November 29, 2025
The left wants us dead, but sure, let’s talk about the game Last Night
by Kevin Finn
AmericanThinker.com
For years, I’ve read articles scolding “leftists” for cutting off coworkers, friends, and even family members the moment they discover a Trump vote or a red hat. The authors almost always conclude that ending relationships over politics is immature, petty, and small-minded.
But is it really?
And must it be all or nothing? Can’t we simply draw boundaries, declare certain topics off-limits, find the handful of things we still agree on, and restrict conversation to those safer waters? After all, Justices Scalia and Ginsburg were dear friends who agreed on virtually nothing of consequence. Justice Sotomayor recently spoke warmly of Justice Thomas. If they could do it at the highest levels of ideological combat, why can’t the rest of us?
I’ve tried.
Nearly everyone I work with is a loyal Democrat. Many describe themselves as Catholic or at least Christian. Yet almost to a person, they support abortion on demand, same-sex “marriage,” and the full transgender ideological package — positions their professed faith explicitly condemns.
They weren’t always this way. In the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, they seemed fairly normal, even if they voted Democrat. Something changed. The party lurched hard left, and they followed without apparent resistance.
Their information diet explains a lot. They used to watch the evening news on the broadcast networks. Over time they migrated to CNN, then MSNBC (now jokingly called MS-NOW, AKA “MS-No One Watching,” h/t Sarah Huckabee Sanders). As those outlets grew more openly partisan, their viewers went right along, absorbing an ever more distorted picture of reality.
So now I spend forty-plus hours a week surrounded by people whose deepest convictions I find not merely wrong, but morally repugnant. When politics comes up — and it always does — the talk is an endless loop of Trump-bashing and Republican villainy. When it doesn’t, they talk sports: football, baseball, basketball, and (God help me) soccer. There’s not an instrument on the planet sensitive enough to measure my indifference to those topics.
That leaves the weather, movies, TV shows, and the occasional complaint about traffic. In other words, almost every conversation is shallow by design. We all know where the fault lines are; we silently agree not to step on the mines. I don’t bring up abortion or religious liberty; they don’t ask why I own certain books or listen to certain podcasts. A tense truce prevails. But when I hear them talking among themselves, it’s like having CNN playing in the background.
I don’t hate these people as individuals. Many are pleasant, funny, even kind in small ways. But I do despise what they believe — and not in the mild “agree to disagree” sense. We are talking about matters I consider existential: life, family, truth, the nature of reality itself.
That is the rub. Can you genuinely like someone while holding his deepest convictions in contempt? I have concluded that you cannot. Respect, perhaps, or at least courteous distance — but not real affection or platonic intimacy. Civility becomes a performance, not a relationship.
If that is the best we can manage in a workplace we didn’t choose, what does it say about a society half of whose members regard the other half’s core beliefs as evil? Simple courtesy might be enough for buying coffee or sharing an elevator, but is it enough to hold a nation together?
Perhaps — except that one side keeps telling its followers, in so many words, that the other side needs to be imprisoned, re-educated, or even shot.
When that is the background music, “let’s just talk about the weather” starts to feel less like maturity and more like unilateral disarmament.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/11/the_left_wants_us_dead_but_sure_let_s_talk_about_the_game_last_night.html
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