Fair enough, I’m perhaps being too pessimistic; the lib I work with is very depressing in how he falls back into the stuff being spouted online very easily and I’m probably extrapolating far too much.
That just means you haven’t found the thing that speaks to their soul yet, just something that they agree with on a surface level and doesn’t incept them with a will to unpack anything personally. For me my de-libining came after 2016 when I read what the groypers were saying and thoroughly read intellectual dark web stuff and saw that the lib brand of alternating snark, hysteria and patting themselves on the back for being the “decent” side was completely toothless against and ignorant to these rising political currents.
All of the Democrat messaging I saw felt designed to make them look good only within the parameters of right wing framing, and depended on taking the right’s bad faith arguments at face value (“I thought you loved the troops but now you’re attacking Gold Star families? Busted!”). I saw how the dirtbag left didn’t mince words when talking about troops or back down when another self-righteous fake outrage campaign was started by the right, I saw Richard Spencer get punched once, lose the majority of his following and disprove the notion that the “marketplace of ideas” was the best antidote to hate, and I never looked back.
