When I stopped lawyering full-time last December, I stopped arguing. It wasn’t just because I wasn’t getting paid my hourly rate anymore. It was because the whole concept of an argument has become pointless. Arguing presupposes and requires a good-faith opponent who will examine facts and evidence and potentially change their mind. That means an audience – an opponent or an observer – who will examine and accept evidence that leads to conclusions that are potentially at odds with prior beliefs. Well, take a look around you now. Do you see a lot of people who are open to argument? Do you see a lot of people whose minds might change? Do you see a lot of people who will look you straight in the eye as the sun rises in the east and tell you that not only is the sun rising in the west, but you’re a transphobe for refusing to admit it?
The only thing to do with such people is to maximize your political power and use it to crush them. We used to be able to argue about our differences. But that was the before times, and it’s incumbent upon you to know what time it is.
You might think that somebody who refuses to believe something obvious that is right in front of his face is an idiot. Well, there’s some of that. Or, that person might be some sort of sociopath. There’s a lot of that, too. But the problem is that it’s not just idiots and sociopaths who are doing it now. It’s allegedly regular people, all on the left side of the aisle – this isn’t one of those both sides things – who are doing it. Congressmen, senators, reporters, people on Twitter. It’s not so much that they don’t recognize that the facts they are citing are false as that they are embracing the falsehood. They are lying to your face.
They know the weirdo who murdered Charlie Kirk is a leftist. They aren’t stupid enough to believe that somebody conservative killed probably the second loudest voice of conservatism in America because of some sort of 4D chess reasoning that’s more painfully convoluted than sitting through a monologue by Kamala Harris after she’s guzzled a couple of goblets of oaky Chardonnay. They know that there aren’t any MAGA dudes who are hitting some furry dude who thinks he’s a furry chick. They know it, and they don’t care. They deny the facts, either claiming they don’t exist, or that they are a false flag, or that they’re invisible.
Nor did they take the second step and analyze the facts to come to a reasonable conclusion. It’s not reasonable to deduce that some spazz firing a hunting rifle into an ICE facility likes ICE, and liking ICE is pretty much a threshold requirement for being on the right wing in America. But no, somehow, it’s more likely that a right-winger would shoot Charlie Kirk or shoot an ICE facility because reasons and shut up transphobe. And because he hit detainees inside a van – which, as the creepy panel van experts at the Lincoln Project well know, you can’t see into – it’s clear he was shooting at detainees, not that he missed the agents. Dur-hee! Oh, and there’s the matter of his notes confessing it. False flag, dur-hee! I’ve said before and I’ll say it again – they ought to call it Occam’s Racist, because if you accept the most likely scenario as the one that probably happened, you clearly hate Latinx people.
So, I don’t argue with them. I’m not going to get on Twitter and try to convince someone who’s lying to me of anything. It’s kind of like being in court. I argued, but that was a situation where you had a judge and/or a jury, and they were usually going to accept evidence and the reasonable conclusions to be derived from it. But you know what I never tried to do? I never tried to convince the other lawyer. That’s because I was never going to convince the other lawyer, or if I did, he would never admit it. Now, I might point out things to make him more eager to settle on my terms, but once we got into a trial, I did not care what he thought. It did not matter if he believed me or not. My job was to crush him. My job was to get that judge, or those 12 folks who didn’t figure out a way out of jury duty, to come down on the side of my client.
That’s what you do in court, and that’s what you need to do in the political arena. You need to understand that your task is not to convince the activists of anything because you can’t convince them of anything. Like the lawyer on the other side, they’re not going to stop believing something they are rewarded for believing. The lawyer gets money for believing it or at least pretending to believe it. The activists get whatever activists get for believing it, or at least pretending to believe it, but whatever they get is important enough to them for them to jettison their dignity and embrace manifest falsehoods.
Nor should you ever correct them when they get something wrong about us. You’ve seen it a million times, where some leftist explains how our Christianity works, or why we voted for Trump, or what we conservatives really think about whichever group is currently No. 1 with a bullet at the top of their oppression chart. They are inevitably wrong. They don’t get us. That’s because they don’t want to get us. They have no interest in getting us. In fact, to attempt to understand us would, in their twisted minds, bestow a level of legitimacy upon us that they simply cannot tolerate. We’re so evil that our theory of mind is not only unworthy of examination, but it’s actually bad to examine it.
So, they say ridiculous things about us and what we allegedly think, and we quite naturally want to pipe up and correct them. But don’t correct them. It’s not your job to fix stupid leftists who say stupid things. You have better things to do. You can be with your family. You can practice your faith. You can set up a game of lint soccer with the guy in the next cubicle over. Anything. Literally anything is more worth spending your time on than trying to convince a leftist that we’re not as awful as he thinks, because he isn’t thinking. You can’t talk someone into thinking their way out of a point of view that they didn’t think their way into.
So, please don’t try. Don’t try to fix them. Don’t help them. You see, when they say things that are obviously and clearly untrue to anyone normal who’s paying attention, they look like idiots. And when they don’t understand us, they are at a grievous disadvantage in dealing with us. Now, we understand them very well. We are surrounded by leftism in society and in the culture. We swim in it, breathe it, and we get it, which is why we’ve been so effective in undermining it. We can see it as it is, so we can see its weaknesses and pick apart the weak links in the chain of commie failure. But they don’t get us, and that hurts them. Look at them tripping over themselves trying to figure out that whole Christianity thing from Charlie Kirk’s memorial. Look at all of them screaming about fascism when normals care about locking up criminals and deporting illegals. Look at Kamala Harris trying to woo back the working class her party abandoned; to paraphrase noted political philosopher Sir Mix-A-Lot, the Democrats chose to toss it and leave it, and we pulled up quick to retrieve it.
That’s why the Democrats are polling on par with foot fungus. Normal people take one look at them and judge them either completely dishonest or utterly insane. And we should encourage that. It’s not your job to argue with them. It’s not your job to help them. If you have to throw them a life preserver, make sure it’s made of lead.
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