🧵Yesterday I was in a position where I could overhear three women, all in their early to mid 20s, discussing the assassination attempt against Trump. I was trying to ignore it out of simple politeness. Then they started trying to remember which President won like all the states.
They couldn't remember and one said Kennedy and that's when I snapped and said excuse me I don't mean to interrupt but I have a history background and you're causing me pain from that and from my teenage years being your history: it was Reagan in 1984 and well after he was shot.
They were really nice about my interruption and we started talking and it was fascinating to hear what they thought about the current state of the world. Here are the things I found most interesting from that conversation.
1. They were all convinced that the Secret Service was absolutely hiding something because there was no possible way that some 20 year old kid was able to crawl up on the roof without anyone doing anything about it.
They were all fairly decently up to date on what few facts had been confirmed and they were all clearly keeping up with it closely. And they all agreed that the official story could not be true because it flew in the face of common sense.
We then had an interesting discussion about conspiracy theories in general and I brought up that it was far more comforting to think it was a conspiracy then that the Secret Service was so incompetent and they agreed. All of them said they didn't trust any investigation at all.
One of them said she knew an ass covering when she saw it and the other two nodded. Another brought up the cocaine in the White House and said c'mon, everyone knows it was Hunter's, stop lying about it.
All of them scoffed at the loser boy being a registered Republican. They kept saying he was 20, he didn't know anything, he probably did what his parents did. One of them brought up the ActBlue donation and they all thought that was meaningless as well.
They weren't sure what the conspiracy was, just that they felt insulted to their faces that the Secret Service was acting like that roof wasn't an obvious security flaw. They all agreed the government was going to lie about everything about the investigation.
II. They all think Trump is going to win and going to win in a landslide. That's how the who won like all the states even came up in the first place. They think it will be that level of victory. What's more interesting is they didn't appear to feel any particular way about it.
This is especially noteworthy given the demographic and that I live in a battleground state. To them, it was simply the way the world was going to be. Notably, they all thought he was going to win even before the attempt, it was just that now it was certain.
Trois. They were all fascinated by how their children would be learning about this in history class. We got talking about The Picture and all of them said that picture would be taught forever. I explained that's how I felt about them not remembering Reagan won 49 states.
It was really interesting watching them realize that the history that they were taught all neat and dry was messy when it was happening. (Aside: all three of them clearly wanted and planned to have kids)
Vier. All of them had absolutely no use for either political party. They all planned to vote, since they all agreed that voting was important, but they thought all the people in DC cared about was the people in DC, no matter the party.
We very specifically did not discuss any political issues directly so it wasn't a policy based discussion. It was more that the parties care more about staying in power then trying to solve any problems and that there was a lot of money in making us all mad at each other.
It was very interesting to see how all of this is playing out to people significantly (sigh) younger than I am. If anything, I came away slightly hopeful about The Children. Anyway, here's a red panda. /fin
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