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kleinbl00  ·  1377 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: If your parents or grandparents still plan on voting for trump...

Let's talk about this.

The outrage... IS THE POINT. As Parker Malloy notes, this was Ryan Holiday's PR move when dealing with Tucker Max: upset the shit out of the snowflakes, get them all talking about it, and drive the jackasses in just to piss off the snowflakes. Think back to the 2016 campaign: How much of our 24-7 news coverage was some form of "coming up, you won't believe the racist and inflammatory thing Trump said be sure to tell your friends how angry you are!"

The 'wingers are all about the "shy Trump voter" or "stealth Trump voter" right now because he's tanking in the polls but they have a point: my father-in-law still hasn't admitted he voted for Trump. For all I know, he will again. He's a doctorate-holding retiree in one of the most liberal corners of the United States and he doesn't want to defend his choices, he wants to align his internal experience with his external experience, which is 100% conservative talk radio. I can make him uncomfortable; just last week he decided that student loan debt was so high because kids were being irresponsible and spending way too much on worthless degrees and I had to say "look, buddy, you got doctorate for eight grand, a house for fifty grand and were making forty grand out of college. Your daughter's doctorate cost a quarter million and that was ten years ago and if someone were to buy your house today it would cost them a half million dollars. Meanwhile, your doctorate is still making forty grand out of college." But what does that accomplish? It shuts him up, sure. It makes him look uncomfortably at his feet. But fundamentally I'm reminding him that the facts out in the world don't match the pablum he chooses to consume for multiple hours a day.

For sure - there are people out there facing a reckoning. But it's far easier for them to be closeted Nazis. Worse, the more vocal and outraged you are about Nazis, the more closeted they're likely to be. We've talked about this before. We've talked about it a lot. Confrontation doesn't really get you much, all it does is make them listen to you less.

Yeah, you have to do something. But being mad at your family for something the Trump campaign does won't have the effect you intend.