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Its hard to respect and humanize folks that are actively working on taking away my human rights and dont consider people like me human.

Something I always try to remember is that nobody or almost nobody thinks of themselves as the villain of their story

Adam needs to do one on busting the myth of democracy in America, and exposing the corporate owned oligarchy.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I grew up in a very rural, conservative, religious community. I went to graduate school and moved to a liberal city, but my heart is in the country and I go back often. I hate how urban liberals talk about rural conservatives, and vise versa. Country folk are usually very kind, loyal, helpful, and clever. They’re good neighbors and hard workers.

We mock them for being clowns instead of looking at projects 2025 with the horror it deserves. We made this mistake with Trump. We have to learn from that.

One of the important things I came to grips with over the last decade or so was just how different some people see the world. You can know it on a surface level, but it's very easy to assume that you all hold certain fundamental ideas in common and only disagree on more trivial stuff.

It is interesting to discuss socialism and the Green New Deal as old thoughts. What I struggle with is so many on the left, didn't want that term- socialism. I realize Bernie did. But other left folks would have liked to leave the term behind because of its perception. I don't know how we get away from the whole "say it three times and folks think it is true" when Republicans are walking around saying "the left is communism".

As a person that grew up in the South in a “traditional” working class, religious, moderately conservative (but not unreasonable and often moderate) family, surrounded by moderate to highly conservative, I know “the Right” pretty well. After being a music major and joining the military, I spent a lot of time around both extremes, and started becoming much more grounded with being an independent moderate to highly progressive, I’ve seen both sides even more objectively for a couple decades. I’ve been all over the world and spent time in a lot of different cultures. The biggest takeaway has been that people are more alike than not, regardless of your birth, raised and chosen beliefs. I still spend a lot of time around people I normally wouldn’t choose if it was on me, and all too often, when I’m around conservatives, I’m the most progressive person in the room, and when I’m around very liberal people, I’m the most conservative person in the room. After I started studied science, I felt that trying to take unbiased approach to problems was important to getting the best results. I tired to call myself an independent moderate for as long as I could, but independent progressive is really the most accurate. I do see how so many people box themselves into restrictive and not fully realistic views. With the internet and social media, we seem to have created even deeper and detached bubbles. We all will fall into ridiculous holes of rhetoric and nonsense; it’s just a matter for how long and how deep before we catch ourselves from it. And nowadays, it can feel really isolated and lonely by trying to be so rigid with not getting sucked into either direction it can go. Now that election season is in full swing, with likely yet another election with two candidates that are terrible for uniting a country and a part of systems that are the problem, it’s a frustrating and depressing place to be. I don’t have hope things will go well regardless who the next elected figurehead will be. It’s not that it’s bad to have extreme views, but when you reside in one camp for everything, that when it becomes toxic to a functional society and culture. There are no cookie cutter fixes for everything; that is why an adherence to one political party or set of ideals (as they are most often realized and employed), especially with a mostly two-party system, is terrible for a democratic republic. It is certainly understandable and unpreventable to not get extremely mad and frustrated by “the other side“, but you cannot dismiss them or write them off completely, or it just exacerbates our problems even more. And in an age where we live more in the extremes than in a long time, it allows those with power, influence and money to gain even more control of things, and rig the system against the majority.

I think Corey still misses the point. The job of the Right is to "win" - they treat life and politics like a zero-sum game. If you are to "win" someone else obviously has to "lose" and they sometimes focus very heavily on making sures others lose: if everyone else is losing, then probably you're winning... something... somewhere. That's actually the driving principle of people who live, work, and vote on the right. (and then mix in from time to time a right-driven sense of self-guilt about this that then makes the right want to rally behind a "moral compass" that tries to offset their daily activities in pushing other people into a losing position)

It's also a mistake Liberals make to focus on the dumb stuff like how cartoonish or irrational or hypocritical Conservatives appear, and then dust their hands off and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. As if pointing those things out and laughing will be so devastating a critique that the Conservative will shrivel up and hide back in the shadows.

I’d like to see a video about what the Right gets wrong about the Left. I like what you said - it lurks in the human heart. We all have the same human nature, regardless of political affiliation.

I watched this because I honestly questioned myself, why are smart people for Trump? Maybe there should be one for "What Conservatives Get Wrong about the Left" because conservatives have some pretty vile ideas about liberals.

The portion about villains was so telling, and I've fallen into that trap so many times. Thinking that the enemy is stupid, because if they were smart (the unsaid portion being "smart like I am"), then they'd have come to the same conclusions that I did. But the realization that those on the right have a fundamentally different worldview, where they believe that equality is the enemy and hierarchy is inevitable and good, was jarring. And when you realize that, all the supposed hypocrisies of the right fall neatly into place. It's not actually hypocritical to them to demonize drug use by the poor while engaging in it themselves;

As someone who only recently deconstructed his conservatism (and reconstructed as a socialist anarchist? WTF, me?), this is so true. There is so much determined principled stance’ing on the right, and so much energy goes into dealing with the cognitive dissonance involved in holding positions which are necessarily paradoxical. I was a good guy, kind, helpful, benevolent; I believed in the individualist philosophy, even when it seemed no one around me took it seriously. My shell was cracked from the inside by that calloused disregard for decency shown by my social and religious heroes, and eventually shattered to bits by the raw decency and invested-action of the folk I was instructed to see as diabolical enemy.

It was a democratic movement against slavery in the U.K. too. Decades of campaigns, petitions, boycotts etc. There is a brilliant book called “Bury the Chains, the British fight to Abolish Slavery” which details it. It’s incredibly inspiring

I love the comment about putting kids in public school instead of private! I've been having this argument with my in-laws a ton lately. They insist they'll pay for it, and I keep telling them that's not the problem. I want my son to be exposed to many different walks of life, specifically, different socio-economic walks of life. Hence, it becomes much more challenging to dehumanize and reduce those people to a "problem that needs to be fixed."

The idea that we all are just dismissing conservative people as stupid because we have no idea of conservatives' inner thoughts or philosophies is just not true. A lot of people have family who are deeply conservative and grew up that way so they understand it. I know all the rational I had when I was conservative and I know all the cognitive dissonance required to make the whole cart not tip over.

The day after the 2016 election, I had to attend a work-related seminar about suicide in the US. The presenter showed a map of the US that depicted which states had the highest suicide rates. I couldn't help myself, I jumped to my feet and stated, "It's the red states! They're all the red states!" The presenter replied, "Clearly these people are struggling." It would appear that our systems are failing them.