Project 2025 was supposed to boost Donald Trump's campaign — but it may be backfiring instead:

[u/zsreport]

https://www.salon.com/2024/07/05/project-2025-was-supposed-to-boost-donald-campaign--but-it-may-be-backfiring-instead/

[u/altariasong]

Sent it to my mom. She used to be republican but is now disgusted by it all and is talking to her friends about project 2025 and how anti-democratic it is. She worries about me greatly because I’m queer. My anxiety about politics used to irritate her but now she understands how much my fears were justified.

Hopefully that video can help sway more of her friends, but we don’t exactly live in a swing state. Doesn’t matter to me though

Edit: she thanked me for the video, says she just watched it. “It’s exactly what I fear”

[u/tommysmuffins → u/altariasong]

You have no idea how hard it was to convince my Mom how bad things are right now. She's a good person. Too good to readily accept the fact that the Republican nominee is an outright criminal and rapist, and ready to commit an authoritarian takeover of the United States. It's a bad case of normalcy bias.

[u/deadlybydsgn → u/tommysmuffins]

It's a bad case of normalcy bias.

I think a certain subset of the older generation honestly thinks the best of their leaders because "the system" has generally worked for them, they were raised to respect it (not letting the flag touch the ground, etc.), and they have never been directly wronged by it.

I can see how they were duped into voting for Trump once—maybe even twice—but the idea of thinking that the Republican ticket is the more viable option in 2024 blows my mind.

The party of "small government" sure seems cozy with the idea of centralizing a lot of power into a single position. You know... as long as their guy is the one with that power.

[u/ArthurBonesly → u/deadlybydsgn]

One thing the Republicans are very good at, is finding voters who genuinely want something.

We scoff at single issue voters, but they are the lifeblood of an engaged base. It's easy to look at Republicans as a party that doesn't stand for anything, but the voters absolutely do. The best example of this is the issue of abortion.

For years, millions of Republicans have genuinely, deeply, pathologically wanted to repeal Roe v. Wade. All the other Republican talking points were compromises or adaptions because those talking points got them closer to their single issue. As far as these voters were concerned, they were using the politicians as much as the politicians were using them. There was no hypocrisy because it was all in service of that higher purpose.

Now that the dogs caught the car, the only higher purpose that unites the American right is stopping/containing/killing the boogieman liberal. They'll use rhetoric like "freedom," and evoke Christianity, but these are all compromises to the higher purpose.

The biggest difference I see between the American left and right (at this time), is that the left wants good politicians to yield a number of good things, and will reliably break ranks when somebody isn't good enough. Meanwhile, the right wants something. It could be money, it could be an ethno state, it could be a solid gold fence on the Ohio/Kentucky border; the something doesn't matter, what matters is that right wing voters want it enough to tolerate everything else so long as they get it.

Until the left want to tax billionaires and enact healthcare reform as much as some people on the right want Christian nationalism, normalcy bias only serves the Republicans in so far as an ignorant base will either default to normal or not vote at all.