If you don't try to understand someone you won't change their mind.
There is a lot to unpack there. You already have a prejudiced and a bias going into your thought of them based on their choice of only two real options. Think about that.
You are looking at the world through a straw, almost with an ideological lens of religion. Politics are the new religion in ways, and yours is terrifying.
I don't think this about republicans or any other political group, but if you're a Trump supporter after all that has happened (birtherism, 'grab her by the pussy', banning an entire religion from US entry, separating children at the border, 'Jews will not replace us', refusing to denounce and hiring white supremacists, 'fine people on both sides', 'when someday I leave [office], whether it's in 4 years, 8 years, 12 years, 16 years', praising Putin, Duterte, Kim Jong Un), you are beyond the pale of civilisation. You have supported racism, fascism and a naked grab for power and the destruction of democracy in the US and around the world.
If you break the rules of civilised society and violate the right of others to exist or vote, you can expect to be shunned.
Denouncing white suprmacy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0cMmBvqWc
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/status/1311469297613504512
https://twitter.com/authorMCWebb/status/1311499351043313665
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6hxPYWD50
Did you see what happened to that French school teacher? Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?
The media has damaged our psyche. There are not peaceful protests in Portland right now. There have been riots for months! I use to live in Seattle, and the media did a very poor job of covering CHAZ. I made this:
https://battlepenguin.video/videos/watch/9f81cd38-3ee9-4f26-...
Antifa is not an idea, it is real. There are cell groups who have done terrible things and the media paints them as peaceful protestors. They're not. They're straight up descendants of The Students for Democratic Society and The Weather Underground ideologically. The protestors in Portland are Domestic Terrorist. The National Guard was finally called in this week to stop them from burning things down.
Suppressing speech: that's fascistic
Getting people fired because they support a politician you don't like: that's fascistic
Calling everyone you don't like a racist or white supremacists: that's fascistic
The hard left, big tech and big media are the fascists.
It's like, come one, I live in Portland. There's no media conspiracy and the city isn't burning down from "antifa terrorists" or whatever. Take a step out of your filter bubble.
How many Biden voters would approve of his full-throated support for the Iran and Iraq wars? How many support his current stance against Medicare for All? How many would defend the Obama administration's escalation of the Drone Wars (assuming they're even aware it's going on)?
The bigger question here is how many Americans were voting for the the least terrible option?
Even if, as a progressive, you find Biden milquetoast and uninspiring, he at least isn’t an embarrassment to the office and to the country.
But I never doubted for a second that they weren't trying to do their best. Trump, I did, and that's why I voted against him.
https://battlepenguin.com/politics/who-will-lead-us-from-war...
Trump expanded the global War on Terror and drone strikes in particular which are the biggest component of it. It doesn't make sense to exclude drone strikes, they are the largest part of the war.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/trump-escal...
But yes, it's likely drone strikes have gone up. They went up under Obama. They will go up under Biden. It matters not who is president, we will drone more each year than before. There is no doubt.
He has avoided actual on the ground wars, carpet bombing (Libya) and created historic peace treaties with three nations who now recognize Israel. Obama got a peace prize while he was in active conflicts for his entire presidency and actively bombed 7 nations.
Trump has done nothing to change policy - he kept occupying troops abroad, expanded strikes globally, undertook strikes on Iran and assassinated a top member of that regime illegally in Iraq - we haven't seen the fallout yet.
Also if you're willing to overlook Trump's racism and fascism in favour of a slight change in foreign policy (even if it was real), I'd suggest some introspection at this point.
He is, however, one of the few presidents in the past century, to have avoided starting a new war.
Biden has a record of participating in a government that supported intervention in Syria and Ukraine, and his family benefiting from it, (whether legitimately or not is not my concern).
For this reason I have reluctantly preferred Trump to Biden.
What do I do now, how would I continue to participate in a society full of people who think and feel like you?
Can you provide an instance where Trump's individual action prevented a military engagement or war that was actively lobbied for by leading Republican figures?
It seems unlikely for a President to start a military engagement without the support of their closest political allies and constituents. So it would seem that blame for previous wars should fall across both Congress and the President, and you can no doubt agree that many of the same Republicans (and Democrats) are in the same seats that they were then.
How do you only worry about what you read about Biden and his record on wars, where you even bloody admit that you're not really concerned about "his family benefiting from it", and IGNORE everything else that should worry you? Like a denial of the reality of the actual virus killing Americans (1 website says at the moment more than 243000 dead, that's like having a 9/11 number of deaths, followed by a 9/12, a 9/13, with two towers and 4 planes crashing every day all the way past Thanksgiving, with the latest being 2 more planes smashing into 2 more WTC-sized towers on a 12/1/2001...).
Let me try to answer why I think that is: you like Trump, for whatever reason (maybe you're racist, maybe you're brainwashed by Fox to think Biden is the devil), and you looked for a justification for liking him, and you found one when you read about him "profiteering from war". Good enough for you, everything else is irrelevant.
Where do you think she got the ideas? Fox? Other media outlets? Or does the sewer link into social media have an unknown source?
Your own mother notwithstanding,it’s almost certainly the case that not everybody who voted for Trump did it because of “a fear of the future” at least not anymore than anybody else who votes against any other candidate.
I was on the phone with my mom earlier and one of her friends called her up. She's a republican, but they avoid politics. She asked her, genuinely afraid, if she thought that Harris would steal the presidency and convert the country to socialism. She's not an idiot. She's a physician, but was still so caught up in fear mongering that she genuinely believed that the government would steal her income and that there would be riots in the streets as we turn into a third world nation. I'm going to think about her differently after hearing that.
This is probably the first time in my life where I am going to look at people differently based on who they voted for and I hate that. However, I can't get it out of my head that they voted for a president that has so disgraced the highest office in our country and that they did it because of a fear of the future burning so far inside them that they felt another four years of Trump was preferable to even as bland of a change as a Biden presidency will be.