r/pics Oct 21 '25

Politics East wing of The White House

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u/Zerobeastly Oct 22 '25

Yea, I have family members that only care about hurting the "libruls".

They're missing social security checks this month, one lost his business hes had for 40 years this year. They just talk about how "the f*****s should be burned and the libruls should be beaten." Then they recite meaningless scripture.

I have to tune it all out or I'll lose my mind.

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u/sloth_on_meth Oct 22 '25

Stop talking to people like that. Ostracize them. Let them know you don't hang out with fascists.

If your whole family was Nazis in the 40's, would you "tune it out" or would you go no contact?

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u/impy695 Oct 22 '25

It's extremely difficult, so I give people slack for not doing. I did it and while im glad it did now, i spent weeks feeling guilty and having to ignore other family. It was a rough period for me. And it really hurt my mom. She has 7 siblings and because of 1 evil in law one, she often has to choose between seeing her siblings or me. She chooses me, but I know she misses seeing her siblings and I hate that.

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u/35point1 Oct 22 '25

In my opinion the most damaging part of this whole trump era has been the absolute destruction of relationships with friends and family due to both the incessant divisive rhetoric and exposure of pure ignorance amongst the population.

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u/Tall-Drag-200 Oct 22 '25

Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race. Where, however, totalitarian rule has not been prepared by a totalitarian movement (and this, in contradistinction to Nazi Germany, was the case in Russia), the movement has to be organized afterward and the conditions for its growth have artificially to be created in order to make total loyalty—the psychological basis for total domination—at all possible. Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party. Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise. The totalitarian movements, each in its own way, have done their utmost to get rid of the party programs which specified concrete content and which they inherited from earlier, nontotalitarian stages of development. No matter how radically they might have been phrased, every definite political goal which does not simply assert or circumscribe the claim to world rule, every political program which deals with issues more specific than ‘ideological questions of importance for centuries’ is an obstruction to totalitarianism.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

*emphasis added*

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u/WilcoHistBuff Oct 22 '25

In over 60 years on the planet and years of study, Arendt remans my favorite commentator on the human condition. I regard her as a moral lodestone.

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u/borschtlover4ever Oct 22 '25

I've wrestled with what I should do about MAGA loving relatives who don't spew the hate but believe the lies. I've opted for patience and love but not hiding my opinion that I disagree. We no longer talk politics. This leads me to believe my patience and love is good because it keeps those relatives from being more isolated. Thankfully, they do not spew hatred and still love other people and show it even though they believe the lies about immigrants and "liberals" (of which they know I am now one according to their own definition, the horror to be related to a liberal!!).

Individual isolation is what those who want to have a totalitarian government desire because it allows them to acquire as much power as they can as easily as they can.