John Dule Tries To Reason With Trump-Supporting Facebook Boomers: The Thread

[Co-Chair Bagel23]

Boomer memes are the lowest form of humor.

Dude I actually lmao’d out loud, keep up the good work antifa John!

[Starry Eyed Jagaloon]

Trump supporters of Atlas, are these really the types of people you want to associate yourselves with?

This is what always dumbfounds me. You guys think leftists look stupid? These people represent the average supporter that attend Trump rallies and I can speak as a liberal Democrat that these semi-literate, semi-sentient slugs are the first thing that pop into my mind every time I hear somebody call themselves a Trump supporter. It's a completely different thing than a negative reaction I would have had to somebody identifying as a Republican pre-Trump, he's basically a proxy for determining which people are utter, gullible rubes that will slurp up whatever bullsh**t story you throw at them so long as you tell them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how appalling stupid it is.

Being an oblivious moron is nearly a requirement for rabid support of him in a way it isn't for other politicians.

Look, this is what I should've made clear when I was first getting into this site: I think Trump is a babbling baboon, and his ardent supporters (the ones who voted for him in the primaries) are what he might call "low-IQ individuals." But for my entire life, I've lived in an area of the country where these people are basically nonexistent. I've never encountered them in real life, and I still have a hard time believing they exist. Instead, my exposure to political extremism has been from the left, living in a town where the city council recently passed an ordinance to "de-gender" manhole covers by renaming them "maintenance holes." I am routinely exposed to Antifa thugs, stoned white college students with filthy dreadlocks, a homeless problem directly brought on by liberal policies, transgender bathroom protests, and team-building activities that begin with everyone telling each other their preferred pronouns.

When I look at people like the Trump boomers, all I see is the last dying gasp of an outdated version of America. When I look at the far-left loons who run the Bay Area, I see the future of this country... and what a dismal future it is. Rent control, corruption, overtaxation, an easily abused welfare system, rampant cronyism, price ceilings, gun bans, nanny state interventionism, authoritarian NIMBYs, etc-- all hidden behind a smokescreen of "equality" and "justice." Simply put, a Trump supporter in my hometown is nothing more than a circus oddity. Meanwhile, the lunatic left has completely usurped control of the levers of government.

I did join a left-wing Facebook group around this same time as well. Maybe I'll post some of those screenshots on this thread too, but they're much longer (though equally frustrating).

I get that, and I've a similar lived experience (although I have absolutely no problem with gun bans or PC language choices), but these people don't have a majority within the Democratic party like Trumpists do with the GOP. We are the party of Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and so on--not of AOC and Sanders. Even in the heart of your bay area, San Francisco rejected ultra progressive but sane Jane Kim and Mark Leno to elect London Breed as mayor. We are still, as a majority, a party of sensible, pragmatic neoliberals and social democrats. UC Berkeley is not the Democratic party. Also, even with all of our flaws, Democeat-run dynamic places (tm) are performing a lot better than anywhere which elects Republicans, and any sense of moderation in the GOP has completely died.

[John Dule]

Look, this is what I should've made clear when I was first getting into this site: I think Trump is a babbling baboon, and his ardent supporters (the ones who voted for him in the primaries) are what he might call "low-IQ individuals." But for my entire life, I've lived in an area of the country where these people are basically nonexistent. I've never encountered them in real life, and I still have a hard time believing they exist. Instead, my exposure to political extremism has been from the left, living in a town where the city council recently passed an ordinance to "de-gender" manhole covers by renaming them "maintenance holes." I am routinely exposed to Antifa thugs, stoned white college students with filthy dreadlocks, a homeless problem directly brought on by liberal policies, transgender bathroom protests, and team-building activities that begin with everyone telling each other their preferred pronouns.

When I look at people like the Trump boomers, all I see is the last dying gasp of an outdated version of America. When I look at the far-left loons who run the Bay Area, I see the future of this country... and what a dismal future it is. Rent control, corruption, overtaxation, an easily abused welfare system, rampant cronyism, price ceilings, gun bans, nanny state interventionism, authoritarian NIMBYs, etc-- all hidden behind a smokescreen of "equality" and "justice." Simply put, a Trump supporter in my hometown is nothing more than a circus oddity. Meanwhile, the lunatic left has completely usurped control of the levers of government.

I did join a left-wing Facebook group around this same time as well. Maybe I'll post some of those screenshots on this thread too, but they're much longer (though equally frustrating).

I get that, and I've a similar lived experience (although I have absolutely no problem with gun bans or PC language choices), but these people don't have a majority within the Democratic party like Trumpists do with the GOP. We are the party of Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and so on--not of AOC and Sanders. Even in the heart of your bay area, San Francisco rejected ultra progressive but sane Jane Kim and Mark Leno to elect London Breed as mayor. We are still, as a majority, a party of sensible, pragmatic neoliberals and social democrats. UC Berkeley is not the Democratic party. Also, even with all of our flaws, Democeat-run dynamic places (tm) are performing a lot better than anywhere which elects Republicans, and any sense of moderation in the GOP has completely died.

"PC language choices," to me, aren't the real battle. They're just a tool to re-frame the entire debate, a la 'newspeak' in 1984. The best example of this is a phrase that's getting tossed around a lot this election cycle: "economic justice." It doesn't really mean anything; you don't look to the free market for justice any more than you look to the justice system for plastic Chinese gadgets. It's nonsense. But it's useful for far-left activists who want to reject nuts-and-bolts policy debate in favor of emotionally guided knee-jerk responses.

You might remember a ballot initiative called Prop. 10 in California last year. It would have lifted the ban on new rent control laws being passed in a lot of California cities. Now, rent control is a stupid, stupid idea-- any economist worth his salt will tell you that price ceilings (if managed as poorly as they are in California) will cause demand to outpace supply, causing a shortage to develop. This is exactly what's happening in the Bay Area. People are living homeless in the streets while developers build one luxury condo after another to avoid the rent control laws. Nobody builds low or medium-income housing in San Francisco anymore because rent control (coupled with the inane zoning laws) makes it impossible to turn a profit. So the city stagnates, more people wind up homeless, and the price of housing keeps skyrocketing because supply is so low.

Prop. 10 lost by something like 18 points come election day. But I will never forget sitting in a Berkeley auditorium, listening to a debate on the proposition hosted by a bland, balding real estate developer and an overweight left-wing "economic justice" activist. The real estate developer presented facts and figures in a cold, impartial, logical manner, arguing that rent control causes buildings to deteriorate, the rate of homelessness to increase, and new development to slow down. Then the woman stood up and said: "The economic argument is fine, but I'm far more concerned with the moral argument." There was thunderous applause.

This kind of disingenuous smokescreen is why I have no patience for left-wing politics these days. Leftist policies, from nanny-state welfare capitalism all the way to socialism, are predicated on the idea that good intentions will necessarily lead to good outcomes. But it doesn't work like that. And when I see that a good two-thirds of my generation doesn't understand that, I start to seriously fear for the future. I've met people who seem to seriously fancy themselves as the next Stalin or Pol Pot. And while those people will probably never obtain any political power, the fact that 47% of Millennials now say they favor "restrictions on free speech" gives me pause.

So to sum up: I'll never support the Democrats, even the so-called "centrist" ones, because they adhere to a transactional method of politics that has crafted some of the worst policy in the past fifty years.

[John Dule]

Anyway, back to making fun of the right instead of the left... this particular incident was one of the most painful experiences I had on that godforsaken Facebook page, because I had a personal connection to it. Some account called "Trump Is My President" shared a video about how California schools were teaching "Islamic law" in classrooms and forcing kids to convert to Islam. The video just so happened to show a picture of my seventh-grade history textbook, which (although it had a chapter on the history of the Islamic world) never advocated for the mass conversion of California's middle schoolers to Sharia law. It's a shame it didn't, too, because then that class might've been more interesting.

You'd think that allegedly "educated" Americans might stop to consider the fact that no middle school, even one in California, would try to implement Islamic conversion in its curriculum. But yet again, that simple thought process seemed to elude the average Trump supporter.

Thus began another unfortunate lapse in patience on my part.

[Continential]

Imagine telling them about Arabic Numerals.

[HisGrace]

I was going to say that everything in this thread is great, but then you've got to think about the fact that there are this many stupid people out there.

[John Dule]

This will be the final installment in this thread, because after this interaction, I could no longer handle talking to these people. The original post linked to another Russian bot article. This one mentioned "White House Propaganda Director Emmanuel Goldstein," an obvious reference to 1984-- and f**k, even if you didn't read the book, shouldn't you know that the White House doesn't have a propaganda director? Once again though, this was too much for the Trumpeters to wrap their heads around, and I had to wade through another ignorant slew of comments from racist aunts and drunk uncles.

This time around, I thought that the obviousness of the lie, plus the fact that "Emmanuel Goldstein" can easily be proven to be a fictional character through Google, would be enough to actually turn the tide. I thought that I'd finally found a lie bald-faced enough that even a Trump supporter would understand it. As usual, I was wrong.



I quit the Facebook group soon after this. This was one of the most disheartening experiences I've ever had on the internet, and it made me realize just how delusional Trump supporters are willing to become just to justify the fact that they were conned. It's easier for them to pretend to believe every inane thing that comes out of this White House, because to do otherwise would be to admit their own mistake. Can't do that! This collection of irrational boomers has shaken my faith in humanity and destroyed my hope for reasonable political discourse in this country.

[Rules for me, but not for thee]

The upside is the boomers will mostly be gone in 10 years.

[lfromnj]

Then again the libertarian party is the one that booed when Peterson he didnt believe 5 year olds should be sold heroin.

[Continential]

The upside is the boomers will mostly be gone in 10 years.

[AndyHogan14]

Trump supporters of Atlas, are these really the types of people you want to associate yourselves with?

This is what always dumbfounds me. You guys think leftists look stupid? These people represent the average supporter that attend Trump rallies and I can speak as a liberal Democrat that these semi-literate, semi-sentient slugs are the first thing that pop into my mind every time I hear somebody call themselves a Trump supporter. It's a completely different thing than a negative reaction I would have had to somebody identifying as a Republican pre-Trump, he's basically a proxy for determining which people are utter, gullible rubes that will slurp up whatever bullsh**t story you throw at them so long as you tell them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how appalling stupid it is.

Being an oblivious moron is nearly a requirement for rabid support of him in a way it isn't for other politicians.

Look, this is what I should've made clear when I was first getting into this site: I think Trump is a babbling baboon, and his ardent supporters (the ones who voted for him in the primaries) are what he might call "low-IQ individuals." But for my entire life, I've lived in an area of the country where these people are basically nonexistent. I've never encountered them in real life, and I still have a hard time believing they exist. Instead, my exposure to political extremism has been from the left, living in a town where the city council recently passed an ordinance to "de-gender" manhole covers by renaming them "maintenance holes." I am routinely exposed to Antifa thugs, stoned white college students with filthy dreadlocks, a homeless problem directly brought on by liberal policies, transgender bathroom protests, and team-building activities that begin with everyone telling each other their preferred pronouns.

When I look at people like the Trump boomers, all I see is the last dying gasp of an outdated version of America. When I look at the far-left loons who run the Bay Area, I see the future of this country... and what a dismal future it is. Rent control, corruption, overtaxation, an easily abused welfare system, rampant cronyism, price ceilings, gun bans, nanny state interventionism, authoritarian NIMBYs, etc-- all hidden behind a smokescreen of "equality" and "justice." Simply put, a Trump supporter in my hometown is nothing more than a circus oddity. Meanwhile, the lunatic left has completely usurped control of the levers of government.

I did join a left-wing Facebook group around this same time as well. Maybe I'll post some of those screenshots on this thread too, but they're much longer (though equally frustrating).

Go Bears!

Anyway, while I am a left-of-center Democrat, I have often joked that I was definitely considered to be a "conservative" while in Berkeley. Hell, I would be more than willing to vote for a European-style conservative party. I too have been lucky to not be totally exposed to the pro-Trump crowd (even the conservatives in my native Orange County do not advertise that many of them voted for Trump). When I was in DC in April, I found it rather disturbing that there were so many "MAGA" hats around because I never see them in California—many of the hats were being worn by teachers/chaperones leading school groups. Again, disgusting. While California has its fair share of issues, I thank the powers that be that I was born a Californian so I don't have to be around that garbage all the time.

[Frodo]

To be fair, how could these Baby Boomers have known about the long-term effects of all those mushrooms, acid, and other psychedelic drugs that they took in their youth would have on them in their dotage?  Now they can't tell what is true and real, and what isn't.  

[Co-Chair Bagel23]

The upside is the boomers will mostly be gone in 10 years.

Look, I can get why they can be annoying but let's not be happy about these people dying, they are still people with grandchildren and family, and are still worthy of life .

[Badger]

Trump supporters of Atlas, are these really the types of people you want to associate yourselves with?

This is what always dumbfounds me. You guys think leftists look stupid? These people represent the average supporter that attend Trump rallies and I can speak as a liberal Democrat that these semi-literate, semi-sentient slugs are the first thing that pop into my mind every time I hear somebody call themselves a Trump supporter. It's a completely different thing than a negative reaction I would have had to somebody identifying as a Republican pre-Trump, he's basically a proxy for determining which people are utter, gullible rubes that will slurp up whatever bullsh**t story you throw at them so long as you tell them exactly what they want to hear, no matter how appalling stupid it is.

Being an oblivious moron is nearly a requirement for rabid support of him in a way it isn't for other politicians.

Look, this is what I should've made clear when I was first getting into this site: I think Trump is a babbling baboon, and his ardent supporters (the ones who voted for him in the primaries) are what he might call "low-IQ individuals." But for my entire life, I've lived in an area of the country where these people are basically nonexistent. I've never encountered them in real life, and I still have a hard time believing they exist. Instead, my exposure to political extremism has been from the left, living in a town where the city council recently passed an ordinance to "de-gender" manhole covers by renaming them "maintenance holes." I am routinely exposed to Antifa thugs, stoned white college students with filthy dreadlocks, a homeless problem directly brought on by liberal policies, transgender bathroom protests, and team-building activities that begin with everyone telling each other their preferred pronouns.

When I look at people like the Trump boomers, all I see is the last dying gasp of an outdated version of America. When I look at the far-left loons who run the Bay Area, I see the future of this country... and what a dismal future it is. Rent control, corruption, overtaxation, an easily abused welfare system, rampant cronyism, price ceilings, gun bans, nanny state interventionism, authoritarian NIMBYs, etc-- all hidden behind a smokescreen of "equality" and "justice." Simply put, a Trump supporter in my hometown is nothing more than a circus oddity. Meanwhile, the lunatic left has completely usurped control of the levers of government.

I did join a left-wing Facebook group around this same time as well. Maybe I'll post some of those screenshots on this thread too, but they're much longer (though equally frustrating).

Forgive the necropost, but i a s h a n linked to this thread from the John d u l e talks to Q Anon thread. Holy hell how did I ever miss this absolute Gem of a thread?!?

I decided to necropost, something I normally don't do, just to respond to JD's post above. While you look at San Francisco as the inevitable future of the country and the implementation of harebrained woke liberalism, surely you have to understand that San Francisco is, to put it mildly, "special" in that regard. Seriously, I consider myself to be pretty darn Progressive and a lifelong Democrat, and I would probably argue with you over the fundamental soundness of rent control policies and whether it actually increases homelessness ( even while agreeing that San Francisco's probably go too far), San Francisco does stuff all the time that even makes me and frankly about 90% stop progressives cringe. The city council's decision the other day to rename schools named after people like Lincoln, John Muir, Etc was a prime example.

My point is that to be fair San francisco-style Uber woke liberalism is not representative of American Progressive and liberal thought by far. On the other hand, the certifiable morons and racists you dealt with on this website are sadly not far below the middle of the bell curve for Trump supporters.