There are anecdotal reports people are avoiding political conversations this Thanksgiving season. That may spare us the annual articles advising how to talk to relatives from another political party, articles in which it’s usually assumed “we” are good Democrats and the unwelcome relatives are trouble-making Trumpers. As someone who’s been a philosophy major, journalist, participant in faction-prone movements, debate organizer, and New York City resident, I’ve had plenty of conversations, most of them civil, with people of radically divergent political views, and if there’s one clear lesson to be drawn, it’s that there are times when it’s best everyone just shut up and go their separate ways.
Below are a dozen such cases, all happening now.
The left-liberals are apparently flocking to the X-like online messaging service Bluesky, and I don’t pretend to know exactly why it’s happening now. Bluesky, which like X has roughly speaking fissioned off of the old pre-Musk Twitter, has existed for a couple of years—and the left-liberals have hated X’s owner, Elon Musk, for at least that long. It seems, though, as if the prospect of Musk now having some official or semi-official role in government was the last straw, inspiring left-liberals not just to flee him and his app but to try recreating the lost Twitter they loved, with its censorious rules, high-profile users who are also MSNBC hosts, and constant ratting on other customers for perceived rules violations and abuse. Fantastic! Let the left-liberals go do their thing, this time unburdened by the dangerous pretense that their little cyber-playground is the whole world, pleasing though that illusion was for a time.
In a big enough sample of humanity, you can find examples that appear to fit almost any political or cultural generalization. In downtown Manhattan this week alone, you could see the highly rational November 20 Soho Forum debate between two Argentines over the merits of Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist president, Javier Milei, then walk a few blocks to visit the spot where mentally ill chronic arrestee Jordan Neely abandoned civility completely, threatening to kill fellow subway passengers and saying explicitly that he didn’t care about legal penalties, leading to him being tackled and held down by good Samaritans—including Daniel Penny, who’s now on trial (also within blocks) for Neely’s resulting unexpected death. But prosecutors here, salivating at rare opportunities to charge white men with killing black men (as ably parodied nearly 40 years ago in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities), have now been dealt a setback in the form of the main witness against Penny admitting he lied about some details of the incident and made it sound as if the witness was counseling restraint while Penny went berserk. That account being abandoned may be enough to make the prosecutors abandon their case. Regardless, as virtually everyone here knows but only about half the residents dare say, the city would likely be far more dangerous if everyone in Penny’s position thought that intervening to stop a self-proclaimed homicidal madman were itself a crime. Debate the details and methods endlessly if you like, but please stop the babbling would-be murderers. (New York City is far from homogeneous, and we may yet see the day when all the people who want the babbling psycho-killers left unmolested flock to Brooklyn while the Daniel Penny supporters, UFC fans, and Wall Street-style libertarians stick to Manhattan—and the more conventional populist Republicans continue to live the pleasantly pseudo-suburban, quasi-rural life on Staten Island, a mere stone’s throw from all the violent socialist crazies of Brooklyn but protected by bodies of water if Brooklyn ever goes full-communist-revolution.)
At the same time that cyber-secession has been splitting Twitter into X and Bluesky, with their slight right and left valences, we’ve been told the financial bankruptcy of Alex Jones’ media operation might lead to his site Infowars being purchased by comedy site The Onion. I can’t be the only person who dislikes the liberal media establishment in general and its court humorists in particular—and roots for Jones to survive in some fashion and continue making at least some of the more libertarian of his fevered right-populist arguments—but who nonetheless wanted to see this purchase occur. It wouldn’t have killed Jones, after all—let him go try something new—and the thought that Infowars and Onion might blend and grow in unexpected ways is tantalizing. I basically got my start as a college humor-writing libertarian and am probably still one of the very few people to have (for example) both the urbane-and-witty Spy magazine and the paleocon publication Chronicles on his resume. I was half-tempted to send the nascent OnionWars (or whatever they plan to call it) a copy of that resume, but word broke that the bankruptcy court proceedings seem to have been flawed and the purchase is on hold. Since the disappointingly boring and establishment head honchoes at The Onion were apparently planning to turn the whole Infowars operation into an anti-gun-rights project, not the gonzo anarchist right/postmodern mashup of my dreams, it may be just as well. At least there’s Splice Today.
Like many people, I believed in paranormal things such as the possibly extraterrestrial origins of UFOs as a child, then dismissed all such things with a skeptical vengeance starting in my teenage years, then started to think in the past decade or so (as congressional hearings and other sources of expert testimony started to pile up) that such things might warrant a sympathetic or at least agnostic second (third?) look, and now (even as I await the posting of recent video of me debating the topic) am starting to think everyone should shut up about such topics for a while. As usual, I’ll probably end up the odd man out, and just as I turn away from the topic in exhaustion, everyone else will be talking about, say, the implications of the government’s massive Immaculate Constellations database of UFO sightings, one of the things that came up in last week’s House hearing on UFOs and perhaps a topic for this week’s Senate hearing as well. The UFO believers have undeniably upped their epistemological game (not coincidentally in a fashion sometimes resembling the mounting expertise of Jones-style political conspiracy theorists) since the days when I insulted them as a snotty teen, but at this point those of us paying close attention have heard so many almost-but-not-quite accounts from second-hand or third-hand witnesses, seen so many photos that could be but aren’t necessarily alien, and have read about so many leaked memos that are long and official-sounding and admittedly surprising but not quite laboratory-report-ready that I’m starting to incline back toward a (mellower) version of my old position on all such matters, from God to ghosts, which was essentially: please shut up until you have something conclusive for me. Sorry, but people have things to do.
Speaking of conflicts (in part) over the paranormal, Prof. Hassan Diab will now teach “social justice” at Canada’s Carleton University despite his 1980 terrorist bombing of a synagogue that left four people dead. But perhaps, given the fanatical attitudes of people who love “social justice,” I shouldn’t say “despite.” The desire to remake the world is often irrationality gussied up to look like rationality, and we shouldn’t be too surprised if the mask drops from time to time. Even John Rawls, for decades touted as the very definition of rationalism in liberal political thought, started out analyzing what were essentially secularized Catholic-theological ideas, with some sort of triune God the great thing lurking behind the veil of human ignorance rather than just a sketch of an improved welfare state. Scratch many a professor, find a pontificating loon. Maybe the culture needs less professing and less preaching. Some quiet time.
Unlike the Canadians, though, I’m not so strongly in favor of quiet time that I think people would be better off dead than in a state of intense conflict. The aforementioned Alex Jones site—not the Onion, at least not yet—notes Canada appears to have euthanized a guy mainly because he was suicidal, mentally ill, and complaining of possibly vaccine-related injuries. Euthanizing the suicidal sounds awfully redundant and may be yet another reminder that a lot of issues resolve themselves best if individuals are left alone without the whole of society having to get involved and get its hands dirty. You do you. It’s the pretense there’s an us that tends to create conflict.
Similarly, it’d be great if that merely-depressed young woman in Amsterdam euthanized earlier this year had gotten over her sorrows and chosen to live, but failing that, the world might be better off had she not dragged us all into her misery, foisting upon us all a debate that could do little more than divide people into factions willing to coerce her, willing to let her die, prone to harangue the rest of the culture for letting this happen, eager to build a medical infrastructure around killing, or perversely (and rather Scandinavianly) celebratory of her decision—all of these positions being ugly and dispiriting conversation knots that could’ve been avoided if she had exited more quietly. Trying to talk a troubled person out of anything is exhausting and often futile, and sometimes you just have to walk away.
It would be nice if such existential questions could be quietly discussed in the academy, but the academy is becoming a place for fighting instead of for quiet conversation. Witness the calls to expel a student from the Pace University School of Law for purportedly using a disfavored pronoun and pointing “aggressively” at a trans debater during a Federalist Society event, something that may not have happened at all but which in academia can bring your semester, possibly even your career, grinding to a halt nonetheless. Since most sane observers who’ve dealt with the Federalist Society know it aims for quiet, scholarly debates about things like whether James Madison gets enough attention in legal circles these days, they’ll have a hard time believing one of its sedate gatherings turned into a threatening, far-right hate festival but will find it easy to believe the left wants to depict things that way. Hysterical overreactions are considered a sign of virtue on the left, one of many things that all good people should hope change in the next few years if the left thinks seriously about where it went wrong lately. For now, while reality offers a Federalist Society where, for example, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch speaks politely about the forced euthanizing of unlicensed pet squirrel P’Nut as one of many ways society is “Over Ruled” by regulation, left-wing fantasy such as the DC Comics-based Amazon TV series The Boys now depicts the Federalist Society as a KKK-like gathering of elite racists, sexual sadists, and murderers. I think it’s safe to say the writers of The Boys haven’t been to any real-world Federalist Society events and safe to say they probably ought to shut up. I say this as someone who has himself written for DC Comics and knows how left-wing and painfully ignorant some of the loudest people in the comics biz are. Stick to evil robots and stuff.
Meanwhile, in another borough of New York City, namely Queens, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is publicly wrestling with the question of how so many of her constituents could’ve voted for her (a socialist) for Congress but also for Queens native Donald Trump (a right-populist) for president. There are several possible explanations, including voters just basing their votes on name recognition and regional loyalty (both AOC and Trump being celebrities of a sort, not to mention locals) and the possible interpretation (toward which AOC seems to be gravitating, perhaps in advance of mulling a 2028 presidential run) that many voters just want a seeming advocate for the unruly working class, whether right-wing or left-wing. That (together with ditching the lefty virtue-signaling pronouns from her online bio) might suggest AOC is toying with the idea of crafting a more moderate image, blending elements of left and right—even as she continues to do radical things like condemn Tulsi Gabbard of all people as “pro-war,” which must be a big, confusing surprise to many of Gabbard’s old neocon/hawk critics. My more mundane theory on why Queens residents might like both AOC and Trump is that they just enjoy crazy loudmouths. I’d almost swear I can hear them across the river here in Manhattan.
Whatever else goes on in Congress, I hope the Senate keeps the filibuster. This may sound hypocritical coming from a guy arguing that it’s sometimes best to truncate debate, but keep in mind the filibuster, often exemplified by senators just reading long poems or recounting their childhoods instead of voting on a bill, isn’t so much a real debate as a protracted announcement that one refuses to legislate at this time, and a refusal to legislate is even sweeter than a refusal to get into protracted arguments. Naturally, some Democrats, who recently argued for getting rid of the filibuster and condemned the stalling tactic as a mere impediment to legislative action, are all for the filibuster now that they’ve lost control of all three branches of government. There’s nothing like losing power to make one appreciate impediments to the use of power.
A particularly striking example of the madness that can befall someone who claims more talk is always good even as she heaps spite on half the people doing the talking is provided by self-proclaimed skeptic Rebecca Watson, who I mentioned in my last column. She ends this new video with two minutes of calling everyone who voted for Trump a “Nazi,” listing all the ways you should try to make them miserable short of outright violence, then pivots like a blank-affect psychopath to say that these days she’s mainly interested in fostering community and meeting neighbors. I hope I don’t happen to live anywhere near her. The skeptics movement, like so much else in our society, has largely been destroyed from within by its hate-fueled leftists, and their autism is no excuse.
If debaters keep on arguing and shouting at each other, though, at least the public seems increasingly aware that talk is cheap and that most of it is meaningless. The continually mounting speed of hypocritical political reversals does more to heighten that awareness than any carefully crafted argument could. For example, publications such as Politico praised Obama as wise for mulling RFK as a possible EPA head just 16 years ago in 2008 but on cue fear RFK as an anti-pharma maniac now. I was an editor for the American Council on Science and Health back then and as wary of fringy pseudo-science as anyone, but at some point you have to start for rooting for whatever causes the hysterics to shout themselves raw and then fall into a peaceful sleep and an overdue silence.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey