Don't Alienate Family and Friends Over Politics

It’s a blueprint for losers, by losers.

Yale’s chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun urged Democratic voters to isolate themselves from their Trump-supporting family and friends this holiday season. “It’s completely fine to not be around those people and to tell them why,” she declared to Joy Reid on MSNBC. “To say, I have a problem with the way you voted.”

Sunny Hostin agreed with Calhoun’s sentiment on The View and supported the idea of boycotting holiday gatherings with family who “voted against them.”

Salon’s Amanda Marcotte went even further in a piece so unhinged I thought it was satire at first. She suggested that women need to punish the men in their lives by punishing themselves. Her totally healthy and not at all insane tips include:

• Divorcing your Republican husband (women who voted for Trump should similarly be thrown away by their spouses according to Marcotte).

• Avoiding marriage all together because according to Marcotte, “with Republicans escalating their threats to take away the right to divorce, marriage may be too big a risk to take right now.” I don’t think I’m being naive in stating that divorce is here to stay folks. Men love having the option just as much as women do.

• Getting sterilized. I’m not kidding. She writes that “Vance and Trump's policies and cultural grievances are exactly why it is an increasingly bad idea to have kids. They are making a world so scary and degraded that it's perfectly understandable not to want to inflict it on a child.”

All of this advice should be mocked. It’s a blueprint for losers, by losers.

Think about it: these tips are being propagated by same individuals who spent the last election cycle lying to their audiences about the migrant crisis, crime in blue cities, the extent of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and how “flawless” Kamala Harris’ muddled and confusing campaign was.

These are the same identitarians and culture warriors who make a living pitting Americans against each other over race, gender and sexual orientation all while congressional lawmakers use insider info from closed-door briefings to get rich trading individual stocks. We’d be thrown in prison for years if we pulled the same crap.

Hostin, Reid and Marcotte aren’t interested in honestly evaluating the pathetic campaign Harris ran. You know, the one where she said she wouldn’t do anything differently than Biden while voters kept communicating their displeasure with his economy. It shouldn’t be shocking that the candidate who was touting endorsements from reprehensible war criminals like Dick Cheney didn’t win. But we should all be angry with male Latino voters instead?

The ire should be directed at the power players who got us into this mess in the first place. The corporate donors who fund Democratic campaigns are fundamentally at odds with what the voters want. Harris took a billion dollars in campaign bribes, ignored the concerns of voters and just assumed she would win by calling Trump scary names like “fascist.” But the only people who won from this horrible strategy were the Democratic consultants who got their cut of Harris’ impressive fundraising.

Americans overwhelmingly feel that the Democratic party will do nothing for them. That is the problem. For first time in nearly a century, voters associate Democrats with cultural issues more than with economic solidarity. The party’s corporate media enablers don’t want to reckon with that.

Partisan media figures would rather have everyday Americans fight one another so party elites can carry on with their dog and pony show. No thanks.

No one should feel compelled to maintain relationships with people who treat them poorly. But let’s not pretend that all Trump voters are vicious and cruel. Let’s also not pretend that the right has a monopoly on cruelty either, which was a hard lesson I’ve had to learn myself.

There are openminded, kind and wonderful voters on both sides of the aisle. Those with influential platforms should encourage dialogue, healthy debate and understanding among Americans rather than promote the anti-social dysfunction that has ripped the country apart for the last decade.