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Thanks for the link. As others have noted, it's extremely long, but its length does help address this feeling of unease many of us experience when observing or engaging with "culture war"-related topics in the modern online space. You wake up one day and everyone is saying something that is obviously false. I'm not sure whether it's helpful or harmful to my case to throw in examples here, but what comes to mind for me are Larry Summers on female representation, Covington Catholic, Kyle Rittenhouse, Trump's "very fine people on both sides", Florida's curriculum on slavery...
Apparently the "stages of grief" don't have as solid a scientific backing as we might hope, but even so, something like those stages are what I have gone through many times in the past few years as these cases have become hot.
Denial - it's just a misunderstanding, after the initial controversy people will look at the full context and realize there was nothing to get so worked up about
Anger - Partisans are inflaming the issue for their own benefit
Bargaining - If my friends and family would just watch this video, they'd see that the media portrayal has been all wrong. I'll just send them the link...
Depression - This is where I usually end up, because none of the above makes any difference.
So I really identified with your experience as an extended example of the "Bargaining" phase I've gone through myself. To be honest, there have been an embarrasing number of occasions on which I insisted on sitting down with someone and showing them a video or reading them an article that unequivocally establishes "the truth", in contrast to the media narrative. At those times, I would have been glad to pay people to watch these videos, because how could they watch the video and still disagree?
I can't say I've had 0% success in these endeavours; I think on occasion I've convinced people that the situation is more nuanced than they were led to believe. But I don't think I've every had anyone really understand my desperation to make them understand, get why these matters are so upsetting to me. So I quite appreciated your essay, not just because we agree on the matter at hand, but because I know how it feels to be so sure you are right but still need someone else to validate that belief.
I've had similar experiences to you, for me the difficulty has been piercing through the veil of expertise of the priesthood. If you sit them and debunk a specific thing, they'll still hold the belief because "If the truth was so plainly different surely all those elite journalists wouldn't believe a falsehood! There must be some more complexity to it that you don't know or understand..."
I feel like in a lot of cases, it's because people have an unconscious understanding that if they let one thing through to show them "yes, the news achors absolutely would tell you easily debunked falsehoods" (and note, this applies to the priesthoods of any political team) it'll all come crashing and they'll be cast out into the intellectual wilderness as we here mostly are; and sadly I have to admit it's a place many people are not equipped to face mentally and emotionally.
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