There is nothing you can do if they identify you as liberal.

Just tell them that voting is for suckers.

Trump definitely has a personality cult, but everybody who supports him is not part of the cult. The distinction between the two is made based on how they respond when ****ty things happen to them due to Trump.

Let's say Tom has his government healthcare taken away from he and his family as a result of the new health care plan. If he sees the harm done and realizes that Trump is ****ty, he is not a cultist. If he rationalizes this as him acting in his best interests in some way, he is a cultist.

I don't even bother talking about politics with middle-aged and olds. They will only change by their own choice. When I was in my mid 20s and pointed out how FOS the fight against gay marriage was, my mother still opposed it due to religious reasons. But when my cousin came out, all of a sudden gay marriage and homosexuality were okay with her. She realized that she was wrong not because of external pressure but because she rationalized it on her own.

Around that age, people will only be able to change when something affects them or somebody they love directly. An old person is not going to grasp abstract concepts such as privacy. After all, they can't see the cameras. They don't hear any microphones. They can't touch the hardware. They don't feel violated. To them, it's a non-issue unless they sense it in a practical way. If they see cameras and microphones planted, then they can feel invaded and be opposed to privacy invasions.

If you really want to change people, you have to interact with teenagers and young adults and steer them away from right-wing populism. At that age, they are more open to new ideas and are less set in their ways. Hell, I didn't become politically aware until college and even then I was basing my views on what my parents thought. It wasn't until my mid/late 20s that I began to develop opinions of my own.

I posted an article in another thread that makes a strong correlation between who the POTUS was in your teenage years and your future voting trends. The theory being that you are at your most impressionable at that age so what's happening then has a greater impact on you then than it would now. I'll find the article.

EDIT: How The Year You Were Born Influences Your Politics

My neighbor, who I mentioned previously, is an old, miserable, crusty white guy with various right-wing bumper stickers on his car; had a "Trump 2016" hat in the dashboard for a long, long time. It vanished a couple of weeks ago.

In other news, currently in the middle of moving. Only a 13-mile move from one county to another, but my polling place's results, which were 55% DJT/43% HRC, are now 92.5% HRC/4.3% DJT. Win!

The Big Sort in action!

As you know, Trump has a way of turning big wins into big losses. Your county will be one of the last to receive aid in the event of a catastrophe, and one of the first to be ****ed over by the new rigged census findings.

much of the below article feels lazy, but in conversations with randos where the stakes are low I've taken some of these techniques for a test drive and I have to admit they've actually landed:

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/...uasion/515181/

the only way I can pull it off without feeling filthy is that I have to trick myself into a temporary headspace where their moral worldview isn't necessarily evil or even inferior---that more conservative-aligned values like authority and group identity/patriotism were clearly fundamental to human evolution and the result is that some % of modern man continues to have these dials cranked way the **** up.

it also helped me when I realized that when I played serious team sports my own values *on the field* were a thousand times more conservative than they were anywhere else. I'm not sure why that was. I'd say it was because it seemed necessary, but really it was never a choice that I was making, it was just something that happened. Anyway, when I close my eyes and try to extrapolate how I would feel walking around the world if my values as an athlete were extended to my whole worldview, then two things happen, 1. I actually empathize with them for like five seconds, and 2. I am overcome with a hunger, a lust, to launch like half of the people I've ever known into deep space, into I don't care where, into the horsehead nebula, because nice to meet you and byeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I actually heard it was 99% of Muslims on welfare, the remaining 1% being oil sheikhs.

I have to thank the alt-right for making me aware of cucking pornography, because it's given me an excellent lens through which to regard those sorts of claims. When you go BTL on the right sort of news story (and this is by no means restricted to the US, I'm actually mainly thinking here of a particular Irish news site), you can see them building and building to what must be an amazing climax.

I live next door to this Romanian lad... he gets €85K a year from the State... uhhh... and he's working part-time off the books... uuuugggghhhhh... he drives a solid gold Mercedes AAAWWWWWWWW

About 51% of immigrant-led households receive at least one kind of welfare benefit, including Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches and housing assistance, compared to 30% for native-led households, according to the report from the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for lower levels of immigration.

where he probably got his idea from:

https://archive is/r7H3l

Bret Stephens' column today is straight fire. Straight up calling Trump stupid, repeatedly.

It is their religion. Preachers preached that Trump was God's choice because Hillary eats babies ldo and because God made it possible for DT to be POTUS it is perilous for their entire belief systems to challenge the idea that Trump is bad, or that God was wrong. Faith leaders, also, have maintained their support for pussy-grabber-in-chief, with the muslim agenda there in the background keeping any would-be defectors from leaning away from God's obvious will.

I GOT MY MOM TO ADMIT TRUMP IS GUILTY!

Score! What a happy mother's day this will be. I'll give you the line I used...

"Why do you think Trump is committing crimes to block the investigations?"

She immediately said it's because he's guilty of something else bigger. There was no transition period or anything. This is a breakthrough.

(Sort of...)

After that, she did feel the need to qualify it by saying "But they all are. Look at Clinton..."

It's a start. "Our House's mom has got it goin' on..."

But she is so correct: "they all [(99.999%)] are." I have an open challenge to any politician above mayor or city council in a very small village or town to be totally clean of anything. Everyone is not at Nixon's level or JFK's level with respect to corruption or debauchery, but they all are tainted. You can get away with leading a "clean" political life in the equivalent of Mayberry, but any more than that and you are invariably infected with nepotism, cronyism, kickbacks, bribes, and outright lies.

I really suspect that my mother is not really on the Trump Train anymore. She seems to be an unwilling passenger as of right now. She just needs the courage to jump off.

Hating liberals train? Yes. She'll be on that forever. There's still some cognitive dissonance due to her irrational, generalized hate of liberals. So I doubt she'll fully admit to regretting her vote. But just listening to how depressed she gets when hearing his name, I think she is not particularly satisfied with his performance. Aside from liberal-hating stuff, she has posted nothing supporting Trump in a solid month.

Enough of this behavior and she'll come around. Maybe not to support Democrats. Probably would support whoever primaries Trump or abstain from voting. It's really the best I can hope for.

When elections come back around the "hating liberals" element always dominates over "well this republican is an idiot" element. Every time.

My mom is openly criticizing Trump too after the last few events. Good! Now I just need to get her to stop dragging Obama and Hillary down with him.

She did own me two days ago though. After a whataboutclinton moment followed by my "Clinton isn't POTUS" reply, she put me in place by saying she meant BILL Clinton. **** me.

Yeah I don't expect a lifetime GOP voter who will be over 60 come the next Presidential election to vote Democrat.

She'll probably go with the "As long as it isn't Trump" angle when it comes to which GOP member she'll support.

Hey I don't mean to bash you for trying. At this point we have to exhaust all possibilities.

First domestic terror attack, or manufactured war, she'll be back on the train with gusto. It's inevitable.

Yeah, she still holds the typical right-wing views but still thinks Trump is a fool.

The Reichstag moment is simply a matter of time.

Today, Trump became president (as the mushroom cloud goes up over Pyongyang).

?

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2...ria-newday.cnn

Profile A

• Male
• Late 30s - Early 40s
• Has kids
• Lives in New Jersey, but in a relatively redneck/hick section of it
• Pickup truck with confederate flag sticker
• Claims to be religious
• Works a menial job for an small HVAC place, mix of office stuff and light manual work (I've seen the office, it's a dirty hole, ever get your car towed and see one of those dingy "offices"?)
• Claims to have been a heavily-recruited college athlete who nearly went pro, yet zero Internet evidence to back up any of that
• Did not complete college, or at least didn't list it on resume
• Makes $17.75 an hour, started at $15 a few years ago. Minimal benefits, no 401k or anything like that
• The most marketable thing on his resume was about 12 years' worth of construction work, but other than the time there's nothing to suggest any particular expertise, no supervisory roles or whatever

Let's count the ways he blew what should have been his easiest interview ever, casual setting over lunch rather than formal interview. Had sent unsolicited resume to my wife and she wasn't sure if she was going to create a position but had been thinking about it, and someone with both office and construction background would be an interesting candidate for her.

-Mentioned getting fired twice during his construction stint, and this was unsolicited
-Gave income + salary requirements right off, also unsolicited.
-Seemed to suggest that his age and the fact that he tithes to his church warrant better pay
-Likes guns but can't own them because of an incident with his ex-wife, pretty much means a restraining order
-He left his phone on and got a call. Caller ID said "Capital One"
-Said he was a stud athlete at a bigger school, we looked later out of curiosity, found nothing on him at all
-Asked him what his major was and how long he went, he said only a couple semesters but played sports 3 years (wtf?)
-Wouldn't say he dropped political bombs but ventured a bit into it which is pretty stupid regardless of your political leanings.

Profile B

• Male (uncle)
• A fairly decent, friendly guy
• Middling intelligence
• 59 years old
• No kids, lives alone in full bachelor mode, shelf full of porn DVDs & VHS in living room
• Not into computers
• Lived with his mother until she died 15 years ago, actually still lives in the same apartment. He did take care of her as she was 40 years older than him
• HS diploma
• Has never lived outside of same small Hudson River town in NY, a swing district, and his family home was on same street two blocks down
• Loves guns, hunting
• Suffered injury to back and hasn't worked in 3+ years, disability, but known for a very strong work ethic
• Had been a bricklayer, more recently did some sort of light welding thing that he was fine with. Earned $15/hr which actually isn't terrible for the area

He's a pretty good guy despite some quirks. He's definitely a Trumpkin and bought into the whole "he's a businessman" pitch, loves those guns and seems really concerned about immigrants, despite living in a relatively white bubble and being the son of two immigrants. At the same time he doesn't have any issues with blacks or gays, or seem to care about abortion. No real .02 on global warming or any conspiracy BS, laughed off some nutcases. Last chat with him I was pretty direct about the GOP moves against heath care and that he's in kind of a precarious position at the moment, and should be able to understand the need for more than just employer-provided health insurance. But it still boiled down to he likes guns and didn't like Hillary. Couldn't tell me a single thing he thought she'd be better at. Loved the MAGA slogan.