War Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?

Source: New York Times - Archive
By David Litt
Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother.
I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license. My early memories of Matt are hazy — I was mostly trying to impress his parents. Still we got along, chatting amiably on holidays and at family events.
Then the pandemic hit, and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn’t shocked when Matt didn’t get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I’d imagined we shared.
Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.
“Work’s been good?”
“Mhrmm.”
My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?

I wasn’t the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’” An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create “teachable moments,” it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers’ deaths.

Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be “ostracized” — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so.
But that was before social media. We live in a world of online fandoms, choose-your-own-adventure information and parasocial relationships. Few people who lost friends over the vaccine changed their minds. They just got new friends. Those exiled from one version of society were quickly welcomed by another — an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives.
There has been a sorting into belief camps, algorithmically and in real life. It dictates whom we match with on dating apps and where we live. We block those we disagree with online, we leave the group chat, we don’t show up for Thanksgiving. Recent data suggests that today, one in five Americans is estranged from a family member over politics. More points of deep disagreement will surely arise: over Trump’s immigration crackdown and use of the military in domestic affairs, over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA mandates, over antisemitism, over a megabill that takes health care from the poor while cutting taxes for the rich.
No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for. But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.
These days, ostracism might just hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.
I wish I could say I learned this through self-reflection and study. What actually happened is that I started surfing. After moving to the Jersey Shore in 2022, I signed up for lessons. Despite my advanced age of 35 and lack of natural talent, I got hooked. Matt was the only other surfer I knew. I put my principled unfriendliness aside.
From the moment we began paddling out together, I could tell my cold-shoulder strategy had backfired. I’d spent the peak of the pandemic in a cultural bubble, and he had done the same. Driving to a break or changing into our wet suits, he’d often express opinions — about the merits of vigilantism, or the health benefits of Mexican stem-cell injections — that I found slightly unhinged.
Where is this coming from? I wondered. The answer was nearly always “Joe Rogan’s podcast.”
I assumed our surf-buddy experiment would either fail spectacularly or bring Matt over to my side. Neither of those things occurred. Instead, the connections we found were tiny and unrelated to politics. We agree that “Shrimply Irresistible” is the perfect so-bad-it’s-good name for a seafood restaurant, and that Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” is a classic. Although I still wouldn’t call myself a Rogan fan, we share an appreciation for his interview with the surf legend Kelly Slater. Matt and I remain very different, yet we’ve reached what is, in today’s America, a radical conclusion: We don’t always approve of each other’s choices, but we like each other.
It helped that in the ocean, our places in the pecking order reversed. Matt’s a very good surfer — one might call him “an elite” — and I am not. According to surfing’s unwritten rules, he had the right to look down on me. But he never did. His generosity of spirit in the water made me rethink my own behavior on land.
Three years after my first surf lesson, Matt and I haven’t really changed each other’s minds on major national issues. But we have changed each other. His fearlessness in consequential surf made me more courageous. His ability to go “over the ledge,” launching himself off breaking lips, helped me curb my overthinking. Ostracizing him wouldn’t have altered his behavior — and it would have made my own life worse.

I suspect that’s true for Matt as well. While I’ve never asked if our friendship made him more open-minded — we’d find that embarrassing — I’m confident the answer is yes. Last year, when I briefly considered running for office, Matt said he’d vote for me. When I asked why, his answer had nothing to do with party or policy. “You’re a regular guy,” he told me. “You walk the dog.”
When I share stories about surfing with my brother-in-law, people often tell me about relationships in their own lives pushed to the brink by politics. Sometimes, they’re proud of ties they’ve severed. More often, they’re hoping for a way forward. How can we pierce bubbles of misinformation? Can friendships fractured in the Trump era be repaired?
My advice is always the same. Our differences are meaningful, but allowing them to mean everything is part of how we ended up here. When we cut off contacts, or let algorithms sort us into warring factions, we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics. Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence.
There are, of course, some people so committed to odiousness that it defines them. If Stephen Miller wants a surf lesson, I’ll decline. But are most people like that? In an age when banishment backfires, keeping the door open to unlikely friendship isn’t a betrayal of principles — it’s an affirmation of them.
 
Remember that any relationship with a leftist is conditional on sharing 100% of their poisonous ideology, and it changes with the 24 hour news cycle. They're like vermin, but even hungry vermin are more loyal than a leftist.
If they're younger than 25.

I know a lot of older leftists that I can have spirited-but-pointless (because we'll never shift each other) arguments about politics and it never poisons our relationship.

It really seems to be a serious symptom of the youth, where they absolutely can't interact with the other side, and it's really atrophied their critical thinking skills.
 
lol Manlet (Obama is 6'1")
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Here's him and his brother in law
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Of course he is a Barack Obama speechwriter; this is all Barack's style of hiding your serpentine malevolence under the cloak of empathy. All the feelgood stuff in the second half of the article is manipulative garbage. He isn't sorry he damaged his relationship with his family, he is sorry things didn't work out for him when he did. He isn't trying to mend fences, he is trying to regain his clout, both in the family and wider society. And he is trying to slither away from his responsibility in poisoning social relationships when he had the upper hand. He is a fucking snake, and he needs to be treated like one.
 
Setting aside your petty political differences for the sake of familial love is what would commonly be referred to as "tolerance". Not besmirching them under your breath, but appreciating them as people you know and care about. It's what we know as real human decency, not that he's ever really known what that was.
 
You can always find common ground with someone on the other side of the political spectrum. Just talk about your love for that one super mario bros., a mutual distrust of zionism and agreeing Trump denied the Epstein list because he is on it.

The divide is healing, oy vey GOYIM shut it down!
 
I'm the only conservative in my family but no one has snubbed me or cut off all contact because they're normal people and not retarded. The shit we see on the internet is not the real world, the retards crying that they hate their Trump supporting family are a loud minority
 
I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother.
You're just a fucking prick.
My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?
And no one, least of all some inlaw, is going to question their beliefs because some PRICK doesn't want to talk to them. If anything it's a blessing.

I wish I could say I learned this through self-reflection and study. What actually happened is that I started surfing. After moving to the Jersey Shore in 2022, I signed up for lessons. Despite my advanced age of 35 and lack of natural talent, I got hooked. Matt was the only other surfer I knew. I put my principled unfriendliness aside.
And of course as soon as YOU need something, well, who has principles anyway?

From the moment we began paddling out together, I could tell my cold-shoulder strategy had backfired.
"help, help! it's the consequences of my own actions!"

I assumed our surf-buddy experiment would either fail spectacularly or bring Matt over to my side.
Always scheming, have to do the work no matter what.

There are, of course, some people so committed to odiousness that it defines them. If Stephen Miller wants a surf lesson, I’ll decline.
Just tickling the edge of self awareness.

keeping the door open to unlikely friendship isn’t a betrayal of principles — it’s an affirmation of them.
"I did literally nothing wrong."


Jesus christ.
 
I suspect that Matt never noticed this guy being "rude", because the writer was always insufferable anyway, and Matt was tolerating him because he married a family member.

The best response to someone "cutting you off" over politics and crawling around again later is always "I didn't really notice." More importantly, it should be true, because people like that are fickle, fair-weather, and shouldn't be more than an acquaintance.
 
"I do not have the social capital to get praised for bullying the people I disagree with."
Though I will be fair. He could be hating the guy for just being with his sister and that's just the public excuse.
One thing you will need to watch out for is that these people are not in it because they care about a topic but because it grants them social capital. As right wing politics garner more and more social capital they will quietly switch sides.
 
I don't get why these people dislike Joe Rogan so much, since he also claims to value open mindedness?
Joe Rogan is just code for "right wing podcasts" to these people. At least, that's how my in-laws use it.
I can actually track what the current NYT propaganda is by how my mother in law refers to chuds. For ages it was "Joe Rogan listeners", then "Putin Lovers", then briefly it was "Crypto-Bros" and now, of course, it's "Trumpsters".
 
Bold of them to suggest this when they've been fanning the flame of "ANYONE WHO DOESN'T AGREE WITH US IS LITERALLY HITLER AND A NAZI AND IS EVIL AND HAS NO MORALS AND SHOULD DIE. EVEN BEING ASSOCIATED WITH THEM IS THE SAME AS SUPPORTING THEIR VIEWS REEEEEEE" for the past 10 years.

Congrats, you've solidified this mindset in a lot of people. Trying to undo it now with a simple article is like trying to spit on a raging inferno to put it out.
 
I wasn’t the only one thinking this. A 2021 essay for USA Today declared, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’” An L.A. Times piece went further, arguing that to create “teachable moments,” it may be necessary to mock some anti-vaxxers’ deaths.
Matt is a retard for welcoming a Jew who'd mock his death and subsequently his sister grief if it meant dunking on le conservatives.

It's like legitimately living with a psychopath, what bothers me is that conservatives (and I mean that in the broadest sense, bill Maher and Joe Rogan are 2004 democrats, but the Overton window made them right wing Nazis) are always willing to lend a hand and let bygones be bygones when this retard is obsessing about trump and fascism and evil and how he is part of that by voting for him, while they are surfing, that bro dude doesn't realize that his brother in law is staring at the back of his wet head thinking even for a couple seconds that if he suddenly "drowned" that would be one less anti vaxxer trump voter fascist nazi in the world.

That is true terror to think about and I don't blame anyone who thinks "the other side" can be redeemed or ignores their ideology would morally justify murder of your own family, you'd go insane 9 out of 10 times if you had to accept this.
 
A lot of this happened because for a long time, your politics was essentially fairly disconnected from real life. People had different opinions about abortion and gay marriage but unless you were actually getting an abortion or gay married, that stuff is something you could argue about without going insane about it because it's mostly a debate on social norms that is removed from your day-to-day. You might not even have any idea your family member had a wrongthink belief, because they might just stay quiet when people bring it up at Thanksgiving and tuck into their mashed potatoes instead of talking about their beliefs.0

Then covid happened. Suddenly you had to put your politics front and center, literally on your face. Think masks are retarded and that you should be able to have your children out in public enjoying the sunshine? That's not a belief you can just have privately and pull a lever for a candidate based on. It's something your family, friends, and neighbors will know about. Vaccination was another of those things where people might have had different beliefs from yours for years and you wouldn't have known. But once covid vaccines rolled out, places had differentiated treatment for those with and without vaccine cards. You'd know your brother-in-law wasn't vaccinated because he wouldn't have a card to show the restaurant hostess in order to be allowed in.

There was no way to "go along to get along" during covid, no way to simply smile and nod at the idiocy while continuing to live your own life as you saw fit. Millions of people who had previously been going along to get along had to make choices that visibly and obviously put them out of step with their loved ones. And then, even before any other politics had a chance to get aired out, the covidians shunned the anti-mask, anti-Pfizer people in their midst.

There was a real weird time in about 2021 where a whole bunch of people who had previously considered themselves "crunchy" leftists with a healthy skepticism toward pharma companies and big government suddenly found themselves ostracized to the point where their only options for building bridges were with right-wing people. I'd say 90% of the people like that I knew became right-wing themselves, and I'm one of them.

I will never, ever forget how quickly these people became okay with cutting off family members who didn't make the exact same choices they did about masks, vaccines, and so on. I will not forget the surveys indicating a large proportion of these people wanted to make people like me live in camps and have our kids taken away.

American pluralism was a terrible casualty of covid. Generations of Americans had a "live and let live" attitude about politics in the family, because it didn't impact Christmas dinner whether you believed trannies were real women, or whether you were a deficit hawk.

But stuff like "is everyone going to wear a mask? Is everyone going to quarantine for a week before our family gets together? Will everyone show their covid test results before we meet up?" meant that contentious political issues became part of the decision making process behind every gathering. Suddenly "going along to get along" wouldn't mean calling a hulking hon "she" for a couple of hours and snickering about it in the car later...it meant wearing a mask you couldn't breathe right through, masking up your kids as well, faking vaccine cards or actually getting a vaccine you didn't want, and pretending to be okay with shunning anyone who was actually brave enough to not go along.
 
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