Liberals, why don't you like Conservatives?

Here’s what actually happened.

At this point the “moderate” conservative became angry and defensive, accused me of being “condescending,” told me I obviously think I’m the sole owner of the truth, and insisted that people like me are the reason Democrats will never win another election. Apparently people like me hurt his feelings, and he’ll vote for a rapist, liar, grifter, and convicted felon to punish me.

I have encountered a small number of conservative-minded people on Quora who have kept their language toward me mostly respectful, and who have insisted that they are “reasonable moderates” who are open-minded and willing to engage in constructive dialogue. I had an extended back-and-forth on Quora with one such individual yesterday.

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I pointed this out to the “moderate” conservative.

So, back to your original question. It’s not that I don’t “like” conservatives. It’s that we don’t exist within a shared reality.

About five or six comments into the exchange, after this gentleman asked me what I don’t like about Donald Trump, I said that I don’t like Trump’s tendency to promote malicious lies about other people, and his tendency to build policy around these lies. He asked for an example, and I cited Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets.

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It’s worth noting, too, that if you support Donald Trump, you’re saying, at a minimum, that’s it’s not a deal breaker for you that Trump mocks disabled reporters, insults Gold Star families, says he doesn’t like soldiers who were captured because they aren’t real heroes, brags about grabbing women “by the pussy,” calls the Chinese “motherfuckers,” calls NFL players who protest police brutality “sons of bitches,” illegally paid hush money to a porn star to help him win an election, and refers to majority-black nations in Africa and the Caribbean as “shithole countries.”

Rather than acknowledging Trump’s claim as an obvious and ridiculous lie, this “moderate” conservative doubled down on Trump’s lie, claiming, falsely, that there is “video” of a Haitian immigrant walking off with someone’s dead pet in Springfield, Ohio. He claimed that the “mainstream media” suppressed the story because the media wants to “destroy Trump” and wants “open borders.” He had a lengthy conspiracy theory that I’m not going to get into here.

I want to emphasize that this is what a self-proclaimed “reasonable” and “moderate” Trump supporter did. He didn’t resort to cursing or name calling, but it would be a stretch to credit him with intellectual honesty, information literacy, consistent logic, or even-handed beliefs about other people. His logic was riddled with faulty assumptions, poisoned with lies, and backed by wild conspiracy theories.

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It’s not that I “don’t like” conservatives.

Back in July 2024, a user on Reddit posted a photo depicting a person carrying a dead goose down Cleveland Avenue in Columbus, Ohio. A Google Street View of the photo's background shows the photo was taken in Columbus, not Springfield as numerous right-wing accounts have claimed. A month later, users on X began reposting the image, claiming falsely that the photo depicts a Haitian immigrant who had stolen and killed a pet goose from someone’s yard. Everything about this is wrong. The image is a Canada goose, not someone’s pet goose. It was roadkill. There is no evidence the man planned to eat it, no evidence that he was Haitian, and no evidence that he was an immigrant. Finally, and perhaps least consequentially, the original post was a photo, not a video. The entire narrative was invented. The man who took the photo said, “"I wish I never took it, for sure. And I hate that the picture that I took is being weaponized to use against immigrants, or really, any other group. They always have to have somebody to use as a weapon. Some group to be the bad guy.”

I calmly and patiently pointed this out.

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I have inferred that such people don’t like me. So I’m not going to expend a lot of my energy trying to make myself more likeable to them. I’m certainly not going to try to placate them.

He doubled down again, saying “this isn’t the only example of media gaslighting the public.” Never mind that the original example he provided was an example of him lying, not an example of the media gaslighting the public. He then cited several more lies: vaccines cause autism and death, unnamed “elites” are steering the path of hurricanes to punish conservatives, FEMA ran out of disaster relief money because it gave it all to undocumented immigrants, Democrats are importing immigrants to vote for them illegally and “replace” white Americans, and of course, Donald Trump won the 2020 election. In short, he responded to being called out for promoting a malicious and dangerous lie with a flood of more outrageous lies. Anthropologists refer to this tactic as the Gish gallop: a rhetorical technique in which a person attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them all.

Just in the past few months, people on Quora identifying as conservatives have responded to my comments by calling Democrats, and myself in particular, “scumbags,” “hacks,” “foreigners,” “children,” “man child(ren),” “cucks,” “pussies,” “NPCs,” “degenerates,” “bed wetters,” “moonbats,” “losers,” “insane,” “loonies,” “lunatics,” “nut jobs,” “scum,” “disturbed,” “twisted,” “lazy,” “fatties,” “delusional,” “conspiracy theorists,” “poorly educated,” “feeble minded,” “stupid,” “useful idiots,” “morons,” “low IQ,” “retards,” “dolts,” “fucktards,” “libtards,” “libturds,” “butt-hurt,” “jackasses,” “Dumba$$es,” “assholes,” “asswits,” “sensitive,” “snowflakes,” “Kunta Kinte,” “comrades,” “pro-Hamas,” “pro October 7,” “Nazis,” “Demo-Nazis,” “Dimwitocrats,” “DUMBocrats,” “Demo-lunatics,” “demokkkrats,” “DemocraTicks,” “democraps,” “demoncraps,” “Demafucks,” “bitches,” and “Bidenbitches.” They’ve gone on and on about the “plandemic,” told me that I “hate America,” that I have “TDS,” that I “belong in a jail cell with [my] new boyfriend, sticking it in [their] butt” and “don’t know what the fuck [I am] talking about,” and to “go play with [my] dildo” and “eat shit” and “drop dead.”

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