They chose to reject all of that along with the social contract we all have as a society.

This is the key part I want to disagree with. There’s this impression among the sensible-thinking people in the US that the 1/3rd of the country that supports Trump is actually aware of what’s going on, and supports it. They are not. Their news is full of incredible degrees of deliberate lying, such that anyone who comes up and tries to even tell them the reality of what’s happening, they think is just lying maliciously on purpose.

They don’t know about CECOT. They don’t know about the corruption. They don’t know about innocent people getting snatched up. They think Biden fucked up the economy, and Trump is going to fix it, and Democrats are whining and making up all these crimes that Trump allegedly committed that he really didn’t do. It’s really, really difficult to grasp how distorted their view of reality is.

This is why part of the occupation in Germany after the war was setting up movie theaters and rotating people through, showing them films of literally what had been happening. They didn’t know (you could say they should have known something was wrong, and they kind of did on some level, but they legit didn’t know the full extent). Some of them were crying in the theaters. It wasn’t that they all thought “yay concentration camps, let’s kill all the Jews.” They didn’t know.

I’m not making excuses for them. I’m saying you have to understand the problem to solve it.