Maybe it's time to give up...

On people who refuse to acknowledge reality.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, I unfriended around 150 people on Facebook. Many were just old acquaintances that I don’t even see in real life, but I also purposefully unfriended my few remaining MAGA “friends” and those who liked to argue with me about the hateful things he said. I decided this was my Facebook page, not a news site and I had no obligation to provide space for both sides of the argument. If I wanted an echo chamber, so be it. I also did this for my family’s safety as well because I was worried that, in the next few months, I might not want MAGA defenders to have access to what I was posting or what I was doing.

I realized quickly, however, that without these voices, it was harder for me to gauge how Trump voters were feeling about the crazy things that were coming out of the White House. I started reading comments on news sites, but it can be hard to weed out real from the bots. So I started reading the comments on my friends' posts. These are real people, not bots, who voted for Trump, and I was curious if they were going to defend the insanity or start to see the light.

At first, they were quiet. I took this as a good sign. I thought maybe they were starting to question what was happening but didn’t want to tell their Democratic friends. However, now I kind of think they were just regrouping because they seem to have doubled down.

Their answers are a mix of refusing to believe the truth and defending lies that they themselves don’t even understand. I’m both fascinated and enraged about the world they are living in. As far as I can tell, they believe:

• They see the world as made up only of friends or foes. Their selective memories seem to have completely blocked out all republican presidents before Trump. The villains are any democrats, with Obama holding the position as chief villain, then Biden, then female democrats. Lumped into this category are rich people and celebrities, but only those who didn’t campaign for Trump. Of course, the only hero who matters is Trump and then anyone he’s ok with, they’re ok with. And it’s just that simple. And anything they don’t like, they blame on Democrats, and anything Trump says, must be right. Of course, those of us with critical thinking skills know that the world is made up of shades of grey, but to Trump voters, it’s black and white.

• The government is full of wasteful spending and this was made worse during the Biden years. This is easy to fact-check, but it also completely ignores the fact that every few years, we have Republican presidents. They also do not have any understanding of what the government actually funds and why it is important. They seem unable to grasp the big picture (in terms of USAID, for example) and only see “money going to other countries.” I wonder why they even care what the government spends. The national deficit has never affected my day-to-day life, but suddenly working-class republicans everywhere think the federal government needs to be reined in.

• This leads me to their next belief which is that, when Musk trims all this financial “fat” from our budget, they seem to think he’s going to spend it on Americans. I understand why a person struggling to buy groceries could be easily manipulated into channeling their rage toward money that helps war-torn countries overseas. The easy narrative is “take care of your own first,” and I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but they don’t understand that USAID money (which is less than 1% of the federal budget) is not going to be funneled down to them. It’s probably going to be funneled into Elon Musk’s bank account.

• In terms of Musk gaining access to our personal data, the response seems to be a mix of “that’s not true” or “so what, China has already had all of our data.” For a group that is incredibly paranoid about the power of government, they are weirdly accepting of giving up their own personal data.

• They also have a huge misunderstanding of bureaucracy. Heather Cox Richardson recently explained that the reason government is clunky and cumbersome is by design. The Founding Fathers built in layers and layers of checks and balances. Does this make for a lot of bureaucracy? Yes. But its purpose is so that no one person can be calling all the shots. The MAGAs seem to think that one person calling all the shots is ideal because they think they’ve elected the only person on earth who truly understands them. This is problematic for many reasons.

• They’re obsessed with states' rights. We know this, republicans have always used this line when they were cutting federal services, but it’s so hypocritical coming from a group that practically orgasms at the mention of the Constitution. They are defending the gutting of the Department of Ed, for example, by crying about how things will be better when states control education. Of course, they lack a significant understanding of what the Department of Ed even does.

In general, their responses continue to be overly simplified and wrought with misinformation. When you back them into a corner, they say “What about Biden?” or “What about the Democrats?” When you ask them for sources they say, “Do your own research,” which is an ironic suggestion that they have done anything other than read a headline on OAN.

So what are we to do? Today I was reading a back-and-forth between a friend of mine and her MAGA relative on Facebook. I became so incredibly angry at his responses that I noticed my heart was pounding. I looked up from my phone and said to my husband, “I am, truly, experiencing an unhealthy amount of anger right now.” My hands were shaking. I got up, walked around the house a bit, and took some deep breaths, but it took a few minutes for my blood pressure to return to normal.

I thought about it for a while and realized I am stuck in a cycle of reading and responding to horrible news, reading MAGAs responses (which was like salt in the wound), and then spiraling through various emotional responses. I even made a graphic to explain it!

The anger and paralysis don’t come from opinions I don’t agree with. They come from our complete inability to share any FACTS with these people. A complete inability to get them to even CONSIDER what you are saying. They share misinformation, lies, and hate with their full chests.

I think a lot of us have held out hope that some of these people will come around. That things will get so egregious that they will have to snap out of it. I think I’ve realized that is not going to happen. In Timothy Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, he summarizes the work of German scholar Victor Klemperer. Snyder writes, “Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Kelmperer that Hitler ‘has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.’”

This part of the book has haunted me since reading it. After the war, after the world discovered Hitler’s death camps, after the overthrow of fascism, and after losing a limb, this soldier still believed in Hitler.

So maybe it’s time to give up on them. As things unfold and each day gets worse, it might be time for us to start thinking about our own safety and the safety of our families. In a previous post, when I outlined a few of the chapters from Snyder’s book, I summarized the four modes Klemperer outlined in his work. Mode 4 involves the sacrificing of one’s individualism, experience, or discernment in place of a larger “faith,” and Klemperer found that this transition was permanent.

I’m going to continue to channel my energy into building a community with safe and like-minded people. I’m going to continue to make my phone calls, prepare my family for the worst, and march when it’s time to march. But as far as MAGA is concerned, the only way I can move forward is to stop engaging with them and to continue to keep them out of my life.

Thanks for reading!