I had no idea about #lolbrooks. I had a discussion-based class in undergrad that featured his articles heavily, and I hated it. If you want a classroom split into (pretty evenly) disengaged and enraged students, make them read David Brooks and talk about it together for a grade.

I asked this question in Pubski last week: "To what extent is it our individual civic duty to try to reconcile with political opposition?"

What Murphy doesn't touch on (yet?, I haven't finished) is that engaging in these racist frames is not only "vertiginous", it can be truly sickening. My wife is black; I'm white. It didn't occur in the conversation I referenced in the link above, but my interracial marriage has been leveraged against me in my conversations with far-Right aligned mavens. It's disorienting enough to listen to someone parrot "gorilla arms" insults about Michelle Obama, but I will not tolerate it about my wife.

All I am saying is that to draw this line of militant non-engagement at the level of “thinking and speaking with a racist frame” would require us to tell millions of people to go die in the cesspool they were born into

Yes. In some cases, you let them figure it out on their own. If that means they die in a cesspool of their own making, it wasn't for my lack of trying to get them out of it. They're not entitled to my conversation or my viewpoint.