I think a major part of it is education and exposure. Conservativism is, generally, a desire to halt or even roll back “progress”. The embrace of traditions and nostalgia for the imaginary “good old days”. You know what your parents and your community taught you. You’ve established what normal is from your small sample size. Why change things? Everyone you know gets along just fine and you like the way it is. Different is scary.

Unfortunately, the world is really fucking complicated. Simple explanations can make perfect sense when your understanding is simple. However, the more you learn about the world, the more diversity you are exposed to, the more context you discover, the more stereotypes get broken… the more accommodating and progressive you usually become.

The will and the resources have been there trying to move in this direction for a long time. I do agree that he’s absolutely fast tracked the process. His complete disregard for civility, shameless willingness to grift, and transparently transactional nature have enabled the absolute worst in us. From hateful, racist poor folks to deranged religious nutjobs to narcissistic billionaires - they’ve all been given the green light now.

I just hope that everyone takes note of which side people are on and, when this is all over, make sure that the memory of those who stood on the wrong side of history are so shamed, ostracized, disgraced, and hated that this shit doesn’t happen again.

To be fair, Trump is not the source of the problem. He’s a Heritage Foundation puppet, and those psychos kind of have people everywhere right now.

He’s not a crybaby. He’s trying to make dissent illegal in preparation for a fascist takeover of the government.

My interpretation of this might be different, but I agree wholeheartedly with my interpretation.

Being morally just doesn’t just mean “not causing harm” directly. It means striving to not cause harm both directly and indirectly. As someone who lives in the USA, our entire society is built off of exploitation. The less expensive something is, the more heavy the exploitation likely is. The cheapest manufacturing is done in countries where labor is exploited or even enslaved, where the manufacturing process can pollute and poison the area with little consequence (to the manufacturer), and where the powerful can force deals on the government to let them extract valuable resources and pay a fraction of its value - depriving the locals and nation prosperity. Even when buying US food products, the food industry mostly relies on extremely poor conditions for the animals it keeps, taking advantage of farmers it buys from or employs, and may even employ migrant children for dangerous slaughterhouse labor.

Avoiding these kinds of practices throughout most supply chains is sometimes impossible and usually more expensive the more thoroughly you manage to avoid the practices. Even then someone has to check in and constantly verify that the practices are legitimately avoided and not just greenwashing or fraudulent.

It’s really quite depressing.