Yes, all the things they’re doing are indeed part of a plan and all of that plan is bad. It’s more that some of what they’re doing (right now, actively) is hurting people and setting up for even worse things. Erasure is bad but you’ve gotta pick your battles, its much harder to stop any of this when they take away your ability to vote.

These people have the memory of a goldfish. Resignations were the main way he got the vacancies to fill with collaborators in his first term

There might not be an easy alternative right now.

People tend not to internalize a problem until they can personally see it, and a lot of these problems (deportations, cutting education, handcuffing the CDC, etc…) might not affect them until things get truly bleak. Unless of course they do something reckless like directly cutting funds that goes directly to their wallets (Medicare or Social Security).

Spreading awareness has always been a huge problem. Activists in Tsarist Russia had the same problem of trying to reach out to uneducated rural peasants and their efforts didn’t go smoothly. And of course this was before everyone had hand held disinformation machines in their pockets.

I don’t have a magic bullet but we do have some things going for us. It’s not yet illegal to spread radical ideas, our targets are generally literate, and we still share a fair number of cultural references.

The following is my best guess at advice, I’m just as open to ideas as giving them:

The tricky part is that mainstream social platforms are a non starter. You’d never outweigh the echo chamber. In my opinion digital organization is secondary at best because anything can be suppressed at the whim of server owner, ISP, or government.

So as dumb as it sounds, go forth and talk to people in real life. Be sure you’re educated on what you want to talk about (read your history and theory, know what political buzzwords actually mean). Try to avoid activities that insulate you in your own comfort zone, and gravitate towards ones with wide appeal and low barriers to entry.

Start a woodworking club with some like minded friends or join a book club and offer suggestions. Running group, bodybuilding, birdwatching, whatever… If you want to do some good for your community, join a mutual aid network.

Try to know the narrative these people are living in, even if it’s a fantasy. Avoid trigger words they’re primed to react to, keep it simple and let them draw their own conclusions. Not everyone will be receptive, some people are just assholes.

It’s not sexy but it’s also not that hard to point out glaring injustices in the world. Most people can at least see that far and agree that something needs to change, starting that conversation is first step.

What if the system is designed to keep you ignorant?

If you want to come to that conclusion in a political postmortem 20 years from now I’d fully encourage it.

The problem is that right now the house is burning down and shaming people for playing with matches won’t save us.

This is the political awareness equivalent of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

People are overworked, lack childcare, have poor healthcare, come from underfunded schools, never get exposed to diversity, etc… Just because it’s possible to escape those conditions and doesn’t mean it’s natural or easy.

Saying people are dumb and lazy is a thought terminating cliché, you have to view that as an extension of the problem.

Unless you’re talking about 90%+ of the force resigning, they won’t struggle to backfill with poorly train and radicalized militia LARPers. Probably a much worse situation

Right but this isn’t the conclusion of a world war yet. I don’t doubt that the problem gets worse after people are forced to participate or be complicit while atrocities are committed.

There’s a series of miniscule steps from being ok with a hateful statement to being ok with dangerous people being rounded up to being ok with dangerous political opponents being rounded up to being ok with gas chambers.

Assuming that everyone who ignores the first step is a full fledged Nazi isn’t putting faith in people to change or even resist. Plenty of people stepped out of line in Germany and paid the price.

The real lesson after WW2 is that the Nuremberg Trials were far too lax and narrow in scope. Germany’s populace (while on the cusp of swinging far right) went through the most thorough denazification. It’s still putting up much better resistance than the United States (which had basically no punishment for nazi sympathizers) or Italy (handwaved due to surrender).

Fully agree that we can see the obvious fascists at the top and the rot seeps down. But idk that I can call 77 million people who casted one ballot Nazis.

My (maybe optimistic) perspective is that the rot has shallow roots. These days you don’t need thousands of dedicated grunts to print flyers and hang posters. Just get one billionaire with a social media platform and a few dozen managers and you can broadcast anything you want.

Surely my message will be seen by the millions of Trump voters on… checks notes …Mastadon

How do people not realize they live in an entirely separate digital space from the right.

Not just separate platforms (YouTube vs Rumble, Mastadon/Bsky vs X/Truth) but perfectly segregated by their personalized algorithms. They keep us separated by design. How many trans influencers are on truth social? Not enough for a user to view them as anything but an “other”…

This post is reaching nobody that needs to see it unless it has a sarcastic title over the screenshot

That’s the one thing that gives me hope: their views changed radically but only in one generation through concentrated, directed effort. Calling people idiots or sheep misses the point that this is the natural result of exposing people to this shit daily.

Nobody in history ever thought people are inherently rational and considerate, society is held together through a culture that reinforces it. The tools of the information age can rapidly and drastically shape our society however we want it, we just need to pull them out of the hands of those billionaires burning civilisation to the ground for their own benefit.

Nobody’s born a nazi, and in my opinion painting millions of people with a broad brush solves nothing even if feels righteous. There’s a whole spectrum of people ranging from apathetic to ignorant to hateful and inflammatory.

As funny as it is to call someone an idiot for voting based on the price of eggs, it lacks empathy for what that might mean to some people. What if all you’ve been eating is instant ramen with an egg to pay for a medical bill that insurance didn’t cover and now you can’t even afford that.

You might be more inclined to scroll past yet another “Trump says wild shit” headline but engage more with right wing Tik Tok content arguing that the system is broken because of the ((woke-ism)) and ((DEI)). Even if you don’t believe it, now the social media algorithm has your weak spot and can put you in an echo chamber to exploit it…

Are there still people out there waving swastikas and chanting racist shit in red hats? Sure. But screaming at them won’t change anything. If someone can be changed, you’re not going to reach them now with lecturing and scolding. It’s not kiddie gloves, it’s taking a realistic approaches to convince real human beings

Edit: Apparently saying people aren’t born Nazis is controversial in 2025. Let me frame it like this: if 30% of the population are idiotic, racist scum and tweeting about it for 8 years hasn’t changed anything, why keep doing it? Why keep tweeting free content for Libs of TikTok? Why not direct that anger towards the people running the asocial media platforms? The people actively dismantling our government? Why not do it in a non-digital space? Who cares if MAGA-loving Cletus is on your side or not?