by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Just from my personal interaction with my far more conservative relatives — whom I love dearly — I’ve noticed an alarming development: debate nullification. This is when an issue becomes so loaded that it’s impossible to discuss it with a MAGA person.
There are two ways this happens.
One is, the received talking points from Fox News and Right wing podcasts are so potent that all that happens when you, a center-Left person, try to talk to a MAGA adjacent Traditionalist conservative is you talk past each other. They are so wrapped up in their media narrative that they just don’t listen to you. They wave off any facts you have as “bogus” because they’re enraged by how they perceive the “woke cancel culture mob” as being “groomers” who are so aggressively gay in their agenda that they will ruin the lives of anyone who won’t become transgender.
You think this is hyperbole but this is pretty much literally what they think.
The other way it happens is an otherwise very serious issue — everything from global climate change to the vicious attack on Paul Pelosi — is reduced to a “joke” that they can crack. So, you the moment you bring up this or that alarming thing that is really serious and in any functioning democracy would be something we would debate to come some consensus as to how to address — they just chuckle and crack some dumbass joke they heard on a Right wing podcast.
It’s all very aggravating.
I just don’t know what to tell you. There’s no solution. The two sides are receding away from each other at such an alarming rate that we’re all very, very fucked. We’re pass the event horizon for autocracy, civil war or military junta. Either you recognize this, or you don’t.
America is facing some severe macro problems that are all going to come to a head in late 2024, early 2025. We just won’t be able to punt these massive problems down the road anymore. The chickens, as they say, are coming home to roost.
