My country burns money, resources and human lives to enforce its hegemony on the other side of the planet while I only have health insurance through my crappy job and the infrastructure is crumbling everywhere. How do you think I feel?
The native Hawaiian military was oppressed so harshly, martial arts in general were declared illegal in Hawaii. The locals worked around it by disguising the basics of their military arts as dance. You might have heard of the hula…
Nobody wants to think they were "lied to", even if it's true. Westerners default to thinking of themselves as the main character of the story, and swallowing the idea of having been fooled is difficult, nearly impossible. You can't be a victim, can you? That doesn't fit the narrative arc at all.
Come at it from the other angle. Even those people deep in the shit pit of reaction can still FEEL when an atrocity is wrong, even if they twist it into blaming it on minorities or whatever. The right wing runs entirely on feeling, it's literally all they have. The other side of their knife is taking blame away from the self- it's never their own fault, and they never have to sacrifice anything. The other edge of their knife is the dulling and nullification of feeling.
When someone you know- someone shamelessly liberal- agrees with you that an atrocity is indeed wrong, embrace them and build on it. Not "No, but", but instead "Yes, and"! They're feeling something, and the people profiting from their suffering would prefer if they dull that feeling. Instead, link the feeling to facts- "Here is why the bad thing is indeed bad"- and turn that feeling into praxis- "You can fix it!".
Living proof that general strikes are possible and not just something to vaguely suggest once in a while.