it’s like you believe you can tariff them expecting they won’t do the same. Why do you believe the rest of the world is not going to retaliate and why do you believe America can prosper without the rest of the world?
What’s the point of having a military alliance with countries you puts tariffs on? That’s unfriendly to say the least.
The people you need to hear from aren’t using Lemmy.
OP should try Truth Social, I hear it’s technically a Mastodon fork…
Ew.
I mean, yeah, but it’s where they would actually find conservatives…
…ew.
“”“conservatives”“”. Sometimes I think the DNC is the last place to find actual conservatives these days.
the DNC is the last place to find actual conservatives these days.
There is a good reason for this. Money to win elections comes from CONSERVATIVE corporations and populism isn’t on their wish list.
Yeah.
- consolidated health spending for single-payer services with far less admin slop? Conservative.
- taxing like it’s 1945 to build and maintain infrastructure? Conservative.
- reliable and varied power source? Conservative.
I dunno what these guys are on about, but their big-C conservatism isn’t conservatism but stealing-in-the-name-of.
It’s mastodon? I thought it was a different fediverse platform.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/trumps-social-media-site-quietly-admits-its-based-on-mastodon
Trump’s Social Media Site Quietly Admits It’s Based on Mastodon
Mastodon had originally threatened to sue Trump’s ‘Truth Social’ site for allegedly violating its open-source license.
Oh so it was X before Twitter. Lmao
holy shit!
Gotta love the grift - how much did they sink on this thing? And then they just stole an open source project and tried to hide it.
What’s next, TrumpOS? Reskinned Ubuntu with wallpapers and icons for $300?
Actually - anyone want to join my OS dev team?
Can you imagine them federating their content? What a stream of odd toots that would be!
It would be gab all over again
Whoa!!!
OP’s also not going to get an answer that’s interesting or helpful out of them even if you go to where they live and ask and don’t get immediately flamed for asking.
There’s no acceptable answer for it. I have plenty of conservative friends and I could make sense of voting for Trump the first time. Not for me, FUCK that, but not all Trump v1 supporters were racists and there were valid conservative reasons to vote for him. He was definitely an unknown, nobody could have told you with certainty how he would act once in office. I could have told you what I expected and it was about as horrible as I expected, but people often see things in politicians that they want to see, rather than seeing what’s really there.
But any of the “OK to vote for Trump v1” falls apart completely for Trump v2. We saw what his first term was like and especially how it ended. His campaign in 2024 was even more unhinged and less grounded in reality than in 2016. Voting for him in 2024 is really inexcusable.
The US will be unimaginably worse off by the time Trump leaves office this time, tariffs and tax cuts for the rich and inflation, it’s going to be bad for Americans on an individual level. On a global level, Trump will have shredded alliances and any goodwill we had built up over the past decades, while also validating and confirming the world’s worst concerns about us.
And when Trump does finally leave office, the people you want to hear from will largely feel like it was a phenomenal presidency. It is a cult and logic and reason don’t have anything to do with it.
I’d love to believe this, but cynical me is thinking about those conservatives that look at Milei in Argentina and legitimately think it’s going great.
Milei’s performance really does depend on your metric.
If all you care about is inflation and regulations, then he’s doing all right. Somewhere between fantastic and “eh, he’s getting there” depending on how you squint.
If you care about how many people are in poverty, or struggling to eat, he has been a disaster.
Conservatives don’t care about suffering. The suffering is natural. Life is hard. Lots of people are losers. Trying to stop the suffering just moves the pain from people who deserve to suffer (the poor) to people who don’t deserve it. (The rich)
Some of them are, you just have to scroll way way way down
Conservative on sh.itjust.works appears to be conservatives.
I have my doubts about that. Most of the mass posters are too “conservative” and lean extremely hard into stereotypes. They take racism and bigotry just a bit too far in many cases and it doesn’t quite align with actual conservative bigots and racists that I know.
It wouldn’t be surprising if most of the “conservative” communities are part of the same troll farm that lives primarily on other instances.
This is all speculation, of course. But, organized campaigns to spread discourse on social media are real and some of these trolls are really good at what they do.
Nahh, they were pretty conservativy when I tried to interact with them.
Sadly true. We actively searched for alternatives when we realised other channels were getting too manipulative and full of hate. Those who stayed haven’t even realised it.
If they were capable of thinking critically, they wouldn’t be Republicans in the first place.
You’re never going to get a satisfying answer to this question, because there is no actual reason. If you want, you can go peek in on the conservative subreddits and watch their gold-medal winning mental gymnastics, but the reason Trump is doing this is Putin told him to. The U.S. is destroying themselves for no gain.
for no gain.
Nearly $3 billion USD flowed through the TRUMP cryptocoin rugpull, whoever owned initial coins made very, very large gains.
The $3 billion in quid buys a lot of anti-Ukraine pro quo
But, thanks to the Supreme Court, Trump could go on national TV and say he change US policy on Ukraine because he was bribed and he’d still be immune to any legal consequences (other than impeachment, but never anything criminal).
Nearly $3 billion USD flowed through the TRUMP cryptocoin
But wait, there’s more. Us taxpayer money will now be used to “invest” in these crypto scams.
There’s a lot of traitors in this country, but the conservatives on the Supreme Court may be at the top of the list.
It’s like that scene in the Incredibles where Mr. Incredible gets inside the robot, and has it tear itself to pieces. Except an entire country. And ~88,000,000 people voted against self-destruction and are being dragged off a cliff.
Because they think it owns the libs, plain and simple!
The reality is that these people were/are unhappy in their lives due to stagnation in their finances/jobs, poor healthcare, and they don’t have a tight local community. Then these dumb, angry people are primed to accept someone who says they’ll fix their lives, and knows how to talk right to them. Everything else is just toppings, but that’s really the meat of it.
Good luck finding many of them around here. They find out pretty quickly that they aren’t welcome.
They don’t care about cooperation, everything is a deal to them. If some other country has something, we don’t. The entire worldview of Republicans is just capitalism, if something can’t be framed in terms of profit it’s not worth pursuing.
They’re fucking Ferengis
Edit: as others have correctly pointed out, at least Ferengis have standards. This might be a disservice to them.
Ferengis were meant to be a caricature of our current society, so yes, Ferengi fits.
Don’t insult Ferengis. They’re actually smart.
And comply with contracts
They’ve been whitewashed over time as ST gets farther from the left. The OG ferengi would only have complied with a contract if they thought they’d get caught breaking it, which is honestly a more accurate satire.
Rule of Acquisition #17: A contract is a contract is a contract… but only between Ferengi.
Sounds like you’ve got the lobes for business.
Trump only ran to stay out of prison. Now he’s ripping the copper out of the walls to get as much money as he can before it all collapses under his ineptitude.
Elon thinks he’s gonna be a trillionaire at the top of a technofeudal oligarchy. (He wants to be Arasaka from Cyberpunk but he’s gonna have a hard time doing that while all his businesses fail.)
fascism must always create more outsiders, must always create more enemies to keep control, to keep things directed.
remember, fascism appropriates genuine upset and the fact that to the privileged, equality feels like persecution. it steers itself by creating enemies to hate. remember: people’s lives are genuinely fucking miserable. there is dystopian shit happening. and all of that is really complicated, and if people stopped to think about it for five minutes, they would pull a 1789.
so they just keep adding more enemies, and more derangements like what the qanons call ‘baking’ but hitler just said was the way everyone should read books, until they live in a totally unhinged fantasy world, and any method of social control must engage with the fantasy.
tl;dr: sacrificing external allies to fuel a persecution complex, keep control, entrench the madness, keep attention off the american elites that were at least rhetorically some of the initial targets.
Classic fascist strategy.
This country is circling the toilet FAST.
maybe we should, like, do something about that?
You guys do know that facism tends to be left leaning right?
No. It doesn’t.
Hitler was left leaning. What side was trying to censor opponents and throw political opponents in jail? It was the left and it backfired.
Hitler was not left leaning. He was supported by the old guard and the industrialists like Krupp until he out grew them and then turned on them. At the end of the day he was an autocrat, a totalitarian. Think was Gaddafi liberal? How about Suddam? They both had extensive social programs, but they were not left leaning. In the Weimar Republic it was the right wing courts that tried to censor and throw people in jail, and often let the right wing activists off the hook for similar offenses. Left and right wing groups can both censor and throw people in jail, ie USSR, but generally this is in service of totalitarianism, the ideology at that point is just a husk to keep people in line while people vye for control.
He’s not worth more than 3 words from me. Thank you for standing up for truth. I know it’s a loosing battle on the internet.
Well according to Hitler that his party was neither left nor right wing. He claimed it as a “syncretric movement”. It was essentially his own little sick movement.
And why do you take the word of a man who was infamously one of history’s greatest liars?
Consolidation of power to a tiny coalition of privileged cronies with conditional impunity as long as they backed the leader. That’s not “conservative” or “liberal” or “right” or “left.” It’s just…autocratic. Have you read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith? It’s a very illuminating reference and eschews the entire argument of “left vs right” in favor of a ruling-coalition size relative to the ruled population model and it appears to be quite accurate in predicting and explaining the behavior of politicians and rulers, Hitler included.
Radical centrism strikes again!
Who does that remind you of sir? Kind of reminds me of the today’s left with throwing political opponents in jail and letting the supporters of the left off the hook.
Exactly one political party in US history ran a candidate from a prison cell, do you know who it was and what the party was called?
Hitler put all the leftists in camps and also purged the left wing of his own party, he came to power by being appointed by center-right big business interests specifically as a way to crush the left and destroy labor unions, and those interests did quite well under his rule, the term “privatization” was literally first coined to describe the Nazi economy.
So those are the points showing the Nazis were right wing. The points showing the Nazis were left wing are… they censored speech (which the right also does, all the time) and they have socialist in their name (curious on whether you consider the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea a democracy).
Extreme right wing nazis fought extreme left wing communists in WW2.
New troll account, ban speedrun.
what does ‘left’ mean to you, dear nazi?
The answer is: they do not give a shit.
They do not care about the US as a country.
They do not care about the Americans as a people.
They do not care about the economy.
They do not care about anything apart from their own personal interest. Lining their own pockets is all they care about. If someone helps them do that, they are friends with them. If they don’t, they do not matter.
Congratulations, you now officially live in a cleptocracy where they shake you down, take all of your money and give it to the guys who already have billions. All the taxes they claim to save by obliterating social security, affordable care etc? They are not going back to you, they will stuff them in Musk’s pockets through bullshit contracts and other schemes.
And at the same time, they are critically crippling the IRS to make sure the billionairs no longer even have to pretend to pay taxes.
You’re describing the Republican politicians. The Republican voters are a different bag entirely.
Out of the ones I have discussed politics with, their underlying motivations for supporting Trump are emotionally driven but explained through rhetoric aligning with their emotional motivations. It tends to be grouped into one of a few different feelings:
- cost of living/financial security — immigrants’ fault, taxes, foreign nations taking advantage of US generosity
- fear of change/bigotry — immigrants, “DEI”, “wokeness”, border security
- American exceptionalism/egotism — immigrants, 1st ammendment
- distrust of federal government — “DEI”, government corruption, regulatory overreach, socialism = communism
- distrust of industry — vaccines harmful, science bad
Aside from the bigotry and exceptionalism, those emotions aren’t necessarily wrong. Cost of living increases, politicians owned by lobbyists, and profit-driven privatization of essential services are actual problems. The issue with conservatives is that they have scapegoats to blame those problems on instead of acknowledging the underlying causes. All it takes is some loudmouth, ignorant jackass offering an overly-simplified, emotionally-compelling solution to a complex problem, and others will latch on to it, oversimplify and exaggerate it even more, and disseminate it until the rest of them start believing it.
People can be hateful, narcissistic pieces of shit, and it goes without saying that this repugnant rhetoric is spread intentionally. But, it’s also a direct consequence of a public education system failing among a landscape of patriotic propaganda and media controlled by a powerful few who put profit and self-gain above the health of society.
When someone grows up being told America is a flawless nation, that self-reliance is the foundational trait of success, is never educated to think critically of the government and media, and is bombarded by a neverending stream of false information that validates their fears and lulls them into feeling smarter than everyone else, they end up being indoctrinated into the right-wing cult we have today.
They won’t blame foundational American principles (like the economic ideology) for American problems—they were made to believe America is perfect. It must be something external (like immigrants) making their life worse.
They won’t question those they believe have authority over them—the teacher is always right. If Trump says it’s the Democrats fault, it’s the Democrats fault.
They won’t make an effort to understand other views—self-reliance is antithetical to empathy, and they had it ingrained which one was more important. The only person they can trust is themselves and by extension those who agree.
They also won’t need to understand other views. With the breadth of echo chambers available at the tip of their fingers, it’s easy to seek and reinforce conservative views, social connection, and validation. Chuck McFuck has a sole trans daughter who begrudgingly interacts with him, in contrast to his 10,000 friendly and cooperative buddies on r/conservative.
To cripple the US so it is no longer a threat to Russia, and they can move in to “reclaim” all those Baltic nations and maybe even cop the EU.
Not just Russia. Any kind of meaningful restraint on multinational corps & billionaires requires international cooperation, or the entity just changes the region where it stores/performs/recognizes whatever thing.
I think we’re gonna learn the hard way its actually not okay to let corporations become more powerful than most nations.
look at moussilini and hitler. they all sided with him
Going to steel man this since theres obviously no one on here answering this question seriously. Not a republican and don’t agree with all this, just imagining what my republican dad would say about this:
For ukraine and Europe, we have no interest in protecting them besides sentimental attachments. Ukraine is not our problem, it’s Europe’s and if they want to dump money into a lost cause by all means go ahead, but leave the u.s. out of it unless your going to compensate us for it. The u.s. isn’t threatened by Russia, we have an ocean, the world’s largest navy and nukes to protect us. The larger threat is China and we should be focusing on them, not russia which can barely invade it’s neighbor, much less march across Europe and the atlantic. Europe can handle its own problems.
For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans much more. The only way to get them to come back is to make it too expensive to import things.
This is all about putting America first. For decades America has been spending billions to protect Europe and has been sending billions of dollars over seas to build factories owhile factory after factory closes here in the u.s. We need to stop all of that and spend our money in America for Americans.
Feel free to use this comment as a punching bag, I don’t care, just trying to give OP an actual answer if this was a legitimate question and not some rhetorical question seeking affirmation on how dumb the Republicans are. They are, don’t get me wrong, but just say so and don’t dress it up in questions like this.
We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt. We can’t do that if companies find it more profitable to go over seas and pay people pennies when they’d have to pay Americans much more.
Canada has
- Higher wages
- More safety regs
One of those must be the issue. ;-)
When we spend money in other countries, we are spending it on Americans. When free people thrive, America wins. When people around the world have stable governments that at least try to look out for their own people, America wins. Even if 49% of it is wasted to fraud and abuse, we’re still coming out ahead: the only Americans who have lived through a draft are in their 60s, and a nuclear attack in their 80s.
This hedgemony has staved of world war three and nuclear war for 75 years, and kept the world a relatively stable and safe place for virtually everyone.
Even if you completely disagree with me, and feel like voting for conservatives is the better alternative, two facts completely undermine that decision. First, the times America has failed to live up to its ideals or faltered in its highest pursuits have been exclusively presided over by conservatives. Second, the number of times conservatives have cut spending and passed the savings on to the 99% is exactly zero, but their track record of increasing spending while only significantly cutting taxes for the 1%…is 100%. And, as a bonus fact, this the wealthiest nation ever to exist in the history of the world. The diea that we can’t afford to help Americans and keep up our global spending is meritless, for example, we could eat like three billionaires and end global hunger, provide healthcare and education to every American.
This is a good steel man response, very much like Facebook posts I have seen lately. It’s really sad how much the right has abandoned listening to experts and just assuming we can apply “common sense” answers to fix problems that are complicated.
The thing is, it’s not total rubbish. The problems are real - rust belt decline, life is harder for Americans than it was in the past. America is more protected from Russian aggression than Europe. He doesn’t seem to realise or care that the reason for that is because we trusted that the US would have our back and its not like the us wasn’t getting anything in return.
It’s just that these truths are mixed in with lies - immigrants are the problem, tariffs will fix anything, that if america abandons it’s allies and its promises (over protecting Ukraine after they gave up their nukes), this will lead to a better long term outcome for America.
Trump is too dumb to understand subtlety and he’s being played by multiple bad actors, domestic and foreign.
its not like the us wasn’t getting anything in return
Thing is, what the USA was buying with its expensive umbrella over Europe was a disarmed Europe. At the time, the USA felt it was in their interest for EU to be weak.
For a variety of reasons, the rise of China perhaps being at the forefront, the USA no longer believes its in their interest to keep EU toothless.
I guess they’re right about that. They’re feeling tough now but I doubt the US will like to lose the perks of being our daddy. If this shit continues I’d stop sharing Intel, remove US bases from Europe, make new treaties (including nuclear) covering Europe’s allies and trading partners and give the US the freeze until a sane administration is in power and they can keep their house in order. This is actually a positive since the west has been complacent. No more involvement in shitty US conflicts has to be a bonus. You know, in Europe we haven’t been at war for almost the whole of our history like the US. We grew out of that long ago and only followed our ally the US into their asshole conflicts. They did enough good in the world that the evil was kinda balanced at least. Yeah, that’s over.
Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it had occurred to me that the US disproportionately spends much, much more on military might than our allies do. Europe pulled a good one on us, ensuring they could lead more carefree lifestyles with first world social safety nets while we take on that heavy burden of being the sentry guard of the entire western world.
However, we made promises of security to Ukraine in return for their nuclear disarmament. It isn’t right that we turn our backs on them now.
Trump is a simpleton. He doesn’t truly understand the long-term butterfly effects of the decisions he’s making.
Europe pulled a good one on us […]
No, we did that to ourselves, by always cutting taxes instead of raising them to pay for things that are public goods, like single-payer health care, public transportation, public education, and so on. Our taxes are too low, and as a result we pay far, far more for the same things as private services rather than public. You can complain that the gov’t is inefficient, but there’s no profit; profit takes a far bigger bite than waste, inefficiency, and fraud does.
Great post! And I can see the point of most of that take.
My riposte, which I bring up frequently, is that a smart capitalist isn’t going to invest in American factories, knowing damned well they’ll be left holding the bag on a multi-million dollar facility when the tariffs drop.
That’s not even mentioning the employment costs, which are far more than most on lemmy understand. tl;dr: If I’m paying you $15hr., it’s costing me $30hr.
For Canada and Mexico and tarriffs in general. We need to bring manufacturing back to America and revitalize the rust belt.
For Canada anyway, there is a manufacturing trade surplus in favour of US. Canadians buy more autos than they make, and also provide affordability for US made products, through components. So it means a reduction in US manufacturing jobs, when better products are available from less hateful countries, and US made goods are too expensive for Americans.
Dad? Is that you?!
Nailed it on the head. I think also that you need to include that Canada’s relationship vis-a-vis trade with China will be affected by tariffs the US is placing on Canada, and same with Mexico. I think much of everything is from the viewpoint that China is a bigger problem than Russia at the moment. China is also recovering from some economic turmoil, and one way to do so includes expanding their reach, and so the intent is to limit China in other areas.
The answer is disappointingly simple: emotional satisfaction.
For decades, these people have been told that they are incredibly generous towards their allies, and that they get nothing in return. That their allies are abusing their relationships. Of course this is false, but they’ve been told so every day.
Now they get to abuse their “abusers” right back.
Victimhood is a requirement of conservatism. Like any cult or religion.
Project 2025. The goal is to remove all tariffs and other limitations against the US.
Canada for instance has laws on antibiotics for dairy, foreign ownership for banks and telcos, various things like that. India has tariffs on everything.
The document outlines crazy things like capital punishment and a border wall, its clearly Trumps handbook. It’s all in there.
While I have no issue with Republicans being shunned for their unashamed fascism, it does mean threads like this are essentially pointless because almost none will actually participate and the ones who do will be downvoted into oblivion.
And dont forget, we are on Lemmy. Everything that’s somewhat conservative gets bullied out quite fast. C/conservative started as a legit community and got turned into a meme community. I think this speaks for itself.
My general dislike for modern conservatism to the side, it does reflect a wider issue with lemmy. There is no diversity of opinion on anything. There are no niche communities. Either you like the political and tech subs and the meme subs which are, at a mininum, 60% political, or there really is nothing for you here.
The manga and anime subs can be good for keeping up with new releases, but not there’s next to no actual discussion.
There’s absolutely diversity of opinion, I see trans and Tankie arguments pretty frequently.
What is generally true is the majority of Lemmy users seem to lean left and are generally more techy, makes sense given the main reasons why you’d seek out the fediverse vs a centralized social media.
There’s a lot of diversity of opinion between leftists and liberals. Generally speaking, conservatives don’t contribute anything and drag down the quality of debate because they are openly anti-intellectual, and their presence also drives away people who are actually worth having. The only thing that would happen if there were more conservatives on here would be more cable news tier screaming matches and more verbal attacks on minorities. Liberals still only want to talk and think at a cable news level, but at least they aren’t openly hateful and anti-intellectual.
People are more likely to change their minds or have productive conversations when they approach a topic from the same basic values and beliefs about the world, like if two people agree on the goal of uplifting the global proletariat, they can discuss how best to go about it, but if one person’s goal is to uplift the global proletariat and the other’s is, idk, to drop minorities out of helicopters, then both are just going to be screaming at each other. Not only that, but if two people are discussing how to uplift the poor while the other guy’s in the room, it’s going to have a negative effect on their ability to do so, because they’ll constantly have to worry about everything they say getting attacked by dumb, right-wing arguments. Imagine two doctors trying to discuss the nuances of their profession in the same room as an antivax nutjob.
Yeah now try being absolutely unknowledgeable when it comes to tech and very much into makeup, skincare, 90 day fiance and parenting content. Lemmy, it’s been nice, but after one and a half years I started lurking to Reddit every once in a while again.
It sucks that niche things like that haven’t picked up yet, however be the change you want to see, create a community and invite like minded people to post there.
I think the biggest barrier of entry is that people don’t understand it, and they’re not going to until they try in all honesty.
Lurking is fine. I wouldn’t bother creating an account. Reddit is bot-moderated now. It’s been a real shitshow and it’s not really worth having an account anymore.
I’ve definitely thought about trying to get back onto Reddit once I get a computer they don’t recognize.
I disagree with a ton of stuff, but Ive already been banned from one community so for the most part I keep it civil. I haven’t had much issue arguing against the common opinion here besides the down votes, but I see downvoted comment chains all the time so I’m not as concerned they will be hidden.
Isolating the US and breaking US hegemony. Trump is a Putin puppet, and what’s best for Russia is crippling the US economically and diplomatically. Alienating the EU cuts off the EU from the US who would otherwise help the Europeans against the Russians as they try to reclaim their former territories.
This also helps China who is trying to replace the US as the world superpower. BRICS is doing a good job of creating a competing economic alliance, and the US falling apart helps make it more attractive.
Not a conservative, by the way. Just someone who follows the news.
It’s the most obvious powerplay in my memory. Isolate and remove America on the world stage from the inside. And it’s being highly successful. You couldn’t get a better Russian agent then trump.
