Do you think I’m saying you think the earth is flat, or picking an obviously false example to illustrate a point?

The second.

And half the population isn’t “voting for climate genocide,” in fact, a large chunk of them probably don’t agree with their party about climate change policy. Voting choices are a complex beast, and it’s unfair to assume every voter is okay with every policy the people they voted for support. Everyone will have a different set of issues they care most about, and it’s probably not going to be climate policy for most.

The actual number of “climate change deniers” is quite low, and it’s mostly rhetoric used by politicians to justify their actual policies, which is essentially, “doing something is worse for the economy.”

Their platform is intolerance

Again, I don’t think that’s actually true. That’s what they say to rile up their base for the elections (the whole “anti-woke” nonsense), but that’s not what they prioritize when they get in office, and a lot of voters see through/ignore that nonsense. It’s the same idea as with people on the left talking up LGBT rights and fixing healthcare, but when they actually get in office, they don’t really do anything about it.

Your average voter isn’t following the “project 2025” nonsense or even the party platform, they’re largely just voting for their party because that’s what they’ve always done. Or maybe they think that this time their party will do that one thing they keep supporting them for (for the GOP, this would be balance the budget and shrink the government in ways they want). That never actually happens for much the same reason that the Democratic Party doesn’t actually do what a lot of supporters want them to do (universal healthcare, tax the rich, etc).

So your average voter either votes for their party regardless (something like 30% on each side) or they vote based on what direction they think the country should go in (more left or more right), they rarely support the platform as a whole, and IMO they rarely actually care who the candidate is, unless they’re extremely far off from the typical candidate. However, arguments like the one you used earlier assume that supporting a party means support for all of that party’s policies, and that’s just unfair and inaccurate.

The issue is that we have an overwhelming amount of representation from a handful of demographics, politics being one of them, and whenever you have a majority, minorities get the shaft. And that’s what I’m frustrated about. I want a platform with open, civil discourse that attracts a diverse set of people, and so far I haven’t found a platform that provides that. I want lemmy/the fediverse to be that, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. It’s less bad in some ways to most of the alternatives, which is why I’m here, but it still falls quite a bit short, especially on the political side of things. I don’t know how to solve this problem, so my knee-jerk reaction is to try to provide high quality opposition to when I see evidence of group think.

Anyway, thanks for tolerating my TED talk. I despise the GOP as it is today, but that doesn’t mean I think calling them Nazis is appropriate or even desirable. I think good ideas can come from all ends of the political spectrum.