I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying “woke”, “critical race theory”, ““grooming””, and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open.
You never see the inverse. There is no ConservativesofTiktok getting churches harassed into shutting down for the day or calling in threats. You don’t see cringey boomer memes on the left. And whenever I openly express those feelings, try to create that sentiment; I get shut down. Noone agrees, I’m often shamed and muted. I just don’t understand why that parity exists, it’s extremely isolating to feel so alone in this
And someone who’s part of a cult, or a significant other who is abused, will try to recruit people to their cause or downplay the violence or dig in deeper with their abusers.
Don’t get me wrong, those who perpetuate the hate on the conservative side are rat bastards who have no place in society. However, those on the consumption end have been programmed to think this way. Deprogramming takes a lot of time and requires the cult member to want to learn more and get out. However, forcefully removing a cult member will usually just push them back to the cult harder.
Either these Republican rubes die or start investigating other sources of info. Either way, we have a long fight ahead of us, and that’s only if we can cut off the head of the snake and stop the cult at the top.
It’s true that it’s not effective to try to remove these people from their cult, but again, that doesn’t mean that they’re good. Good people have the strength of moral character to recognize they’re in a cult and leave one, with or without encouragement or intervention. Good people don’t say things that they know are wrong, just to feel like they belong. We can help, and provide a space for them to belong without needing to say those things-- but if they were lead to say them so consistently for so long, they didn’t disbelieve them strongly enough to be considered good imo. Neutral maybe, and that’s acceptable, but they become bad when they are convinced to do bad things. If I’m convinced to kill, or dehumanize, or otherwise significantly harm someone over, and over, and over again, how could you possibly say that I’m good?