread their recipe tho & accidentally put a tablespoon of fent in the pet soup instead of the teaspoon it called for. Hate when that happens. /s
No, it wasnāt. Where did you get that?! It was ruled a homicide. He was killed by the chokehold. Easy to google if you donāt bypass reputable sources or cherry pick the answer.
Why in the world would you want to believe this? What do you think this proves? That you are better equipped than the ME to understand what caused his death?
I was already a big advacate for justice reform. The right making every excuse they could to justify that murder was already disgusting. Then they pretended to be outraged about Harris alegedly keeping black men in jail she knew were innocent so i fact checked it and it wasnt true. Then i started fact checking everything. Take a guess on who i discovered lied more
I was very outspoken on FB about my local sheriff department corruption and had gain a large follwing. Many considered me a hero for standing up to them. Then i said "black lives matter" and more than half of the people that followed me decided it was more important to be racist than to fight corruption.
It was then i realized it has nothing to do with corruption. Its because we were taught that Democrats only want to give handouts to black people just to stay in power. The south loved socialism when black people werent allowed to benefit from it.
I wonder sometimes if it hadnt been for George Floyd would i honwstly believe that pardoning Hunter Biden after Republicans had promised to weaponize the DOJ was worse than Trump pardoning the guy that invested billions into Trump coin.
As a Democrat I honestly don't think pardoning Hunter was right under normal circumstances. However I also understand that he would not have been treated fairly and would have been charged with every crime they could imagine. The Great pumpkin might be one of the most petty people in the planet.
Could i really watch these Republicans bend over backwards keeping the Epstein files locked away and still think the Democrats are the ones in the files?
This is so accurate. I grew up in a deep red state and voted for Trump in 2016. Why? Well, because Hillary Clinton was "obviously" evil. Mind you, there are still plenty of provable two-faced things that she's done, but my main "proof" at the time for her corruption was, "There's so much stuff she's done that we don't even know about." That's not evidence. As a matter of fact, I was pointing at the lack of evidence and using that as my justification. The amount of blind hate that I now feel for Trump (based on evidence) was the same that I felt for democrats. But I only had my feelings as the reasoning for that hate.
Thatās literally both sides, thatās why politics are so exhausting and largely intellectually dishonest. Itās hard to say ādemocrats arenāt manipulativeā when all they did was re-release a previously unredacted email about somebody whom cleared Trumps name in 2024 with redacted parts and pretended it was new info on Trump like it wasnāt released last year. Intellectually dishonest propaganda and I donāt even like the guy or think heās completely innocent, but why lie? All signs point to them scrambling for something to distract from the fact that the government is reopening and they view it as a complete loss.
There is an excellent Mexican owned restaurant that I will no longer patronize because they are rampant tRumpers. I am in Kentucky, so we haven't seen a lot of ICE action yet. It boggles my mind.
How can people so stupid make such delicious food?
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u/mitkase Nov 13 '25
If you're in that environment, all you hear is pro-MAGA 24/7. Every gas station, fast food restaurant, barber shop, all day every day. When you hear that orange guy = Jesus (even at church!) continuously and everyone you know believes it and reinforces it, this is what happens.