I am sure there is a lot of cross traffic between here and thedonald.win, myself included, although I only lurk there. I've been lucking since before the 2016 election, before reddit even banned the original subreddit.
Since the election there has been a huge number of election fraud posts, and while some of them certainly seem to have merit, there are plenty that don't. As a consequence I see posts that call for "low energy pedes" to leave, or Republicans (that aren't Trump supporters) to leave, etc. I fear that the signal to noise ratio is too low, and it makes it too easy for the MSM to ignore.
I have my own theories about what happened with the election, why, and how, based on what I've read, that I hope are reasonable, but my title question is an important one. It also asks other things. Is the Trump movement growing or shrinking? Are reasonable voices being driven away who really want to sort the fact and fiction? Are we all deluding ourselves?
We've disagreed on some things in the past, but I agree with everything you said here. And I can respect a peacemaker who is so because he's had front row eats to horrors and violence that I'm sure I can't imagine.
I wasn't 'front row', but I was still in a place you'd consider the "splash zone".
The thing is that there's no way to get around the violence of a Civil War. The murals, memorials, and stories about lost friends just become everyday life. You just know to avoid places and things because you've learned what an ambush being set up looks like. It becomes part of everyone's life.
I tried to remind some of these college students I knew that in the Battle of Misrata during the Lybian Civil War, the reason Lybian tanks couldn't advance was primarily because the city had marshaled itself. There were tens of thousands of snipers. Anyone who had fired a gun slowly became an expert over hard months of fighting.
People aren't prepared to think that their plumber, banker, school teacher, garage mechanic, and waitress can become a sniper, a mortarman, a machine gunner, a demolitions expert, or TOW gunner. But it happens every time. The more the establishment pushes, the harder it all breaks down, and the worse the normies respond. It's just a common fact that you should always prefer being captured by conventional forces than partisan irregulars. The partisans are formerly normal people, or worse: opportunistic criminals and sociopaths. They're always more violent and uncontrolled. If you get captured by them, your primary objective won't be to escape, but survive the initial encounter.
That's what war does to people, and when someone says "I'll just keep using force and I'll get what I want!", there will be an angry response in the other direction. They just can't imagine it because they think they're "on the right side of history" or are "the good guys" while they keep attacking innocent people.
It's better to save the filthy communist than to let the normies... all of them... stoop to their level.