One of the most important things I've learned from personal experience:
If you want to save people from a cult, you don't accuse them of the same crimes as the cult leaders.
You first understand how they are being victimized, you treat them as people, you connect with their humanity, and then and only then can you have any hope of saving them from the cult.
Remember, they have been told by people they trust YOU are the enemy. If you go in with guns blazing, you're just proving the point.
@quinnsentialOne Depends on what the cult is doing. I'm not trying to befriend them. I just want to be able to mark myself safe from them.
If the cult believes the world is flat they're just stupid, not a danger.
If the cult believes that any election that doesn't result in them winning is fraudulent and the solution is armed insurrection and murdering my friends. We have a problem.
@carver_hudson If you can't distinguish between the leaders and the victims of a dangerous cult, and can't save those people from it, you will have an even bigger problem because the cult will continue to grow in size.
The masses give them power because they take power from the masses.
We need to give the power back to the masses so they don't feel powerless enough to be preyed on.
@quinnsentialOne I would love to hear more about this, if you're willing to share. What changed for you? What was your path out?
@MeditatorMom A few days ago in my posts here, I gave a pretty deep explanation of how I got into MAGA and how I got out, the red bubble, the information prison, and how I'm working on saving my sister first, and then hopefully my family.
I've been trying to compile it more on a bog so I can point to it, but it's a lot to read.
@quinnsentialOne having lived for years in rural Wisconsin I have a fair degree of empathy and understanding with your sentiments. Wisconsin is blanketed by conservative talk radio, 85 stations play CT shows before and/or after ag reports & sports. Many urban people don’t understand how much rural folks listen to radio driving working outside etc, then there is Fox News & it’s offshoots & it’s all amplified on FB where people connect over what’s going on in town church etc.
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@quinnsentialOne This has been happening for decades and it has crept from kinda bad to just off the wall but it has happened over like I said decades. It’s just normal also if people what to get part of why it has turned ugly read “the politics of resentment” by Katherine Cramer you can also find videos of her on YouTube. The book came out around 2015. Anyway yeah, there is a lot going on that people on the outside don’t understand
A few years ago, I would have been calling nearly every single one of you disgusting communists who want to destroy America.
People can change.
People do change.
And I think about this every time I get yelled at by Dad. If insults and arguments and shouting and heated angry words and hot tempered emotions are the only things stopping me from trying to save my family from MAGA, what kind of person would that make me?
We either stand for something or sit for nothing, even if it's our family.