After arriving in the United States from Somalia back in 2009, Fiqy never expected to be contacted by a major political campaign—yet Trump’s team reached out, asking him to help energize Somali-American voters before the election.
He took on the task with pride. But now, as a sweeping ICE operation targets Somali communities across the Twin Cities—and after hearing the president repeat harsh, blanket remarks about Somalis—Fiqy says his support has collapsed.
I tried to make sense of that, uh, word salad, and kinda boiled it down to this:
And if that’s OP’s point, well, I think the past year has proved that it’s not true. The system of fascism is not vulnerable to solidarity and tolerance. In 2024, vulnerable voters rejected the idea that they are vulnerable and did not vote accordingly. Instead they looked at even more vulnerable people and said “Well at least I’m not that guy! That’ll never happen to me because I’m not (insert prejudice here).”
We can blame the propaganda machines of Fox and Facebook and Joe Rogan, and they deserve their share of the blame, but I firmly don’t believe Trump voters were merely duped. I think they already believed in a social hierarchy where, among their few luxuries, they get to look down on other people. They came to America, in their eyes the most powerful country on the planet, so regardless of how they got there, they were already more special than their homeland counterparts. They carried with them their prejudices, their views on women, their views on crime, homelessness, and joblessness, and conservative media tapped into those beliefs to form the backbone of their disinformation campaign.
In short, they didn’t “adopt” anything, they brought their own nascent bigotry with them.
having interacted with some in these communities, living around them and having my kids go to school with them, your comment here is so on point. it is constantly a shock when you see bigotry pop up so casually and i think to myself those who want you out of this country are using the exact same language.
They’re blind to this because in their minds, the boundary in the social hierarchy for arrest and deportation (read: kidnapping and human trafficking), is somewhere below their current ranking. All those terrible things are only meant to happen to my lessers, not me. I’m one of the good ones.
I’m sorry to hear that you speak from experience, because I speak from experience too. There were many off-ramps from the highway of crazy, and I think with each passing one it becomes more difficult for cult followers to deal with the shame of admitting they were wrong. They’re in so deep now, I think they’ll go to their graves with it.
honestly i don’t give them that much credit. between religous and cultural based hate, the concept of “we are the good ones” means they would have to see themselves in a potential group that could be kicked out. they don’t. they see the nuance of their social structure and it never dawns on them that Trump only sees their skin color.
I never really understood the idea that these people are ashamed. Voting is private, nobody needs to know who you votée for, in fact you can say you voted for X bût voted Y
I don’t mean like, peer pressure shame. I mean inner shame, psychological shame. The angst of not being to internally reconcile opposing value systems. Like “I want to be treated fairly, but what if someone treats me badly the same way I treat others?” Cultists, narcissists, bullies, live in fear of the answer to this question, which forms the basis of their internal shame.
The cognitive dissonance that Trump voters have is like a debt that accrues interest, and shame is a measure of the total balance of debt. The way you pay down a debt starts by acknowledging the objective reality of having that debt, and giving something up in return.
A normal person, when faced with shame of a manageable scale, handles it by apologizing for wrongdoing, offering a conciliation gift, changing the way they behave and the values they believe in, that kind of thing. Trump voters are incapable of this, as they seemingly don’t acknowledge the debt in the first place. Which means their debt is always growing, the stakes are always rising. Eventually they pass an event horizon, where they believe reconciliation is no longer possible and the only two options are 1) cling tighter to the beliefs, or 2) end their lives, often violently, often with intentional collateral damage.
And we have no shortage of examples of the latter.