No Stupid Questions

Validation of their feelings and a return to a mythologized past. Try having a reasoned political discussion with someone like this:

Well back in my day things were just better. America was the best and we didn't have to apologize for that. And the blacks and mexicans and what not didn't complain so damn much because folks were wired different back then and there wasn't nothin to complain about. Chuck Berry. You know Chuck Berry? Greatest rock and roller of all time and he was colored. Didn't nobody have anything to say about it, he was just damned good at guitar. Now the kids - black kids - listen to all sorts of damnable noise and them from the cities in gangs shooting each other up and corrupting good white kids in the small towns and suburbs getting them into drugs. We'll be lucky if we dont end up like another Chicago. And they whine and complain about racism, but we had a black president and look how that turned out. Granted he was a muslim and not even a citizen, but try tellin them that. I mean hell look at what Hillary did to all them folks at Benghazi - just let them muslims kill all of em, probably wouldn't have been politically correct to fight back. Dumb broad even wrote it all down - the emails. Had her dead to rights - she should've hanged but thats what you get when you have all those corrupt democrat senators in charge of the kangaroo court. And those democrat cities just keep letting illegals stay because they know they'll vote democrat - they don't care how many of them are raping and murdering women and kids long as they get their votes. Not even just the mexicans anymore, you got those communist gangs from venezuela taking over whole apartment complexes and the defunded police can't do anything about it. You know something was wrong with that Biden election - not just illegals voting but I saw on Fox that they were sending out whole reams of mail-in ballots to blacks and college kids and what have you. And then they take all the conservative ballots and conveniently lose boxes of them. Maybe Elon's going to fix it now since he knows all about those voting machines. Liberals voting for dead people too, but that's been on the news since Bush - I don't know why nobody does anything about that. Now you know what's really racist is planned parenthood - nobody hates babies, especially black babies, as much as planned parenthood. They kill more black babies than anything and the demonrats just keep convincing folks that its OK. Makes me sick that we kill hundreds of thousands of babies every year and i dont care what color they are. You know another thing? We knew which bathroom to use - we figured out a genius method. I'll tell you: drop your drawers and look down. Then you'll know. And you'll know if you should be on a mens or womens track team and if you should wear dresses. It's probably because all the kids have autism from the vaccines these days - now I guess they're mutants because of that COVID mRNA vaccine too - but not me. No sir. I'll stick with the DNA god gave me. That's probably why all the boys think they're girls now. Or cats and try to piss in litterboxes at school. People knew who and what they were once. They knew their place, worked hard, and didn't complain. Now if we can just get Trump in for a few more terms then he'll set everything straight and get rid of all those regulations so I can afford eggs again.

That is roughly paraphrased from my parents, grandparents, other family, some senile guy at the grocery store who wouldn't stop telling the cashier about Chuck Berry, etc. They don't have rational political goals, usually. These folks are genuinely operating on an entirely separate set of facts and assumptions to us. Their brains are co-opted by decades of counterfactual propagandized conspiracy theories, which are too numerous and ingrained to easily disabuse them of. They are faced with an increasingly complex world and are constantly told versions of events that are terrifying or disgusting to them and spoonfed the solution: fascism, piece by piece, until you get MAGA.