5 Steps Conservatives Use to Thrust Their Unwelcome Agenda Into Every Conversation

I went for a birthday party, what I got was a diatribe against liberal philosophy

Since Trump’s definitive, humiliating, and pathetic loss in the 2020 election, my life has been blissfully free of conversations with conservatives. For the most part, I’ve banished them all from my life.

The second a friend, family member, or casual acquaintance starts spreading misinformation I ghost them on social media, block them on my phone, and avoid them in real life.

I’ve had enough. I’m done. I’ve spent too much time and made too many sacrifices educating myself to tolerate idiotic, racist and dangerous opinions.

Goodbye and good riddance.

But the other day I was forcibly, and against my will, pulled into a conversation with a conservative. This was a total stranger, but within the course of about six hours he managed to demonstrate the 5 step method all conservatives use to impose their lazy and contradictory ideology onto the world.

It’s a pathetic and sad way of interacting with human beings. It’s one part real life experience, one part volume, one part conspiracy theory, one part maniacal laughter, and one part implied threat. As I finally managed to detach myself from this person, I found myself both frustrated and depressed. At the bottom of this hollow shell of a human being was a lonely man trying to make a connection. It’s too bad he couldn’t see that his ideology pushes decent people away.

The set up

My daughter got an invitation for a birthday party and I blew it. I’ve had a hectic few weeks which have included installing a new furnace and renovating the upstairs bathroom.

Maybe it was the cache of razor blades that came pouring out of the walls. Maybe it was wasp nest I uncovered. I was off my game. I admit it.

The consequence was that I read the invitation to say Thursday instead of Tuesday.

When I realized I missed the party, I felt terrible. Birthdays mean a lot to kids my age, and if somebody doesn’t show up it can be crushing. So I called up the number on the invitation, apologized profusely, and arranged a play date on the following Saturday.

The dad, let’s call him Aristophanes (because that’s hilarious), assured me that we didn’t ruin the party and that dozens of people showed up. That was good to hear, but I still felt a responsibility to keep my word.

1. Real life experience

I’m not one of those parents who drops his daughters off at the home of a complete stranger and hopes for the best. So, I hung around.

Aristophanes didn’t have a problem with my presence. In fact, he proceeded to tell me his life story. It turns out that he was an oil man, and he listed off a dozen countries where he had worked.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the first step in the 5 step conservative plan to leverage any and all discourse to promote the intolerant right wing ideology.

Engagement with other human beings requires a hook, and Aristophanes had one. Traveling all over the world, even if you’re just doing it to rape the land of its natural resources, is interesting.

The second he mentioned he was in oil, I assumed he was probably conservative, but I hoped we could have enough respect for one another that we could let our kids play in peace.

Aristophanes was retired, and his stories about how oil drilling has evolved over the last few decades were pretty interesting. Perhaps everything he said was nonsense, but I’ve got enough of a technical background to sense when somebody is completely blowing smoke.

After the first stage of our conversation, I was ready to accept Aristophanes as a capable professional who had finished a lucrative career in a demanding and complex business. That was the point, the first thing conservatives like to do is establish themselves as an authority figure.

Fine, he’s an expert on oil drilling. That doesn’t make him an expert on everything.

2. Volume

The first part of any conversation is sizing up the person you’re talking to. I guess Aristophanes got the impression that I was malleable. He must have assumed I was somebody that could be influenced.

Now that I write that, I wonder if I’ve learned to cultivate this impression, or if it’s just a consequence of fervently not wishing to discuss politics. There have been quite a few times in my life that people have spontaneously started to tell me their life stories.

As a writer, maybe I’ve learned to respond in a way that makes people feel comfortable so they end up sharing more. Who knows?

With his authority in a professional field established, Aristophanes moved on to stage two. He started to become louder and more boisterous. He began to emphasize his points with nonverbal grunts.

I realized that I’d forfeited the right to be an equal player in the conversation. He was dominating the setting.

Fine, it was his house. I’d made the mistake of not bringing my daughter to the party. He had a right to behave how he wanted. Still, as a mater of courtesy, a good host refrains from turning a polite conversation into a power struggle just because they’ve got somebody cornered.

3. Conspiracy theories

I started to become uncomfortable when Aristophanes began to allow names like Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Greg Abbot to trickle into his conversation. This was when I started to gently push back on some of his talking points, but by then he’d built up too much momentum to be cowed.

He was like an aroused rapist who turns around to blame the victim for not objecting when he first began to get excited. The deflection of responsibility and powerful ideological dismissal of the opinions and preferences of others is commonplace with conservatives. They fear cancel culture because imposing themselves on people is the only way they know how to interact.

The sad part about the conspiracy theory stage of the conversation is that it required him to abandon his professional expertise. The technical and scientific understanding he relied on for a lucrative career in the oil industry was suddenly absent in his thinking, and he didn’t seem able to recognize that fact.

It’s sort of like how nurses can become radicalized to the point where they rage against vaccines and face coverings.

Aristophanes started in on how Biden messed up in Afghanistan. I felt I had to push back and mention that Trump withdrew the majority of the troops and set up the deal with the Taliban.

“Biden screwed up the withdraw,” Aristophanes insisted.

Then he started in on how wind power will never be an effective alternative to oil and cited the disaster of the Texas grid as proof.

I mentioned that wind turbines have been successfully installed in arctic regions and that the failure in Texas should be taken as an example of political incompetence.

However, at this point, he wasn’t really listening to me. He was just charging on with his agenda. Any warning signs that I was sending off were just ignored.

4. Maniacal laughter

By this point in the conversation, Aristophanes was standing more and making bigger gestures with his arms. Rather than lay out reasonable, thoughtful arguments that we could consider like rational people, he was expressing his political ideology in the form of stand-up comedy.

That is, every one of his points now ended in a punchline.

He started in on some idea that Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has taken it upon himself to complete Trump’s border wall.

Because Biden ceased construction, Greg Abbot, according to Aristophanes, decided to build the wall himself. When the federal government insisted the wall couldn’t be built on federal land, Abbot decided to build the wall 100 yards back from the border on Texas land instead.

“Doesn’t that mean the government is seizing a huge amount of land from private citizens?” I asked.

“Eminent domain,” Aristophanes said. He repeated it for emphasis. “Eminent domain!”

Hysterically repeating the phrase over and over does not address the issue of aggressive government seizure of property. I’ve never been able to figure out why Republicans are so joyful about the idea of the government taking the land of private citizens.

“Get this,” Aristophanes said. “All the material to make the border wall is just sitting there, so Greg Abbot sent the federal government a bill for $20,000 a day for storage fees.” Aristophanes began to laugh so hard that his face turned red and spittle appeared at the edges of his mouth.

It didn’t matter to him that the federal government can cut off funding to the state of Texas anytime it wants to.

It didn’t matter to him that his whole story was just an example of absurd political maneuvering.

It didn’t matter to him that what he was telling me was simply disconnected from reality.

He found a reason for mocking laughter, and to him that was enough to believe his position was absolutely unquestionable.

5. Implied threat

As we got near the end, Aristophanes started in with some fear tactics.

“If all oil production were to stop today, how long do you think the US could continue before going dark?” he asked.

I thought about it for a moment and then replied, “Maybe 90 days?”

He smiled as if he had me. “43 days,” he said.

First of all, my guess was very good, but that wasn’t something he would acknowledge. Second of all, it’s important to note that this was nothing more than a hypothetical projection. It occurred to me that it was odd that he wouldn’t take a hypothetical projection seriously about how long the Earth will remain habitable if it continues to be polluted by greenhouse gases.

Also, he was against the concept of renewable energy. How was it not obvious that his doomsday figure of 43 days represented the ultimate reason why we should dedicate ourselves to converting to a more sustainable energy source?

He insisted that the oil industry does not receive any subsidies (which is verifiably false), and then said that the 9 trillion we spent in Afghanistan was to protect the oil fields that can be found there.

“So the military industrial complex is a massive oil subsidy,” I said.

He nodded, “Bingo!”

Bingo! What bingo? You just proved that the whole industry you’re so proud of has been completely propped up from government funds and every dime you ever made was misappropriated taxpayer money!

The self-deceit and delusion

There are two things that make the world go around and that’s energy and money. If there is a criminal act, heck if there’s an interpersonal conflict, the first question you should ask is, “Where did the money go?”

A whole lot of criminal investigation comes down to tracking down funds.

There are a lot of people in the United States who got very, very rich by operating a business that’s essentially an extension of the government. Yeah, it’s up to the president to keep the lights on, so taxpayer dollars go to discovering, maintaining, and protecting energy resources.

It’s bizarre that the whole political right, the same people that use “socialism” like it’s a swear word, simply refuse to recognize that both the oil industry and the military industrial complex are blatant examples of “free stuff from the government.”

The problem is, if you point this out to a conservative, they’ll start to get uncomfortable. When the cognitive dissonance begins to fail and they have to recognize that they’ve been a fraud their whole lives, their reaction can be violent. They get loud. They start to laugh. They use their physicality. They do anything they can to stop you from talking because they just… don’t… want… to… recognize… the… TRUTH!

Saved by my wife

My phone rang and thankfully it was my wife. “Are you coming home soon?”

I tried to explain to Aristophanes that I had to leave. He took the opportunity to pull out photos of the oil rig he’d built in Russia. He’d funded it by shifting money between five shell corporations in a way he insisted was completely legal.

If you insist…

I finally pried myself away, got my daughter, and walked out to the car. Aristophanes trailed along behind, telling me more stories of global oil pollution and great methods for tax evasion.

As I drove away, I felt he was a rather pitiable creature. His wife had left him a few years before. He seemed desperate for human contact, but he didn’t seem to comprehend that cornering people and peppering them with deranged and contradictory ideological babble isn’t an effective way to make friends.

He was desperately clinging to dysfunctional beliefs that had screwed up his life, and he steadfastly insisted on not recognizing what he should have had enough intelligence and education to understand.

I almost felt compassion.

But then again, I’ve seen too many conservative bumper stickers that read “fuck your feelings” to feel too much concern with his pain.

Get it yet dittoheads? Your philosophy doesn’t work. There are still consequences, even if you refuse to recognize them.