I was wrong because you don't have to be a nazi to love the stupid orange cunt, as long as you're a stupid piece of shit, and we are sharing a nation with millions upon millions of stupid motherfuckers that function on the same mental level as a herd of cattle, a herd which don't seem to mind being directed into ever shittier situations by fucking nazis.
or
I was right to think nobody but a bunch of fascist fucking shitsuckers would willingly support that stupid orange bitchbaby shitnazi, but I vastly underestimated the number of people who are totally fucking down with riding the trumptrain into a fascist dystopian hellhole because there are apparently millions of these stupid garbagenazi racist pieces of shit out there.
Think it may be a third option. Basically every Republican president or presidential candidate has been called a nazi in some capacity for a couple decades, so normal conservatives started tuning it out. Then social media started getting big, a lot of the early voices there were in cities due to those being major areas where high speed internet got installed. Cities that have been pretty solidly democrat for a few decades. This fucked with the in-person view of the overton window and as the standard range of conservatives started to trickle online as higher speeds spread out, they were seen as much further right than they actually would place if you did a national census of opinions. This gets a massive block labelled incorrectly online.
Now intermix this with the aspect that elected Republicans put into office not really shifting too much in overall placement on the spectrum as their base isn't too strongly present on the internet for a good chunk of time, but elected Democrats are tuned into it a lot because their areas have been there long term. So suddenly on the campaign trail, you get them shifting their points to where the perceived overton window considers left in order to remain electable. And this more rapid shift results in a gulf, and then a split forming with more and more of the population pushed into the far right of the perceived overton window and any labels that come along with it.
And then comes Trump.
Man doesn't act what's considered presidential in the slightest, and the media hammers into him and thanks to this shifted overton window thanks to them being centered in major cities, they hammer with the hardest labels. Conservatives largely detached from social media consider it business as usual. And then Trump starts deliberately feeding the media. The media amplifies in turn. And he feeds it in turn. Media starts noticing the Trump Bump and starts to feed into it for business purposes. Trump feeds it more. Conservatives check back in for a bit and see the media having gone absolutely rabid. Some try to calm things down a bit, but this train isn't stopping and the couple, extreme percent that make up most tweets go after them, presuming they are more diehard supporters with all the vitriol the shifted window causes. At the same time IRL, they go "what the fuck is with these people?" and the extreme right 5% of America's populace are overall chill.
Then comes the election.
Most people check out for the voting. There's some diehard trump supporters, but a good chunk of the vote is 'well, I'm voting on the rest of the ticket and need to vote for someone but fuck Hillary' and a contingent of spite for either the media or for how the DNC fucked over Bernie. No one is expecting Trump to win, not without everything talking about Hillary being guaranteed.
And then Trump wins.
Everyone goes nuts, media most especially. Trump starts getting hammered in the media and the dude kinda thrives in that. This is the point that over 90% of the right is fully checked out of any mainstream media because they are completely tired of it all. Occasionally they look back in, but things have only gotten worse. And then stuff starts to infect its way into other entertainment as marketers think "seems to be popular so why not to get more money?" This really starts getting to the conservatives as they are wanting to get away from it, and left with little option, their checking out starts to shift towards defense.
During this time, the die-hard trump supporters have not been idle, the furthest fringe taking things to some extremes. This starts bringing all of the left wing into a fervor, especially the vocal extremes. Things start pivoting to chase these extremes. This is when conservatives start to trickle in from checked out to defensive and are met by this wall of extremes.
So now everything's in a complete and utter clusterfuck. Mainstream media's chasing a lot of what the left that is in 'assail the dictator' mode cares about which is what Trump is doing and being done by the extreme right, while the Right with its now castle mindset is hearing what things Trump is doing right and what things are being done by people on the extreme left. Everytime something comes up, everyone jumps in with partisan mindsets. So where once there were once two halves that would have come together for a complete whole, people are operating under two completely different sources of information and rejecting what the other side is saying completely.
Now we come to the Center. They are viewed a bit more on the right than on a whole nation survey they'd actually land due to the prior mentioned overton shifts, as much as overton can be used anymore in the absolute mire. They try to maintain their central position, but since they are caught in the crossfire, they start getting pushed. And with extreme left being on a warpath to stop the dictator and with them supported by hangers on, these center individuals can't really stay where they are. Some move to support while others get shoved toward the conservatives manning the walls and get greeted by pretty chill standard conservatives, which starts to entrench them in the camp. Sure there's some extreme right making forays out, but they are more seeing the 'bolt down the hatches' type of right-winger while only majorly coming across 'attack' type left-wingers.
This is not the least helped as some power-trippers in the silicon valley companies that run a lot of social media put some harsher punishments on right and center to 'do their part', which when mixed with the very authoritative state of moderation starts to fire up some internal American 'fuck the authority'. Especially with terms and conditions being purposely vague to avoid suits making it hard to argue against that sorta thing, the use of AI rather than humans fucking with people, and a ban without limit basically being a death sentence to social life or in some cases like Youtube potential career and income being suddenly shot (both of which make any bugs causing this
much worse on perception).
And this brings us to 2020.
First Covid begins striking. Dems handle the early PR like utter crap. Complaining about travel restrictions being purely xenophobic and in order to fight it encourage people to go down to the chinatown areas of cities that have them. This backfires when Covid starts spiraling up out of control and tars them in the minds of conservatives and centrists. They manage to recover a bit with the whole "Flatten the Curve" stuff. However, a key point is that it would only be for two weeks, just to allow for hospitals to manage it. Two weeks come and go. We remain locked down. The two mentioned groups thinks its fine, a bit more isn't that bad. And then it comes to a month and more. Antipathy from all the above crap plus anti-authoritarian starts to build and would continue to do so til election day.
At the same time, the George Floyd stuff happens. At first, everyone's going in favor of reform. And then the riots happen. Conservatives start getting antsy. CHAZ is set up. Conservatives and the centrists had been pushed their direction start getting more antsy. Mass protests start to form with not everyone having masks while at the same time a few weeks earlier there were complaints directed towards the minor faction of Conservatives that wanted lockdowns to end. This pisses them off, especially once a narrative that the protests have lower rates of coronavirus spread that just sounds wrong.
All this comes to a head on election day 2020. There's a few percent of Nazis, a lot more "want 90s" reactionaries that were the primary people Trump's loose plans were for, and a decent percent of dumbasses. But the massive bulk is neither of them. But the massive, massive bulk is from people that are just sick of what they've been hammered with for so long and want to give the biggest "fuck you" to the dems they can, and from what they can tell, the best way to do that is to try to get Trump the popular victory in addition to the electoral.
It better be hoped to high heaven that the election results were legit after the audits are done. Because if things wind up being revealed that there was a large enough scale to flip the election? There's going to be making some *ridiculously* pissed off people there.
Oh, little thing to show of the overton window stuff I've mentioned. Is there anyone here that defines their own views as conservative? May be a couple, but I get the feeling they may be pretty heavily outnumbered...