The summer before covid I was in a public park campaigning for Bernie. The vast majority of interactions we had were positive. Anyway, some chunky white Gen Xer came up to me while he was sucking down a vanilla ice cream cone and started ranting about how he was a chemist and climate change was fake. I remembered something Bill Nye said once, and asked this guy why Venus was hotter than Mercury, despite Venus being farther from the sun. (Answer: a shitload of C02 in the atmosphere.) The guy could not answer and soon left. The question clearly bothered him a great deal.
Obviously you have to take my word for all of this. I know it’s also oozing with liberalism, but I mended many of my evil ways the following summer.
I remember once a few years ago I told one of my mom’s lib friends I was a communist after talking to her about recent events for over an hour. She literally froze, mouth agape, at me, for about five seconds - and then started trying to tell me I couldn’t actually be a commie because Trump was the most communist candidate and I had been bashing on him. Further proof that for a lot of American normies “communism” and “dictatorship” are basically synonyms.