Tom Ritchford
2 min readOct 4, 2019

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This seems completely delusional to me.

Can you give examples of this working in the real world? I mean, look at some of the great authoritarian mass movements in history — Nazism and Fascism, Soviet or Chinese communism, the Khmer Rouge. How were they defeated?

Or what about individuals? Can you name even one person who went all in for Trump and then was won over by “gently nudging them into progressivism”?

When someone has deliberately decided to believe what they choose to believe; when someone has decided that they can dismiss any possible evidence against their position as “fake news”; how can you possibly believe that talking with them rationally will work?

It’s not like your strategy is going to be any fun. Please note also that the alt-right specializes in deliberately saying things to “trigger” others — which means things that cause a progressive listener as much distress as possible.

I tried this for years, and I can remember each time I failed. For example, I remember when someone started screaming at me over Facebook that I was a liar, simply because I told them that one of the families who lost kids at Sandy Hook was a friend of a friend on Facebook. I felt required to unfriend these people, simply for my own mental health, because having people scream rage at you is not good for your psyche.

It is my belief, in fact, that your plan will have the reverse effect. I think that this will simply

Pending actual examples of this working, I think this is a terrible idea, and one that will be traumatic for a lot of people.

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