Raise your hand if this happens to you:
You’re at work, or in a family or friend gathering and someone casually drops a “current thing” comment into the mix. The parroting begins. It’s not needed, but it’s the language of the Cult.
“I know – right?”
“I can’t believe HOW stupid some people are!”
“He’s/She’s just the worst!”
“I can’t believe they get away with those lies!”
The only problem is, you know that the “fact” is verifiably false. But the rush to pile on the #MeToo validation by everyone else has proven that you’re the only one who rejects the narrative.
Maybe you say nothing. Maybe you just shrug and say something so cryptic and deeply coded that it could be taken as agreement. Or maybe you push back so very softly that it only hints at your disagreement.
After all, you didn’t come here to fight. You’re here because you’re earning a check, checking on loved ones and/or just tryna get your brunch digested and spill some tea about the new Spin instructor.
It’s interesting how comfortable most of my lefty friends are about bashing the right. It’s also interesting how insulated most of them seem to be from FACTS regarding RussiaGate, Hunter’s Laptop, PedoPete, Ivermectin, Myocarditis, Azov Nazis in Ukraine etc.
There are a number of Lefty-ish people who are reporting on this stuff – Jimmy Dore, Kim Iverson, and Bridget Phetasy to name a few. But the minute they disrupt the narrative, the Cult comes for them and calls them *gasp* Right Wing…
Ironically, I’ve got gay friends who DESPISE the Trans/Non-Binary Movement. I’ve got artist friends who are COMPLETELY over inflation. I have teacher friends who regret taking the C19 shots and won’t let a needle within a mile of their minor children. But all these things are told to me in confidence. For they too are living in “incognito mode.”
I was with a group of friends recently who “mask shamed me” at an event while one of our other friends – a Californian and staunch Climate Change Progressive – wandered mask-free away from the critical gaze of the group. I heard him subtly whine about the mask wearing a few times (which was NOT being enforced at the event we were attending) but he capitulated to the Cult when he saw the lay of the land.
Oh give me a troll
In a livestream chat roll
And I’ll own his Fed keister all day
But IRL when I’ve heard
A discouraging word
From my friends – I know not what to say…
It’s a Purple Pill conundrum. We KNOW these people. We love these people. But when we’re in a group – there’s no WAY we’re getting through to these people. So my favorite game is called: How Gently Can I Push Back Without Setting Off The Alarm?
The goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind or even to “out” myself as an “enemy to the narrative.” The goal is to make the tiniest pinprick in the narrative. Juuuust enough to let a little bit of air out without making a “shhhhhhhhhhhh” sound. The CCP practices “death by a thousand cuts” and I honestly think that’s what it’s going to take to “deprogram” our loved ones. NOT “reprogram,” mind you.
All we need is to get everyone back to their original factory settings – before the Marxism and cultural civil war started to pervade errythang. We had “diversity of thought” and “diversity of opinions.” One of my lefty friends was super 2A even though she HATED (nearly) everything else about conservatism. (She really wasn’t a fan of high taxes either.) And that was cool – because even if we disagreed about foreign policy or the border, we could come back to GUNS’N’AMMO baby!
Handing out Purple Pills isn’t easy. It takes a discerning ear and a delicate touch. It takes dipping your foot into alternative spaces (like Dumpster Fire and The Jimmy Dore Show) to understand the language of the left. It takes acknowledging that some of the people on “your side” are terrible and that some of them have done terrible things. And then – like giving a Malti-Poo heartworm meds in a peanut butter pill-pocket, you just slide that sweet little Purple Pill into the conversation…
“I can’t believe BLM didn’t give ANY of that money to families. I guess it all went to Biden’s campaign…”
“I’m just so over the shots and masks. Everyone got Covid anyway – so what’s the point anymore?”
“I’m really not comfortable with biological men exposing their genitals to women and children in vulnerable spaces. How would you feel if someone who was visibly male was in charge of helping YOUR two-year-old daughter change in a dressing room?”
Tssssssssss
The puncture has been made. Maybe it’ll make a difference over time. Maybe it won’t. Maybe that person will find the hole in his or her bias and patch it over with some bias sharing friends and talk about what a TERF you are. Or maybe – juuuuuust maybe, before it can be patched, another one of YOU will make another tiny little pinprick. And then another. And after a while, the raging cultist will go back to Jimmy Dore or Glen Greenwald and start to think. Just THINK!
At least until then – we still have Incognito Mode…