Your vote tells us you want to hurt others

Radsci of the Daily Kos community wrote a message to his MAGA brother. It lays out several faults of the MAGA movement, though in a way that is likely to bring a defensive reaction rather than a reconciliation. Here’s a summary of some of what he said with a quote of the conclusion. If you voted for the massive surge of ICE goons and the harm they have done to people and families, you are not a Christian. If you are OK with a Russian asset in the White House who is hurting democracy, you are not a patriot. If you reject science over conspiracies, you are not a critical thinker. If you cheer hollowing out the institutions that counter fraud, you are not a conservative. If you don’t want a woman to pursue a professional life and make her own medical decisions, you are not a man.

The lies you are willing to accept make you a danger to yourself and everyone around you. Thus, you should not be surprised that we don’t want to be around you. That is unlikely to change, because now we know that your biases are even more dangerous than we previously understood. Those biases make you a target. The people stealing from you know how to exploit those biases and thereby manipulate you. Your problems were not caused by (insert name of favorite minority here). They were caused by the people you have been supporting with your votes. A vote for the current regime and its allies goes far beyond “politics”. It tells us that you want to hurt others. It tells us you are OK with destroying a 250-year-old democracy if that means you can hurt even more people who might not look or play like you do. And the entire world knows that this is where at least one third of the U.S. population, a solid core, now stands. That is the real MAGA legacy. Unfortunately, MAGA cruelty is a legacy that will diminish all of us, along with the nation we have cherished, long after the current regime is gone.

The comments to this post include stories of MAGA relatives that are no longer in their lives. I also think this comment got it right. It is from Larks Tongues in Aspic:

The fact that Trump makes you angry and disgusted enough to write this is all the validation your brother needs. His privilege is protected, the people he doesn’t like are getting punished, and liberals are having a sad. He’s getting exactly what he voted for.

Also on a rant is Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos. Bill responded to an article by Tyler Hassen, defined by Bill as a “DOGE Bro” and former “Houston Oil Executive” – the quote marks are by Bill. Hassen’s article defends what DOGE did, though admits it fell short. Bill opens his rant with:

I read your little sob story the other day. The one about how oh boo-hoo-hoo nobody understands what our mission of nobility and patriotic righteousness was when Elon Musk got us all together to streamline efficiencies and blah blah blah.

Bill included excerpts of Hassen’s article that discuss a bit of what didn’t work – things a regular person would have recognized before all the cutting began as not being able to work. These mistakes cost a great deal of money, far different from the claims of saving money. A tweet from Julie Roys caught my interest:

White supremacy doesn’t become Christian just because you attach Bible verses to it. Yet a growing group of pastors are doing exactly that, preaching racism and antisemitism to disaffected young men, building large online audiences, and monetizing the resulting outrage.

The tweet included a link to an article in the Roys Report, which has the tagline, “Reporting the Truth, Restoring the Church.” I went to the article, The rise of the Jim Crow theobros, written by Bob Smietana, a reporter for Religion News Service. The article introduces four of these men. I’m not so interested in who they are and what they say – like the tweet says, they are using the Bible to justify racism, even slavery. They also have requests for donations, subscriptions, and to buy their merch. They do reasonably well in hauling in the cash. I am interested in how, the why, and the consequences. These men have...

wedded old-school segregationist theology from the Jim Crow-era South with the hypermasculinity of the manosphere and the savvy of the attention economy to preach white supremacy, antisemitism and patriarchy, mostly to disillusioned young men on the internet. And along the way, they are turning outrage into cash.

Women engage with social media more than man do. The exception is extreme views. If a guy can attract angry, disaffected men – “they are hyper-tribal, hyper-loyal, they share and engage consistently” – one can build a following. But it is one that needs a constant stream of outrage, increasing bits of red meat. Samuel Sey, a black Christian blogger born in Ghana, says these theobros, as Smietana wrote...

chose ambition and controversy over preaching Christianity. To quote the Bible, he said in a reference to a New Testament passage, they want to gain the world but are losing their souls.

And Sey said:

You can’t keep saying all these things, and therefore there not to be a violent consequence at some point.

Smietana included comments by Jemar Tisby, the New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise. Tisby said:

Redemption is a Bible word that means restoring a people to right relationship with God. But in the hands of white supremacists, redemption meant taking back the country for white people. That’s essentially what this resurgence of racism is about.

Tisby also said the people who believe it are becoming more vocal about it, but they’re unlikely to convince large numbers of people. They’re not effective evangelists of their ideology. Hunter Baker of the First Liberty Institute said for these pastors creating outrage is “almost like a fun activity.” They have a “pre-Christian identity,” rejecting the teachings of Jesus. When I was in high school here in Michigan the big card game was euchre. I don’t remember playing in much in college, but it was a standard game at my big corporate job. The department was all computer programmers (a term replaced with the more trivial “coder”) so at some point someone asked whether the winning partners were because they had been dealt better cards. Someone wrote a program to randomly assign cards to players, their “hands,” and save the assignments so several games with different teams could be played from the same combinations of cards. We showed that different players could have the same hands yet come up with different scores. The players did make a difference. Several years ago I visited a cousin in North Carolina. He attended the same high school I did and frequently played euchre with me and my nephews. He and I tried to teach his son and daughter, then in middle school, how to play. The game didn’t catch on. Part of it was euchre has some mighty strange rules. And part of it I was trying to avoid one particular word. Avoiding it just created confusion. Peter Olandt of the Kos community says many card games, like euchre, bridge, pinochle, hearts, and many more, are based on the idea that each player plays a card in turn, the cards are evaluated, and the person who played the card ranked the highest wins the round or “takes the trick.” More rounds are played until all the cards have been played. Many of these games have a way of declaring one suit – clubs, diamonds, etc. – to rank higher than the other suits. The word for that suit is used across many of these trick taking games. But using that word in this particular political climate can make some people (like me) uncomfortable. So what to call it? Olandt says the word may have come from “triumph” and that could be used. There is also “prestige” or “top.” Commenters proposed: “Prime,” but that has associations with Amazon. There is the Cajun word “atout.” And commenter raboof delights in bidding “no trump.” And with that this post to my blog is the 800th to be tagged with the nasty guy.