Anyone have family or friends who are lunatic MAGA supporters? My Mom and brother love MAGA, are raging racists and sexists and believe everything that the orange moron says. I choose not to associate with them because the politics disagreement is just the tip of the iceberg of subjects we disagree about.
I don’t know any MAGA people.
My relatives on my wife’s side are trumpers (except one person). I would highly engage them every chance I get, but that stresses out my wife, so, in consideration of her, I tend to keep my mouth shut around them.
That said, I run into trumpers quite frequently in other arenas of my life and I engage them on their support of the current moron every chance I get. For me, it is a lot of fun. Plus, I think that it is my duty to stop our country’s clear descent into unadulterated insanity. Heck, sometimes I even (somewhat) get through to them.
For example, I often tell them (truthfully) that I can list at least 100 ways that Joe Biden and/or Harris have highly disappointed me. But when I ask trumpers if there has been anything at all ever that trump has done that has highly disappointed them, in reply, I tend to get …
a long, long, long pause.
And then they invariably say,
… “Nope, I can’t think of a single thing.”
Sometimes this conversation starts some reflection. (And sometimes it doesn’t.)
Not anymore
I generally don’t engage with people that polarized from the left or right. I find them insufferable. If I do choose to, I generally just love winding them up a bit.
I had to let go of a really talented sub-trade because he is just full on maga (but the Canadian version). It’s just toxic to be around. I told him it’s not even about his beliefs, it’s about how he expresses them and how angry they make him, and how that effects the job site. Of course, he’s too dumb to understand that so he felt like I was unfairly persecuting him. He couldn’t understand that rolling up to my job site with a big F*** Trudeau sticker on his cab next to the big confederate flag sticker might be a bad look for my business.
You can’t fix crazy. You just need to let them be. If they complain about you cutting them off just say you don’t like how they make everything political and leave it at that.
There are plenty of normal, rational, sane humans in the world. Spend time with them instead.
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I don’t run into them frequently and now the ones I do know have pretty much shut up in the past couple of weeks. But yes, engagement always.
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I have a good friend who just spent a few weeks with us who showed up in a MAGA hat. He was an insufferable prick about it when my wife and I don’t really engage in politics with anyone, but he knows we are incredibly anti-Trump and MAGA.
He won’t be getting an invite to visit probably ever again. I’m sure we’ll text a little here and there for the foreseeable future, but I’m also guessing I’ll let this relationship fade away into just not existing anymore. Although to be fair, it goes far beyond politics with this person, this was just the final straw.
But then one misses out on the enormous fun of winding them up !
I am like this. I don’t talk politics with anyone and it has served me well. I am not sure if my best friends are MAGA or ANTIFA or Democratic socialists or Proud boys.
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Father in law, who lives within eyesight. I don’t talk politics with him and he quit sending me MAGA / anti-D shit since I started debunking the trash he’d text me on every occasion. Doesn’t change who he is but it keeps it out of my face which is good enough.
That’s too bad about your Mom and brother. Fortunately, none of my immediate family are dumb enough to be MAGA.
I did lose a friend because he’s a crazy MAGA nutjob. It’s interesting because before trump he was pretty normal and we never really talked about politics.
Family … for the most part with love and kindness. My Trumper cousin, with whom I grew up, is currently fighting rectal cancer. I focus on our shared childhood and affinity for one another. He does the same. I mean, he’s a political asshole with asshole cancer; but he’s also my cousin and I love him.
Friends … I don’t have any MAGA friends and relatively few acquaintances. There was no conscious decision to end friendships over MAGA. It happened naturally and organically. It’s hard if not impossible to be friends with people who come from the MAGA world - we see reality differently. We have little in common. We don’t like or respect one another. I’m also not friends with any KKK members or radical Islamists.
Co-workers … this one is trickier. Most have the good sense to leave it out of the work place. Some don’t. I live in a politically liberal area but work in a highly conservative field. Most of us have learned to keep politics out of the office. Those that haven’t tend to find themselves siloed. I’m a supervisor and occupy a behind the scenes but high stakes and high profile (strange that it can be both) role at work. I am very careful to keep politics out of my professional facing self although my application of logic, my life philosophy, my sense of right and wrong, all point towards a certain (but purposefully opaque) political outlook.
I hear what you are saying, but I would not associate with raging racist and sexist. Politics would not bother me… Not all Magas are racist just as all libs are not commies and anti semites.
Aunt, uncle and a cousin on my father’s side are beliievers, particularly the uncle. We were never that close and that is a big reason not to bother with them going forward. Was FB friends with my aunt but unfollowed her when it seeped into her posts. Haven’t spoken to any of them in years. We sent a Christmas card out of a sense of obligation but didn’t receive one so i think we’re about done. Also quit going to my local barber shop after the owner/barber brought her politics into conversation unprompted. Who’s dumb enough to bring their loony politics into their own place of business? It was only $13 for a cut but I’m not going to subsidize stupid.
I had a teacher/coach/mentor who told me nearly 50yrs ago… “Never argue with an idiot. People passing by may think the idiot is you.”
When I am cornered by a MAGAT, I usually just shrug, do a rope-a-dope, and move on.
I’ve learned that they have a deep insecurity, and a need to feel safe. They don’t want meaningful dialogue. They are just waiting to talk, and their words bring them a sense of security. They feel better while speaking - no matter how myopic their view. And there is no way to get inside that. If they were to listen only for a few seconds, they’d hear a pov that is sometimes a little L, and sometimes a little R. But they jump on the MAGAT train so rapidly, that all they here is me speaking “Libtard.”
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I don’t allow political discussions in my house since I don’t want to deal with the whining of the limousine liberals family members or the one MAGA light family member.
Most of the people I hang out with are left leaning or further left. No hardcore MAGA people in my life.
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Avoid the topic. As far as I now I don’t have any friends or acquaintances that are MAGA. Family members I just see at Christmas, maybe in the summer, and they never say anything about it and I don’t bring it up.
One of my daughter’s best friend’s parents, or at least dad, was MAGA. I’d interact with him at soccer tournaments and such. I had already pretty much decided he was an blowhard idiot beforehand but once Trump and MAGA became a thing and he was in, that only confirmed it.
No maga family. Some maga-lite acquaintances. A few conservative and classic liberal friends. A couple very progressive friends who check all the progressive boxes. Our solution - politics never comes up, it was never an explicit requirement, it just doesn’t. They know us, we know them, and our common interests outweigh what lever is pulled in the voting booth. We can go for a ride, or drink some beers with great conversation and not once does something political come up.
Unless they’re in your face about it (a no-no IMO), disassociating family or friends for their political beliefs would be childish.
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