Since 2016, when President Donald Trump first rode down the golden elevators and left-wing media told their readers to hate him, liberal family members across the country began to ostracize their own. “Wrongthink” became a high crime with the suitable punishment of social shunning often being carried out.
Almost all conservative Americans have at least one family member who has told them they don’t deserve to be treated like they are human because they decided to vote for Trump.
These zealots of left-wing ideologies have no issue texting you novels of disappointment for your views and explaining that your support of closed borders, a strong economy and safe communities makes you a fascist, MAGA cultist. At no point do they consider the possibility that you are just as informed about national and local issues as they are, but have just come to a different conclusion on how to fix them. No, your decision to vote Republican makes you an uneducated pawn in an authoritarian regime.
After almost a decade of this behavior, it seems The New York Times’ (NYT) opinion section has a plan to mend the fences … kind of.
Former Obama speechwriter, David Litt, wrote a guest essay for the NYT titled, “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?” Before you even begin to think that maybe some members of the liberal mafia have somehow defrosted their cold hearts towards their conservative family members, that’s not really what Litt is arguing for here. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
The premise here in this exceedingly annoying @nytimes oped is ‘we your betters forgive you for your ignorance. We realize shunning you just made you worse. And convinced none of you to get vaccinated 10x over, as you should have. So we’ve decided we can speak to you again in the… pic.twitter.com/z9hPtZRGXK
— Jennifer Sey (@JenniferSey) July 13, 2025
While Litt does advocate for opening doors to family and friends previously closed due to political disagreements, it’s clear he hasn’t changed his mind that genuflecting to left-wing ideology makes him superior to others.
Litt, like many in his world, almost cut off a family member over the COVID-19 vaccine.
“My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?” Litt wrote.
So, he sympathizes with his left-wing allies who are willing to shun those with whom they disagree to “motivate them to mend their ways.” Still, he found that, for some reason, this abhorrent behavior did little to make conservatives learn their lesson.
“No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for. But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished? It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive,” he said.
He admits that “self-reflection” wasn’t the catalyst for his newfound sympathy for his conservative family member. Instead, it happened because their “places in the pecking order reversed” when Litt went surfing with him. Intellectually, of course, Litt saw himself as supreme, but on the waves, his family member was better. And despite the “shunning” he’d experienced from Litt, still took the time to help him get better.
Damn you stupid plebs! Why can’t you listen to Your Betters!! Don’t you understand that I went to *Yale*?? I worked for Obama! (he basically says exactly this, I am not exaggerating)
— Trish “the Plate” (@TrishtheSkeptic) July 13, 2025
“According to surfing’s unwritten rules, he had the right to look down on me. But he never did. His generosity of spirit in the water made me rethink my own behavior on land,” Litt said. (ROOKE: Legacy Reporter Emerges From New York Bubble Only To Miserably Fail At Grasping ‘Texan Stoicism’)
“While I’ve never asked if our friendship made him more open-minded — we’d find that embarrassing — I’m confident the answer is yes,” he added.
At this point, it seems as if Litt is finally learning an important life lesson: “[O]stracism might just hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.”
Still, according to Litt, despite knowing that political differences play “into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence,” there are those he believes should be considered “untouchables” for their political views. He spent the entire piece pontificating about everything he had learned about reconnecting with family and friends, but ends by saying there are still those he’d willingly shun over politics.
Yale Univ.’s @AmandaJoyMD says we should put our political differences ahead of family:
“There is a societal norm that if somebody is your family that they are entitled to your time & I think the answer is absolutely not. So if you’re going through a situation where you have… pic.twitter.com/LlQzoEN8Uy
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) November 9, 2024
And despite his last paragraph concession, his fellow liberals in the comment section came with pitchforks and torches.
“Let’s keep it simple. REPUBLICANS voted for and continue to support an administration of dangerously inept miscreants who are ruining the Great Society that My Country once was. Did you ever meet a liberal who spoke favorably of Civil War? Do not normalize evil,” Tom from New Jersey said. (ROOKE: Texas Flash Flood Brings Important Issue Into Perspective)
“Coddling the traitorous Confederates after the Civil War was a huge mistake. We should not make the mistake of coddling people who support a known traitor today,” Joe Rockbottom from California wrote.
“I utterly reject all Republicans – including both of my awful brothers and my ‘ditto-head’ sister – because they are wrong. History will be quite unkind to this kind of awful garbage citizen. You should, too,” Old Military Veteran from Washington, D.C., said in part.
There are 625 comments and counting, almost all of which say the same thing. Republicans are cultists who don’t deserve to be treated with an ounce of human compassion or dignity because they disagree with me and my group. They don’t want to follow Litt’s advice to reach across the aisle in hopes your kindness might somehow turn your conservative friends and family to your side. His fellow Greeks burned his Trojan horse before it could even enter Troy.
There is no better representative of political discourse than this piece and its comment section.
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