You're more than welcome citing where I stated the left should never do any soul searching, I specifically said that when it comes to people being so gullible to vote for Trump despite his character is no argument for democrats having to do any soul searching because there is nothing to be reflecting about that.
Yes and im saying if we have people we love in our lives who were gullible to that, should we give up on them or fight harder to love them? I choose the latter and that requires me to do soul searching, of mine and theirs.
Please actually read what I wrote because you say that, but at the same time you've now twice projected assumed positions of mine that only would make sense in your mind if I was some progressive liberal stereotype.
Because no, I have never said that I would ignore those gullible people.
Ontop of this I fail to see what supposed soul searching we need to do, for example if I believe in free speech and the gullible voter voted for a president because they promised to flattered them while also promising to remove free speech and jail anyone who speak unfavorablely about them.
Or how about a real example, what soul searching did the republicans have to do when the south seceed? Or how about the social democrats, liberals and the few conservatives who were executed by the nazis, they should've have been more antisemitic? While Hitler took control via technicality rules?
What I'm saying is that it sounds like you're saying there's nothing people can do, that it's other people's behaviors that need to change, that nothing we can do will change their behaviors regarding this specific instance. Is that what you're saying? That it is the other people's responsibility to fix this, not ours?
Okay, well my brother voted for Trump because he believes ~affirmative action~ I mean DEI is ruining the world and hurting him specifically.
He gets extremely angry when NFL players do "N*** behavior", like get in a bar fight, and has never once talked about a white football player doing things like, IDK, stealing from charities.
Any time he drinks whiskey at all, he uses it as an excuse to get very very very aggressive and attack strangers in bars.
He thinks the solution to school shootings is for teachers to be armed. My mother, a teacher of 35 years who has had to literally break up two large teenage boys trying to kill each other, explained that she doesn't get paid enough to learn how to operate a firearm safely around kids, and that's asking for more trouble than it would help. She also used to make daily jokes about running over the bad kids in the school parking lot, so I think it's not a great idea either.
He used to fly a confederate flag as "honoring his heritage". He is french canadian from northern maine, so his heritage is: Marrying native americans princesses because you left the wife at home, murdering those slaving bastards from the south for the glory of the union, and being oppressed by the KKK restarting in our state because we are french catholic
He insists he has never been sicker than since he has gotten the COVID vaccine. In high school he spent a month shitting blood due to a rare medical defect and didn't go to the hospital because he thought he was dying from being an alcoholic. Before COVID existed, he was infamous in our family for exhibiting the worst "man colds" we have ever known of periodically.
He insists that education is liberal brainwashing despite never setting foot in an education institution past high school, which he spent failing biology and learning how to repair cars instead in the vocational wing, and his own mom being a college adjunct professor for decades.
He TAUGHT my nephew to hate Biden. He didn't tell my nephew "here's some things biden and democrats have done that make life worse for people", he just says, multiple times a day in front of the child, "democrats are evil". For reference, our mother did not tell us basically any political opinion for our entire life. He was allowed to go listen to absurd AM radio without anyone telling him what was right or wrong. I thought she DID teach us empathy though.
He thinks Unions are evil.
My sister runs one of the most successful childcare program businesses in the southern part of the state, and has been successfully running businesses involving childcare since 2006. My brother has run zero business other than buying stuff off Facebook marketplace and flipping it to a dumber buyer for a profit. He tried to give her business advice, and became extremely hostile to her when she told him that his advice didn't make sense and was wrong.
He believes we need to strengthen the US border with Mexico to keep out immigrants for our national safety and that immigrants are taking our jobs. His lifelong best friend, who has the same opinion and voting history, is the heir and operator of one of the largest farms in northern maine. Every year they bus in hundreds of people who don't speak english, sleep 50 to a shack, and get paid under the table to pick crops. They've never committed crime while in town.
During the BLM protests, he informed my mother that there were violent protests in my city. The protest was 12 young adults silently laying on the ground in front the entrance to the police station. Our state has high requirements for being a police officer, and even progressives around here have faith in the police, possibly without reason as the shooting with Robert Card showed.
His explicit opinion is that spending $25 to give a junkie a second chance with Narcan is wrong because "it's your choice to ruin your life with drugs". He has had a nicotine addiction since 14 that his wife has begged him to stop for a decade and he has promised he doesn't have anymore.
My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop. He admits he doesn't like Trump and admits that Trump did not win the 2020 election and people saying he did are nuts. He genuinely believes himself to be "centrist", not republican, and claims he only votes for republicans because of Gun Rights.
He has firsthand experience, multiple times of getting stuff stolen from him and the police basically giving him a shrug because they don't feel like doing their job. He is FRIENDS with most of the police that do this. He believes that crime is going up and not being reported because of democratic scheming. Our state had a republican governor at the time the cops didn't want to do their jobs.
He's "NEVER wrong", and he believes that 100%. I don't know any other way to say this, but that statement is incredibly incorrect.
He is wrong, or lying. The story is identical with 80% of my family. They believe themselves the best thing since sliced bread, and believe that a few diversity programs trying to get black people and women into jobs they have never wanted have irreparably damaged the country and their lives. They have, not an exaggeration, never ever ever been in competition with black people or women for any position, any job, any task, etc.
The only difference between my fairly empathetic liberal reality and his "Democrats should be shot" (exact quote) one is that I grew up reading books and having my open minded friend asking me how gay marriage ACTUALLY hurts me and admiring my single mom for being such a powerful force despite the deck stacked against her and learning how science actually works, and he grew up hanging out with people who told N-word jokes and meant it and insisted the civil war was "the war of northern aggression", and claimed science doesn't work, without evidence mind you.
I won't pretend your brother is great and reasonable, but just want to point out a couple things that again, point to why your favorite side lost.
> DEI is [...] hurting him specifically.
He's not wrong on this, since DEI promotes hiring based on skin color and not on merit. There isn't much room to dispute this. Considering race when making your hiring decisions may in some people's value systems be justifiable to right wrongs perpetrated hundreds of years ago (I disagree) but the effect on the people now factually is: to harm people below some arbitrary level of melanin by pushing everyone else to the front of the line. It assumes that everyone making hiring decisions would otherwise hire racistly, which is absurd and offensive to anyone not stupid enough to judge people based on color.
> My brother does not believe women and black people are his equal, full stop
With that, he agrees with the DNC too, since they believe women and black people are automatically better than him. The only difference between their flavors of racism is which color is fantasized to be inherently morally superior at birth.
> He's not wrong on this, since DEI promotes hiring based on skin color and not on merit.
DEI does not promote hiring based on skin color and not on merit, DEI promotes tracking hiring demographics, and identifying and rectifying/mitigating issues that result in perpetuating existing underrepresentation, such as inadequate exposure of traditionally underrepresented communities in the hiring funnel.
Hiring based on “skin color” (or race, which is not the same thing, though some races have names that come from color words, or ethnicity, or sex, or many of the other axes of concern for DEI) remains explicitly and blatantly illegal, and DEI proponents do not oppose such laws, and in fact tend to prefer extending them to additional axes of concern (DEI opponents, OTOH, are more likely top both expose such extensions and to oppose existing anti-discrimination laws.)
