tl;dr: The CEO said he was pro-Trump and he didn’t like the shooting. Certainly not a smart thing to say but not entirely bad, right? Well, he said it to the all the customers via their mailing list.
What’s actually going on is a little bit more subtle, I think.
The people supporting him mostly don’t know he’s a rapist. They don’t know he wants to throw his opponents in prison or kill them. All they see is this incredible opposition to him from people they know, and it just confuses them, because the news they consume doesn’t tell them any of that. And so, they don’t know what the big deal is, and so they just don’t talk about it and plan to vote for Trump sort of quietly.
And, human nature being what it is, if it does come up in conversation, everyone talking to this guy assumes the underlying picture in everyone else’s head is equal to the picture in their own, and so of course this person is already aware that Trump’s a criminal rapist treasonous shitbag who’s dumber than rocks, and just supports him anyway, and so they react with arguing and hostility instead of doing the much harder work of building a shared understanding and engaging in a dialogue that they know isn’t going to resolve into anyone’s mind changing on the first day.
It’s easy to decide that someone’s fully aware of the facts and they’re just a huge piece of shit with how they reach judgements off the same facts you have, and you need to yell at them. That’s rarely how it works though (although, sometimes, yes.) The much more difficult and more successful path is to understand where they’re coming from and how they got to their wrong judgement, and try to work with them to help understand things better even if they’re being hostile or what they currently think is wrong as hell.
This is my opinion on it
I think it’s a bit more cut and dry. This late in the game, nobody that’s going to vote doesn’t already know about Trump and all of his controversies. Whether or not they get the facts from the news they consume, they’ve already been confronted with the ugly truth in some way at some point.
If they are still “not aware” that he’s a rapist, a violence proliferator, a traitor, or a fucking idiot, it just proves they are WILLFULLY ignorant. Which is no excuse.
They don’t get a free pass just because they actively ignore facts. It’s safe to assume they support Trump over literally anyone else specifically because he has these evil qualities.
Pre January 6th tolerating their personal delusion was dangerous but still somewhat tolerable. Post January 6th they are an imminent danger to themselves and everyone else.
I got into a discussion about wilful ignorance and the right with my girlfriend a couple months ago. Me calling them wilful ignorant was my compromise cause at this point the facts are out there and there’s no good reason to vote for him beyond you being evil. It’s extremely easy to fact check those facts you hear about the guy you wanna vote for.
They know and don’t care. And even if they’re in denial, they continue to deny, despite being proven over and over again. They call it fake news, deep fakes, or just flat out say [a thing that happened] just never happened.
Just watch anything from Pretty Little Liars or Daily Show etc. interviews with people at his rallies.
I think there’s a difference between knowing but not caring and not believing it. I know plenty of people who support Trump despite his awful history but I also know plenty more who thinks all the bad press is a lie.
This doesn’t absolve them in any way but you’re not gonna change anyone’s mind in the latter camp by telling them “you know he’s bad, you just don’t care”. And before you say it’s not worth trying, I successfully convinced two different coworkers who voted Trump in 2016 to actually look into the accusations and both voted 3rd party in 2020
I don’t think ignorance is much of an excuse in the US in 2024. You can just go read wikipedia and its sources.
At this point for anyone older than like 15 it’s willful. It’s a willful desire to stay in the comfort of your in-group rather than deal with the negative feelings that come from “Are we the baddies?”
Ignorance is not (just) lack of notions, it is lack of method, it is not having the tools to analyze the notions. You don’t learn that on Wikipedia.
It was very upsetting to me and at the same time very enlightening when I had a long argument with a Trump supporter and realized he literally didn’t have the critical thinking tools to even analyze a source, see if it had self-contradictions, compare what it was saying against verifiable things and see if it was trustworthy. For him it was either “this thing is gospel” or else “everything is chaos and nothing is true and the world is a maelstrom of hopeless lies,” and he was choosing option A.
