This conservative and I kind of had a truce where one of us would explain in detail our perspective on a situation (this was in 2019) and the other would try to rebut or sometimes just learn about something we hadn’t heard before since we ran in different circles.
This went on for months and it was a pretty interesting series of a couple dozen conversations at least. We shared contact information and even texted each other when we found relevant articles that may influence the other, being as objective as a political article could be.
One time, he asked me to provide him with a list of everything Trump had done since he was sure that every single thing Trump was being blamed for was politically motivated and unsubstantial.
So I went through one of those megalists online, and only cherry picked a few dozen of the things Trump himself had signed, like raising the limit of allowable mercury disposal in the. I got through about 4 legislative actions that Jeff checked on his phone, then for the first time, Jeff interrupted me and told me to stop talking and insisted that these were all politically motivated slights and not actually trump’s responsibility.
I pointed out that Trump had signed every single item on this list and these were only his actions as president that directly harmed Americans, and Jeff said that schools were in danger because the DOE was distributing sexually explicit books in elementary schools.
That threw me since obviously we weren’t talking about that at all (and it was easy to show Jeff that that was like three schools in the whole country that were having discussions about explicit sexual education books in elementary schools, rather than the nationwide curricular upheaval he thought it was).
Jeff said he had to go, left, said it was great talking to me again, and then literally every subsequent time for the next 2 months I saw him at places we used to both frequent, would put his hands on his hips, look around as if there were more than three people at the track, saunter back to his truck and drive off. I even waved a couple of times and said “hey!” and he just pretended like he didn’t see me from maybe 20 feet away.
This conservative and I kind of had a truce where one of us would explain in detail our perspective on a situation (this was in 2019) and the other would try to rebut or sometimes just learn about something we hadn’t heard before since we ran in different circles.
This went on for months and it was a pretty interesting series of a couple dozen conversations at least. We shared contact information and even texted each other when we found relevant articles that may influence the other, being as objective as a political article could be.
One time, he asked me to provide him with a list of everything Trump had done since he was sure that every single thing Trump was being blamed for was politically motivated and unsubstantial.
So I went through one of those megalists online, and only cherry picked a few dozen of the things Trump himself had signed, like raising the limit of allowable mercury disposal in the. I got through about 4 legislative actions that Jeff checked on his phone, then for the first time, Jeff interrupted me and told me to stop talking and insisted that these were all politically motivated slights and not actually trump’s responsibility.
I pointed out that Trump had signed every single item on this list and these were only his actions as president that directly harmed Americans, and Jeff said that schools were in danger because the DOE was distributing sexually explicit books in elementary schools.
That threw me since obviously we weren’t talking about that at all (and it was easy to show Jeff that that was like three schools in the whole country that were having discussions about explicit sexual education books in elementary schools, rather than the nationwide curricular upheaval he thought it was).
Jeff said he had to go, left, said it was great talking to me again, and then literally every subsequent time for the next 2 months I saw him at places we used to both frequent, would put his hands on his hips, look around as if there were more than three people at the track, saunter back to his truck and drive off. I even waved a couple of times and said “hey!” and he just pretended like he didn’t see me from maybe 20 feet away.
You done broke his brain! Cognitive dissonance hits hard.