My Wingnut Brother

25 Dec 2024 - 09 Mar 2025

My wingnut brother just called. In recent years we have learned to avoid talking politics so that we can maintain a degree of family comity, but this time he wanted to gloat about Trump…didn’t go well.

He accused me of “ideological rigidity” because I was not open to his endless discussions about various rightwing favorites, like RFK Jr and The Great Barrington Declaration. I am closed-minded and anti-intellectual apparently.

And It’s kind of true! I used to be sort of interested in what the right was thinking, in an anthropological sort of way. Surely it is interesting to hear and understand divergent worldviews even if they don’t make a lot of sense. I’m much less interested nowadays, after absorbing a ton of that stuff. It was amusing when it was fringe, now that it is dominant, it just needs to be defeated, there’s no point in sympathetic understanding (except to the degree it helps defeat it)

Notes post phone call. He was very big on the fact that Musk used to be a democrat but had shifted right in recent years. I could not fathom the relevance, I guess the implication is that if a smart tech guy like Musk could drift to the right, why was I so close-minded?

He seems to be butthurt about something I said 8 years ago, calling something "nonsense" (which I did this time too).

I was the one to put a firm brake on the topic before it got out of hand (or it was already out of hand).