"Every" Trump supporter I know has looked down their nose at the riff raff at the rallies and the guys with the guns in their profile pics and the breathless fears of socialism and the war on Christmas and whatever "scandal" the evening lineup at Fox cooks up for the week.

1/
There isn't a single Trump supporter I know that, to some degree, doesn't personally look down on the caricature of what a Trump supporter is, and the people so eager to portray that self absorbed ill-informed stereotype.

2/
Customers. Real life aquaintences. Relatives. Friends. Facebook people. *All* of them the same. All of them elevating themselves above the deleterious ignorance that has become the hallmark of Trumpism.

3/
All with the same refrain.

"I'm not like that. I just..."

That's all it takes to find absolution.

"I'm not like that, I just... think if they're going to come here they should do it the right way."

4/
"I'm not like that, I just... don't wear a mask because it's my choice not to."

"I'm not like that, I just... think voting for a Democrat is voting for socialism."

5/
But how many bites can you take from an apple before you've eaten the apple? How deep do you need to get before you're in the water?

How many unforced errors and embarrassing missteps and outright lies are you willing to accept because "you just..."?

6/
How many baseless claims and propaganda memes and debunked stories and fake tweets are you willing to consume before you stop telling everyone else to "do their research," and recognize that there is nothing to research?

7/
There's no way to substantiate your cousin's claim that his friend died of a heart attack but they listed it as Covid because they make more money.

It should be enough that you can't prove they did.

8/
If you had the proof that what you believe is true, you would gladly smash it in all our faces. Instead you put the onus on us to prove that what you've constructed from a web of convenient lies is *not* the truth.

9/
But that's not how truth works. That's how propaganda works. You believe so many intertwined falsehoods that when any one of them is stripped away with facts, that new base truth is irrelevant in the face of "all this other stuff."

10/
Nevermind that "all this other stuff" also has near-zero basis in reality and you have no ability to demonstrate that any of that is true either.

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It just must be true, by virtue of the fact that you believe it, because people you believe also believe it. And if people like me just can't see that, then we need to "do more research."

12/
Why don't you wear a mask? Because...
- Bill Gates and China are conspiring to force you to take vaccines?
- The media and left have overblown the virus to make Trump look bad?
- Democratic governors are trying to take away your rights?

13/
- It's a defense of your constitutional freedom?
- It could cause health problems?
- You think herd immunity is the answer?
- You take responsible precautions and think everyone else should look out for themselves?

14/
You might come in all different variations. There's a conspiratorial flavor for every taste; none of it substantiated.

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And you might reject the terms "all" and "every." And the Trump supporters that I know with the more "reasonable" and "logical" exceptions to wearing masks snidely dismiss the extreme conspiracy side of their own team.

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But the end result is that very few of you are wearing masks. And almost all of you believe your own reasons for doing so are just. And you can all laugh at each other's reasons, while still believing your own.

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Every Trump supporter isn't bigoted. All Trump supporters aren't ignorant conspiracy theorists. They don't all want to see kids in cages. They don't all want hundreds of thousands of Americans to die of a virus.

18/
They don't want environmental regulations gutted and health care taken away from millions of people.

I know it can be off-putting when people over-generalize.

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But, me? I'm not like that, I just... think that if you support the wrong things for the "right" reasons, you're still wrong.

20/
You don't need to be the embarrassing caricature to be responsible or complicit. You just need to be willing to justify the unjustifiable... even if it means willingly believing lies to do it.

21/
Just one bite, or the whole apple. It doesn't matter. You've *all* accepted a reality based on varying degrees of fiction.

To what degree you personally believe that fiction is irrelevant.

END/

#Trumpers #COVID19 #Logic #MakeFactsMatterAgain #GOP #TrumpSupporters
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