State of the Discussion

The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us.

My sense is that MAGA people are generally full of fear.

They're gonna take my guns. They're letting a lot of brown people in so that white people are outnumbered. Some Mexican is gonna take my job, or, if you're white collar, some South Asian is gonna take my job. They're gonna chop my kid's genitals off. They're gonna let great big guys play on my daughter's soccer team and she's gonna get run over (my (D) House Rep came out with that one).

There are actually some legitimate concerns in all of the above, and there are sensible conversations to have about them. Those conversations are not available because everybody is so freaking hyped up.

And then there are the folks whose point of view basically my life's good, I'm making money, I want to keep it that way, and if it means tasering some brown person mowing somebody's lawn or working in a restaurant kitchen or mopping floors in a hospital, I'm OK with that.

I have a friend who's an academic, a professor of psychology, who has been involved in this project for a few years trying to find ways to "bridge the divide". His approach is to get people to talk to each other, listen to each other, and try to establish some kind of empathetic connection.

My question to him is always, where the hell is that going to happen? And how are you going to scale that to a level that is going to have an actual effect on the situation we find ourselves in?

It's a mess. I have no solution. Find whatever ways are available to you to mitigate whatever harms you can, and do those.

But I don't see a path to persuading committed MAGAs to change their minds. Even if it all falls to shit around them, they'll find a way to blame on somebody, anybody, other than Trump.

He's their champion, their idol, their savior. That's no exaggeration.

I think my difficulty is... MAGA is a fascist movement--literally. People who like Prager U, Kirk, or other haters are the moral equivalent of good Germans. And most of the good Germans were, mostly, nice people.
As noted above, they only learn from being hurt themselves and even then the commitment to their groupthink often remains. The core of that groupthink is disrespect for the rest of us.
Actually disrespect isn't a strong enough word. That friend I had who claimed that Dems supported infanticide, for example. How the hell could he justify believing something that awful about other people? The Republican party message is a fairy tale about how the good Republican party will save the good people from the existential threat presented by the rest of us. How are we an existential threat? Because we (fill in the blank with current hater memes). What unites the MAGAs isn't a set of shared values or support for certain policies; it's hate for the rest of us.
Just as racists make exceptions for someone they know, MAGAs make exceptions for someone they know. But that nice person who is a good neighbor, a long time friend, goes home and chooses to indulge in hate messaging that makes the rest of us potential targets of violence because of the false claim that we are an existential threat to real true good American values.
Would my neighbor Anne object if I got shot at a protest rally? Probably. Would she object if someone else did? Not if Ingraham or Watters or someone told her that the protester had it coming.
It's weird to chat and be friendly with someone who would has no trouble seeing people get hauled off to prison in El Salvador or FL, can rationalize women dying of miscarriages, supports voter suppression and gerrymandering, voted for the guy who instigated a violent attack on Congress and who is in fact an existential threat to representative government and fundamental human rights.
I guess I have to remember the line about "Forgive them, they know not what they do." But I sure as hell am not forgiving to the ones who get elected or get on Faux.

I have a lot of friends on the right - people I've known since I was a kid. My approach these days is more or less the same as russell's. I talk about other stuff. A few of them will try to bait me into a debate on whatever topic has them spun up at the moment. It usually prompts me to say something like, just as one example, "Let's start with this: Do you think global warming is a hoax?" I respond to anything even close to a "yes" with, "There's no point in talking about this. How about those Phillies?"

I can usually play the argument we would have had in my head, anyway. I know these people.

Aha, out of the gulag! It only took about 40 minutes for both to come out.

I know almost nobody who disagrees with me about Trump, so that (luckily) doesn't arise. The exception is someone fiercely clever who has been my close friend since we were 11, and she is a tribal Republican who actually voted for Trump 3 times. I don't talk to her about it, because a) I can't bear to hear what she might say, b) I love her, and also I am worried about her cognitive decline (starting long before Trump). Now let's see if it's the gulag again...

I generally do not engage in discussions about politics with Trump supporters. I'm fine with talking with them about pretty much anything else.

There are a couple of people - long time friends - that I have had short political conversations with. In those cases, I haven't really brought up facts etc. I just say "I have no use for Trump, he's an asshole and a crook." Or something to that effect. And the conversation moves on to other topics. They're not really that curious about, or interested in, why I think that, it just places me in one bucket or other in their mind and the topic is done.

Once in a while I'll engage with someone online, usually FB, but that also doesn't get to the point of something like conversation. It's more you stated your position, I've stated mine, and move on.

The thing is, I don't think that many Trump supporters are that invested in arguments from fact or reason. It seems more vibe-y. Trying to persuade someone away from that position is less like engaging in thoughtful discussion of ideas, and more like trying to tell someone they shouldn't support their favorite sports team.

People have to experience the real human cost of this stuff before they'll change their mind. Like, someone they care about getting grabbed by ICE, or getting kicked off of Medicaid. Even then, they may find it difficult to impossible to give up their "team" identity. They'll just blame fate, or the "deep state", or similar.

I really don't know what the way out of all of this is. To some degree, all of the toxic stuff that Trump et al traffic in is stuff that's been part of the American consciousness since day 1. And people love being told they are special, they are the best, anyone who doesn't see that is just picking on them.

I don't think Trump et al have the resources or the wit to make the big agenda - Project 2025 and stuff like it - happen in full. There are too many different agendas going on with these guys, the country is just physically too large and various to lock down, and too many of the folks in the administration are just plain stupid.

But they're gonna break a lot of stuff before they are through, and I have no idea what things will look like when they're done.

So I've kind of arrived at the point of not trying to change anybody's mind about anything, I'm just waiting for this particular fever to run its course and hoping that something worthwhile is left when it's over.

I don't do an especially good job of handling these sorts of disputes, but it's not because of anything I have done. The people we engage with have been primed to see our rejections of their positions as a rejection of them, and our criticisms of their influencers as criticisms of them. These conversations are not meant to be exchanges, they are rituals, and when we are on the other side of them we are not people to be listened to and understood, we are opportunities for them to test their courage in service to their community. If we agree, then we can be welcomed into the community. If we disagree, then they have been courageous because they stood up for their community in the face of our scorn and hostility to them.

https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/beyond-facts-the-identity-politics

This is why appeals to reason fall flat. The MAGA movement is not a debate. It is a worldview. And worldviews do not yield to evidence; they yield to rupture.

If rupture is rare, then resilience must be cultivated. Not through fact-checking alone, but through narrative reformation—stories that offer coherence without conspiracy, dignity without domination, and agency without scapegoating.

We have glimpses of what this looks like. When labor movements organize around dignity on the job rather than resentment of the outsider, they create belonging through solidarity. When local communities reclaim public institutions—schools, libraries, clinics—they generate meaning that resists privatization and fear. These efforts are fragile, but they remind us that counter-narratives are possible when they are lived as well as told.

That means confronting the architecture of belief not with contempt, but with clarity. It means recognizing that for many, MAGA is not a political position—it’s a survival strategy. And if we want to dislodge it, we must offer something more resilient than resentment. We must offer belonging.

While I was looking for productive readings to help us find a way out of this I found a Carnegie Endowment policy guide for countering disinformation that I think offers some helpful findings about which sorts of interventions are most effective. I was especially pleased to find Table 1, the Overview of Case Studies because it identifies a few things that we can do which have been shown to be effective. Chief among those are supporting more local, grass-roots reporting, and educating people to give them better media literacy. The first of those points to what Greenberg was saying about offering other ways of belonging - getting outside of the big, national narratives and giving people information that they can connect with personally because they know the people who are providing the information. We have to re-localize our communities. Influencers provide the illusion of this connection through para-social relations. If we can do better with real connections, then we can reverse this.

Easier said than done. To quote one of the people interviewed in Sherry Turkles Life On Screen: "RL is not my best window."

The second - better media literacy - is basically what I teach at university, and yes, it is difficult. It takes time, and effort, and practice, and it doesn't really work unless the person doing it is willing to put their worldview and their identity in the balance as part of the effort. In my experience about one in five of my students are willing to risk this, and fewer than half of these actually carry through and start to actually break through the media narratives to find actual, actionable information that could make a difference.

And as small as that success rate might be, its existence is the reason why the present administration is working so hard to turn America agains their educators. They know that everything they are doing right now is fraying the crap out of those worldviews they have so carefully built up over 40 years, and they cannot afford to allow any communities of resistance to give people a more attractive counter-narrative and sense of identity.

GftNC, I'll email you with some details.

I know it can be confusing, but in this case 'post' is main article/item and 'comment' is something that follows from it. There is NO problem with people writing a long comment with links, it's just very difficult to post an resourced article on breaking news and people shouldn't expect that. For example, trying to write a post about Charlie Kirk, you had a situation where mainstream outlets were posting mistaken information and it is difficult to impossible to link to social media information. I have really felt that lack when looking at the archive and seeing posts that carefully laid out a position that was referenced fully, allowing you to check and understand. So the posts here are probably going to be, at least from me, more conversation starters, especially for things that are in the news.

lj, I have an NYT subscription (gave up WaPo because of Bezos's craven behaviour), and would be happy to post gift links. I am allowed 10 gift articles per month, and would probably only have to save say 4 for my own purposes, so doing one a week for ObWi shouldn't be a problem. Just let me know how to do it, and also what kind of thing you would like linked, and it shall be done. Also, I have an Atlantic sub, but can't remember what the gifting rules are (I rarely read it), so let me know if there's anyone from there you'd like on ObWi and I'll look into it.

GftNC, yes he was.

Charles, a long term redirect isn't possible, once the servers shut down, it's gone. A short term might be possible, but I think the url is a typepad domain and I can't log in to the typepad interface, (and have no way to contact type pad) I can't imagine how I would do it.

Meanwhile, since the UC itself is too busy running scared as the Yam of Grievance and his cabal seek to destroy higher education, looks like all of us involved in the actual educational mandate of the schools will have to fight this bullshit ourselves.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-09-16/university-of-california-faculty-sue-trump-over-ucla-fine-research-cuts

Especially galling when so many of us have so few protections, employment or physical, in the first place. We are exposed while UCOP and the Regents dither and appease.

I'll admit, I'm a bit nervous going back to teaching in a couple weeks while the right is this riled up and screaming bloody murder against universities as if we had a god damned thing to do with the escalating political violence. Campuses are not safe. And now the Vice President of the United States is personally advocating for a doxxing campaign against us.

And my doctor wonders why my blood pressure has gone up since last exam.

Look.

The fuck.

Around.

Just looked again at the mass "notification" email - some of course are anonymous, and it may just be one email, but I wonder if Donald was notified? I know some of us are very much hoping he will eventually come back!

What I believe the algorithm is doing - and by that, I mean what the media oligarchs are doing - is destroying real world communities (churches excepted) and then pushing hard to take over the para-social communities that exist on the Internet to replace those communities with hollowed out versions that are mostly propaganda. Kirk was very good at creating those para-social communities and attracting broken, lonely, powerless people to them, then giving them scapegoats to target with their outrage.

Approval. Sense of belonging. In-group prestige through symbolic action. Very heady brew for young minds.

Vance is aiming hard for that space at the moment. I don't think he can hold it. I hope he can't.

We're going to get violence either way, but I'd rather it no have any direction or momentum. Better static than current.

My Charlie Kirk comment which went into moderation only had 2 links, one from the NYT and one from the Guardian. I must say I think one should easily be able to post 2 or 3 links (or even more) without the need for moderation. But the thing is, wonkie's comment on Charlie Kirk which went into moderation didn't have any links in it at all.

So this is by way of a test, to see if posts with links automatically go into moderation:

WordPress has a stock filter that puts comments with more than n links into moderation automatically. Somewhere in the settings the value of n can be changed.

I'm trying to guess how many of the people coming out of the woodwork to extol Kirk's virtue on social media since the shooting had much of an idea who he was or what he had to say before he was killed. I know a number of politically "conservative" people who are quick to form opinions and spout them off, but who aren't truly politically engaged or well informed. I could be underestimating how much he would have shown up on their feeds over the last few years, though, given their interests and clicking habits.

I see from the Excelsior thread that posts with links do not automatically go into moderation. So maybe it's to do with anything tagged "Charlie Kirk", which wonkie's 5.55 might suggest? Does anybody know how this works - maybe it's because it's a new blog site for us, or is it because Big Brother is watching?