Your perspective, while admirable and worthy of emulation, is inapplicable to the situation at hand.

Sure - people individually are great. People as a group are shit. There's a platitude I coined - "the collective intelligence of any group is inversely proportional its size" - that I've stopped using because nobody smarter or more famous than me has popularized it. It doesn't make it any less true.

When talking about group social perspectives, we're not dealing with individuals.

650,436 people cast a vote for Roy Moore. I'm never going to talk to a single one of them. None of them give the first fuck what I think. There will never be an opportunity for me to sit down in a rap session with a single one of them to pass around the talking stick, sip some warm cocoa and gently expound on why a racist child molester twice expelled from the bench is a poor choice for representing their interests in the Senate.

But vote for him they did. They felt that a racist child molester twice expelled from the bench was exactly what my country needs to deal with. So us elitists over here on the Left Coast with our sanctuary cities and paid family leave can suck it.

You can sing koom bay ya about that all you want: I'll bet I could find something admirable about each and every one of them. I'll bet we could hang out drinking sweet tea and eating pimento sandwiches and having a jolly good time. But the fact of the matter is, they think my courts and schools need more Jesus and disagreeing with them, however politely or convincingly, will not dissuade them in their quest. Because, you see, from a national standpoint we've determined that we get no Jesus in courts and schools and they need to change that for everyone.

It's fucking hilarious that we're talking about those poor marginalized white people. Those poor marginalized Christians. Those poor marginalized gun owners. Are they capable of change? Not really.

On an individual level, of course, many people’s political views evolve over the course of their lives. But academic research indicates not only that generations have distinct political identities, but that most people’s basic outlooks and orientations are set fairly early on in life. As one famous longitudinal study of Bennington College women put it, “through late childhood and early adolescence, attitudes are relatively malleable…with the potential for dramatic change possible in late adolescence or early adulthood. [B]ut greater stability sets in at some early point, and attitudes tend to be increasingly persistent as people age.”

So the 20-year-old Nazis? Yeah, there's maybe hope for them. The 50-year-old Nazis? Goose-steppers until they die.

Yeah it ain't good right now. That doesn't mean it's gonna get any better by saying "so what do you Nazis really want?" They wanna Nazi. Full stop. What's changed? They've been emboldened to Nazi. How do you deal with Nazis? Curb-stomp 'em.

Individually? Collectively? We stand to benefit more through shame and alienation than we do by mainlining. Make no mistake - conservative politics have gone completely around the bend (been shot at? Been on TV? It's probably because you're a crisis actor, not a victim). The way to nip that in the bud is through zero tolerance.

I grew up with the Moral Majority demanding prayer in school. What happened? They went so fuckin' crazy against gays, drugs, punk, rock, fun that the kids stopped coming to church. Now the evangelicals are sucking wind and it's glorious.

Granted, I'd trade Jim Bakker and Ted Haggard for Alex Jones any day. But I also know that acting as if Alex Jones is somehow okay is the fastest way to breed Alex Joneses.

I'm fine. My family is fine. My community is fine. Those crazy fucks insisting national parks are communist and that we oughtta arm teachers? They're a problem and I ain't normalizing them.