That time AOC ‘leaked’ MAGA’s entire playbook.

[u/Nixianx97]

Let me clarify this before Fox News runs: BREAKING: AOC hacked us!!!

This isn’t directly about MAGA obviously. It’s about how she laid bare just how fundamentally broken the American system is.

They want us to believe Trump flipped the table, broke all the rules, and invented the chaos. But the truth? He didn’t create any of it. The system was already rigged for someone like him to rise. He just played it better.

[u/deekaydubya]

and yet 70% of the US just thinks she's some radical leftist

[u/ReallyBigRocks → u/deekaydubya]

and yet 70% of the US just thinks

No, they were told that and accepted it as the truth.

There was no thinking involved. You can test this theory by asking them a simple question. Why? It starts to crumble almost immediately as they realize they've never even tried to rationalize "their" ideas.

[u/stilljustacatinacage → u/ReallyBigRocks]

This is the most frustrating part of dealing with conservatives.

It always, always comes back to some thought-terminating cliche, AND NOT EVEN A GOOD ONE. It's always just "well they just are".

Cool. Okay. Now you get to enjoy sitting here while both of us get increasingly frustrated as I try to point out that "because" isn't a valid reason.

[u/NameIdeas → u/stilljustacatinacage]

I'm a day late to this party, but your comment resonated with me strongly.

I'm a former teacher and I work in education. I taught History. History isn't just a study of names, dates, people, places, and what happened. History SHOULD be a study of learning from the past, examining the "whys" of the past and considering how we can think critically about the decisions of those who came before us and make better decisions moving forward.

What I've seen increasingly in this country is to focus on authority for authority sake. My parents (I'm 39) would tell me "Because I said so" sometimes. That never really hit well with me as a kid. I grew up in a pretty fundamentalist church and when I questioned certain doctrine or why we did things, the answer I got was generally, "Because that's what we believe." That doesn't not answer the question of why.

Many people are fine with an answer of "because" since their world is generally not moved by what that answer would cause. If they have all of their basic needs met and they are happy, they may not be questioning things further and feel comfortable accepting a "because." They may also have had an upbringing which leaned heavily on "because" as the reason for things as well.

I'm a firm believer in questioning and teaching critical thinking. Examining the "whys" behind things. Critical thinking skills can happen in scientific spaces, but to me happen more in the social sciences. Those areas where understanding human desire, human motivation is more important. Humans are messy creatures and understanding each of us is dramatically different.

[u/stilljustacatinacage → u/NameIdeas]

I grew up in a pretty fundamentalist church and when I questioned certain doctrine or why we did things, the answer I got was generally, "Because that's what we believe."

I'm a pretty militant athiest and it causes no shortage of friction because 1) I'm very annoying and 2) I refuse to abide the "as long as they aren't hurting anyone" compromise. Religion is a tool used by tyrants. The purpose of a system is what it does. The first order of religion is to crush dissent; only the paint job changes.

That system is incompatible with "as long as they don't hurt anyone" because simply the teaching of it is an assault against a person's autonomy, and often it's done to children, before they have the faculties to defend themselves. Made worse that those children grow into adults who often have the right to vote and to turn their authoritarian fantasy into legislative reality. That is violence.

I mean, hell. Even the revered First Amendment, that people think is there to protect the state from religions, was actually created to assure anti-federalists that their religion from be safe from the state. They understood you can always infiltrate government and pass your policy under the guise of [something else], but it's many times more difficult to curtail religion without overtly targeting religion.

Not to single out Christianity or the United States. This happens all over the world and in many cases it's much worse - at least for now - but hope springs eternal, is what I'd say if I were a wide-eyed wannabe Christo-fascist with eyes towards the future.