solarbird | When you talk to your Trumpy family and friends…

…which we all need to be doing, to try to rein them back in to the real world…

…don’t go in all guns blazing. That won’t work. Yes, you have an emotional connection to them, so they’ll tolerate it a little better, but you need to go in slowly or yeah, they will throw you out in favour of the God Emperor.

I know that’s hard to hear, but it’s the truth. Ask any LGBT person over the age of 30, or any at all from an evangelical background.

If you go right in with the heavy artillery – say, Trump and Mike Johnson’s massive planned ethnic purge or how Netanyahu wants to keep the war in Gaza going until Trump’s back in office, since Biden’s been restraining him and Trump will green-light full-on genocide – then they’ll howl and rage at you. And they’ll enjoy it – they want that emotional rush; they’ve been trained to need it. They’ll ramp all the way up immediately and harden their defences and entrench in even harder.

So this can’t be a big explosive conversation, no matter how much you care about whatever topic you try to bring to them. Not if you want to get the job done.

You gotta go in slow, and you have to keep at it. Figure out what their biggest worries are. Amplify those, in the context of what Trump will do. Emphasise who in their family will be hurt, or your shared family if you have it. If you don’t have those, argue about how it’ll hurt you, and then, your family. It’s got to be concrete and it has to have an emotional link that leads back directly to them.

Fundamentally, it’s about planting little seeds of doubt one at a time, and watering them. The doubt – and the worry that their own movement has amplified in them – will do most of the labour for you.

I know, it’s hard. Believe me, I am well aware. I’ve sat calmly and argued in public against people raging against me and everyone like me, declaring loud and long that we were all murderous child-rapists buggering babies for Satan. I’ve done door-to-door convincing people they shouldn’t vote to bar us from employment and make schools teach we were pure evil. They had to send us out in opposite-sex pairs, because we were being attacked if we went out solo.

So I know from hard.

But if you still have an emotional connection to someone in that cult, you may be the only person who can do it. Particularly these days.

And once you get that first opening – if you do – then you can move to the worse things. Once that armour cracks, you can start pouring in bits of reality. Slowly at first, of course. I can’t give you an order, I can’t tell you what to emphasise – it’s all up to them, honestly. Just have the facts ready, and be able to back them up, preferably with material directly from Trump himself.

Is America really a shithole nation? Do they really want the military sweeping people off the streets? What kind of country has that happen, really?

Is that what they really think? Is that what they really want?

It won’t always work. To be honest, it mostly won’t work to pull them all the way out. For the most part, people only leave cults when they’re ready to leave the cult, or when it all falls down around them and there’s no more cult to leave. And while this movement is more cult-like then full-on cult – for the larger number of its members – it’s close enough.

But if you can’t pry them out of it, then you can dampen the enthusiasm. If you can make them take even a step back while staying in the cult, maybe they don’t send Trump that next donation. Maybe they don’t do call-in for his campaign. Maybe they don’t chant the slogans quite as loud, or to as many people.

Maybe they just become less effective cultists.

Even that much is of value. It weakens the movement.

And that’s something we very much need.

116 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.