Copeland's Corner: September 21, 2022
We can’t agree to disagree with the MAGA movement. You either support bigotry, or you don’t.
A few weeks ago, I posed the following question on my Facebook page:
“Do any of you have a family member or friend who is such a brainwashed MAGA cultist that you had to cut them out of your life?”
I received over 300 responses with roughly 95% answering with a resounding “yes”.
There were stories shared of relatives who lived and breathed “Fox News” (I put it in quotes because it isn’t news. It’s right-wing propaganda with zero adherence to truth or facts). I heard tales of friends who couldn’t turn off hate radio or extremist podcasts. Friends who were once close but now can’t carry on a conversation without proselytizing the speaking points of the crazed who believe that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that the true persecuted people in America are straight white males. There were stories of family members hellbent on trying to convince them that the January 6 insurrectionists who sought to overthrow our democracy, caused the maiming and deaths of numerous members of law enforcement, and threatened the lives of members of Congress are “patriots.” Not surprisingly, there were even those who told of once adored loved ones verbally attacking them for having the temerity to think that Donald Trump’s stealing of classified nuclear documents, and then carelessly storing them at his golf club, did anything wrong.
Among the 5% or so who said “no” were a few who slammed me for asking the question. I was being “divisive,” they said, as though MAGA isn’t ground zero for deliberately stoked division. There were others who said “no” because they simply “don’t discuss politics.” These are the people who infuriated me the most. Tax policies and governmental priorities are politics. The deliberate spreading and encouragement of racism, xenophobia, sexism and misogyny are not. It pains me to hear from people who can’t tell the difference between bigotry and policy debate. Then again, there are those who’ve called the murders of Capitol Police on January 6 “legitimate political discourse.”
It is difficult for me to listen to those who attempt to equate a disdain for violent right-wing extremism to simple political disagreement. I am a registered Democrat, although there have been occasions in the past when I have voted for candidates of other parties. This isn’t the same as opposing Mitt Romney or John McCain, people I believed to be decent men with whom I had some philosophical differences. We can agree to disagree and it’s fine. We can’t agree to disagree with the MAGA movement. You either support bigotry, or you don’t.
While I posed the question of cutting people off due to their allegiance to this cult, I never answered the question personally. The answer is for me is, unfortunately, yes. I had a very dear friend who I’ve known and loved for most of my life who I just can’t have in my life anymore as long as he continues on this path. We have had political differences forever, but despite numerous, vigorous debates over the years, they never threatened our friendship. Once he pledged his loyalty to Trump, I struggled to separate our friendship from his beliefs even as he became more and more brainwashed. I watched as his Facebook rantings parroted the conspiratorial nonsense about election fraud, how Covid vaccines and masks are a plot to control us and how we’re better off using the horse de-wormer Ivermectin to ward off the virus. I tried until I couldn’t in good conscience try anymore.
I am an African American man. How can this man swear to love me and my children and then vehemently and enthusiastically give full-throated support to every action committed by the only American president to ever be formally endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan? A man whose entry into public life as a young man in the early 1970s was as a federal defendant in a Housing Discrimination lawsuit for refusing to rent units in his family-owned apartment buildings to black people? How can you support a representative of that and still claim love for me and my family? I can’t stomach that and so, sadly, he is no longer a part of my life. He can’t be.
Probably the worst MAGA supporters, in my view, are the ones who claim to support the movement’s views on government yet ignore or compartmentalize the ugliness. The ugliness is the very foundation of MAGA. It’s what fuels its most ardent supporters. From the day Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 and founded the movement with claims of Mexicans as rapists, he drew on those inclined to believe in and practice the demonization of the “other.” I say that these supporters are the worst because THEY KNOW BETTER and are still willing to look the other way.
One poster said that I was calling all MAGA supporters “racists,” which is unfair. Another poster summed it up perfectly when he wrote that “All MAGA supporters may not be racists. They’re just saying that it isn’t a dealbreaker for them.”
It is for me.