I came across this yet again on the latest episode of Truth Wanted, where co-host Dave Warnock decided to pretend that there’s only one side in any political debate.

Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way.To put it into context, there was a caller who was concerned with maintaining relationships with his religious family and while that’s an admirable goal, not always possible but still admirable, Dave tried to push it in a different direction. He said something along the lines of “there was an election four years ago and suddenly, families are being ripped apart by the administration”. I don’t really feel like going back and quoting it directly. You can see the call in question here.

Well guess what? There are two sides to this and neither of them is particularly innocent. I’ve mentioned this before but it’s something I constantly come across, but the left will scream and cry that Republicans are carrying signs saying Biden isn’t their president, when apparently, they slept through the prior four years when their side was doing the exact same thing. Do I think both sides are stupid in that? Of course I do but at least I recognize that it happened. The left seems to have a serious problem with that.

I’ve even brought that up to regressives who are whining about it and they act like they have no idea what I’m talking about. For them, it’s been completely memory-holed. If they pretend they can’t remember it, it never happened.

Apparently, the left has never done anything wrong at all, at least you’ll never get them to admit it. It’s not like they didn’t burn down cities, put people on the other side of the aisle in the hospital and purposely attempting, and sometimes succeeding, to ruin people’s lives. That’s what cancel culture is all about after all.

Now I’m not excusing any of the stupidity on the right. I never have and I have criticized it whenever I’ve seen it. There is plenty to criticize on both sides and often, they both look virtually identical doing it. The idea that only the right is tearing apart families, often for religious reasons, sometimes that’s true. It’s just as true when the left does it though, demanding that if everyone in the family doesn’t share their ideological views, they can’t be in the same room together, that’s every bit as dumb. The one thing that both sides and everyone in the middle needs to stop doing is being stupid.

Give it a shot.

Now I don’t know what Dave meant by any of that and it really doesn’t matter but it’s a symptom of an even larger problem in society and that is group think. You’re either with us or you’re against us. If you’re against us, you’re not really a person anymore. You know who else does that? The religious. In reality, this is all just like a religion, using the exact same methods that the religious have made infamous. You can’t go pretending that you’re better than everyone else when you’re doing the exact same thing. Reality doesn’t work that way.

Now you’ll notice that there are a lot of people of late that are showing up here, throwing a long and ranting comment on something, making a lot of emotion-laden claims and then running away when I ask them to stick around and back up anything they’ve said. The number of people who respond a second time is minimal. They’ve gotten their two seconds of “fame” and their dopamine shot in the brain and now they’re off to do it again somewhere else. If this is your idea of activism, give up now. You’re just wasting your time. You’re just embarrassing yourself and most of these people can’t think beyond the moment to see just how sad it all is. If you can’t back up your claims, if you can’t explain yourself in your own words (a lot of them love to post links and then vanish, as though they’ve actually done something useful), then why are you wasting my time? That’s exactly what it is though, a waste, perpetrated by people who clearly don’t understand the words dripping from their fingertips. If you can’t have an intelligent, evidence-based, rational conversation, then go look in the mirror and ask yourself what the hell you’re doing wrong.

They won’t, of course, because… fee-fees, but if that’s the best you can do, don’t bother. If you can’t show up with your A-game, leave everyone else alone. You’re just making yourself look like an idiot.

Maybe that’s because they are.