[ryandrake]

Imagine having a lot of people you once admired and looked up to as role models, from actors all the way to even your parents, suddenly all within a decade or so take their masks off and reveal that they are actually villains.

[saintfire]

Is it revelatory that human beings having a quality you admire aren't the ideal person you projected them to be?

I'd reckon you'd be hard pressed to find a single person that matches every quality/belief you imagined them to have.

[ryandrake]

I don’t think this is about nit picking some small detail that causes them to fail a quality/belief checklist. It’s not like finding out your hero picks his nose or doesn’t like chocolate ice cream. When someone goes mask-off as MAGA, they are revealing fundamental core beliefs and values that totally flip the kind of person you might have thought they were.

I have friends and family who I never thought had a hateful, cruel, or belligerent bone in their bodies, suddenly start acting like totally different people, in the span of a few years. This isn’t me holding them to some purity checklist!

[parrellel]

"Good People" suddenly going all in on racist rants and hard-core misogyny is never going to stop being disturbing.

Some of them taught me how to behave!? Did they just not believe any of those things?

MAGA is a horrifying movement.

[Applejinx]

It's an object lesson on how certain historical things happened. We go, oh no how could those people have all been inhuman monsters? If only we understood what made them like that.

And the monkey's paw curls…

[mindslight]

Agreed. Additionally, when someone says something latently bigoted or hateful, it's easy to just let it slide because we all have our failings and societal progress is slow. Whereas maggotry is about openly embracing those failings, taking on additional types of failings from other people, and then socially validating it all as a purported political movement. But the only real thing tying it together is frustration with the world culminating in lashing out, which is why when they get into power there are no actual constructive policies in any political framework [0]. (apart from lining the preachers' pockets of course, and now apparently a holy war)

nit: I wouldn't call it "mask off" though, as if it's been there the whole time. I'd say it's more like there is tiny a kernel of that (and let's be honest, who doesn't have this in some form or another?), combined with a lack of willpower and critical thinking, that causes them into give in to the siren song of easy answers from mass-personalized propaganda.

[0] ancap and religious fundamentalism are the only frameworks I've been able to find that fit the maggot movement, and they're not particularly constructive.

[fhdkweig]

Fred Rogers was the same kind, thoughtful person in everyday life as he was when he acted on his show. You can watch the congressional tapes of him testifying on increased funding to PBS and also testifying on not making VCRs illegal.

[kelnos]

That's a little bit of a false dichotomy, though. I agree that it would be rare, even impossible, to find people who match every quality I imagined they had.

But some of those failings are forgivable, others are not.

Getting genuinely confused about pronouns sometimes: forgivable.

Being a loud, public MAGA homophobe transphobe: not forgivable.

[toyg]

"Never meet your heroes."

This goes double when your heroes are actors, i.e. people who lie for a living.