Mask off, at least 46% of Americans are bad people. Most people in every country are chiefly interested in furthering their own goals.

Wanting to further your own goals !== "bad people". You can want to further your own goals while helping others.

I believe this "further your own goals" thing is a particularly American thing.

There's a saying that Americans vote with their pocket-books. It does appear to me that whatever other policies they claim to espouse, when it comes to the crunch they vote for tax reductions.

I suppose that's partly because of pork-barrel politics, and the huge tides of money that wash around US election campaigns. If all the politicians are bought and paid-for, then they can't be trusted to handle taxpayers' money properly.

Absolutely this. Media had my neighbor yelling in my face and threatening to fight me over our differences in opinion over masks. Objectively he's not a bad guy, and I told him that I think we have more in common than not, then went inside.

We really need to stop this cycle of hate. I want to feel safe in my neighborhood and get along with folk. We don't need to agree, but we need to recognize that we are Americans and on the same damn side in the end.

> You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people

So? You judge the moral and intellectual merits of things by how popular they are? That's your call. I don't.

> Both sides have outspoken nut jobs stealing the spotlight

Not really. Only one set of nutjobs actually stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the results of an election. You've bought into a narrative that minimizes what is an insane fact.

QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals. Black and white thinking is stupid in this day and age yet it seems to persist

The ideals of Qanon were implicitly accepted into the American right, and have been working their way into the mainstream. How do you think MTG got where she is?

The Republican party is the party of conspiracy nuts. If you don't like it, then kick them out. But you can't, because a significant percentage of your group would be gone, and a larger percentage don't disagree with much of what the Q-tards believe.

Great to see percentages thrown out without citations, unless you’ve of course spoken to most of them throughout the US personally.

Also I’m not a Republican so

I assume you know how to use google, yes?

I literally just googled "what percentage of republicans believe in qanon".

This is the first result:

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

Stop being so fucking obtuse.

It seems you don't read and are the one that is fucking obtuse. Your link says 25% (not a larger percentage) agree with some "central tenets" of QAnon (as do 16% of the population as a whole), the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government, which to be quite honest is not that far fetched considered the whole Epstein ordeal, so not surprising to see these stats.

It's easy to see why such a large portion agree with that CENTRAL TENET (capitalizing so you can read it when you skim this).

If you actually go into the study you might even see that compared to the 25% of republicans, 14% of independents and 9% of Democrats are also QAnon believers. So to say that it's solely a Republican issue is disingenuous no matter how the media paints it (even the article you linked over exaggerating its source).

Don't be so fucking obtuse and learn to read past headlines

Now you're being deliberately obtuse, and/or disingenuous in your response.

> the central tenets that is mentioned in the article being a pedophile ring in the government

The central tenets (plural) of the study the article references are as follows:

-The government, media, and financial worlds in the US are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex-trafficking operation.

-There is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.

-Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

Quite obviously that's significantly more extreme than your ridiculously watered-down interpretation of the survey's questions.

More interesting tidbits:

-43% of QAnon believers are Republicans, compared to 19% of Democrats.

-QAnon believers are 2.7x as likely to be conservatives than liberals.

-QAnon believers are 4.6x to get their news from far-right sources than from mainstream news outlets.

QAnon is predominately a right-wing problem. Trump rallies were rife with Q imagery. It also permeated the January 6 riots.

In your mind, "both sides" is valid. In reality, "both sides" is complete horseshit. The right is full of morons and assholes, and imo intentionally obtuse and/or disingenuous people such as yourself fall squarely into the latter bucket.

MTG got where she is because she's a representative from a small, hard red district. The whole country could absolutely hate a representative and it makes no difference because it's the populations of those small districts that vote.

MTG got to where she is because she was willing to parrot Qanon bullshit to gain the position.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/marjorie...

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-02-24/a-q...

> QAnon nuts don't represent all conservatives

They represent all conservatives who vote republican. Literally, in congress and as our last president. If you vote for a qanoner you can't say they don't represent you.

Sure, just like all who voted for JFK were right then and there baptized as Catholics

They were certainly represented by a catholic.

Not all of the people who stormed Congress believe in QAnon, nor did I even cite that as a reason at all, so who cares? Can't really see why you brought it up except to try to strawman.

> QAnon nuts aren't all conservatives, just as the people inciting riots and looting during BLM don't represent all liberals.

Logical error here; your point would make sense if someone said "all conservatives are QAnon believers".

The problem isn't "black and white thinking"; it's somehow shrugging your shoulders at the fact that a former president of the US incited a mob to storm Congress in an attempt to stay in power, as if this is some kind of third-world country. "Oh but don't hold people voting Republican accountable for that", you argue. Why not? Party hasn't even held him accountable and are likely going to nominate him again.

Washington D.C. is a high crime city, but you can safely walk in the National Mall at any hour of the day or night alone, and people do. If it were anywhere else it would be a place be a place most people wouldn't feel safe at when alone late at night in a city like DC.

Know why?

Because Capitol Hill and the Mall are secured six ways to Sunday. It is the seat of the US global empire. Congressmembers and high officials are common sights all around DC and they move around pretty freely. It is common to see them around town. It would seemingly be easy for extremists to find these people and intimidate of harm them, and yet this almost never happens.

That's because DC itself is highly secured, at least where the government people live and work. Congress and the Mall are a secure fortress within a secure city. There are soldiers, air defenses, snipers, and heavy surveillance everywhere.

The J6 protesters had no guns, no supplies, no secure communications, no central command. They were no match for capitol security. The police officers who allegedly died that day are not listed at "line of duty" deaths, i.e. no one says they were killed by J6 protester violence. Capitol security shot and killed an unarmed woman protester, the only death attributable to direct violence. This was also not the first time protesters had occupied the building.

I don't claim to know what actually happened on J6, but it is quite obvious that many of the media narratives about it are highly incompetent at best.

You can only lie to my face so many times before I start to question your credibility.

? This is just dumb. Who cares whether they were armed? The point is that they had the motive to do wrong and they took action in furtherance of it. They don't deserve leniency for being various forms of incompetent.

It's pretty disgusting you'd make the moral choice to peg the media as lying instead of being appalled that people stormed Congress and fought the capitol police.

Do you hold the other occupiers of Congress to the same standard?

Congress chose to let them in because they could have stopped them if they didn't want them inside.

You probably didn't read and understand what I said.

THE CAPITOL IS ONE OF THE MOST SECURE SITES IN THE WORLD. UNARMED PROTESTERS DID NOT STORM IT. THEY WERE ALLOWED INSIDE.

That the media cannot figure something so simple out tells all.

Google "video of january 6 protesters breaking into the capitol."

Fuck your deliberate obtuseness.

That's the "basket of deplorables" thinking. You'll hear less-dressed up terms like "garbage people," like someone ought to be thrown out with the trash, applied to huge populations. It's kind of wild.

Nah, about 15-20%. Hillary's "basket of deplorables", as stated (IIRC "about a third" of Trump supporters was how she put it—her entire point was that most weren't actually awful). That was just true. Generous, even. The rest were along for the ride for various reasons, often because they felt compelled to vote for the candidate most likely to support a pro-life position.

Maybe not 46%, but c'mon. No Democrats ever came up to me at a restaurant and told my three year old they hoped Daddy was smart enough for vote for Hillary. I don't recall any attempts by Democratic supporters to run a Trump bus off the road. I've never seen the equivalent of "Fuck your Feelings" flags flown by liberals. Remind me of the years long conserted effort on the part of liberals to claim a Republican politician was born in some other country. How many of that 46% you refer to believe to this day that Obama is a secret muslim or Kenyan? Please be honest.

You clearly haven’t lived in San Francisco if you think crappy behavior is limited to the right.

The vile they’ll spew at someone who doesn’t adhere 100% to their views is pretty shocking.

And in terms of violence didn’t some Democrat shoot at a bunch of Republicans playing baseball a few years ago?

>You just classified 46% of voting Americans as bad people

They're not all bad people, most are just stupid.