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Over the past couple of weeks, the stakes of the culture war have really hit home for me. As I wrote last weekend, the “misinformation gap” between regular voters and reality seems overwhelming.
I’ve long held that building individual relationships can change lives, and can undo a great deal of brainwashing, and I have anecdotal proof: through patient dialogue and loving guidance (and prayer), I helped guide a former student away from progressive extremism and bisexuality (it was a male student, so it’s impossible for him to be truly bisexual, anyway). He’s now a girl-loving populist and, while he’s not totally on the Trump Train, he’s longer a Bernie Bro.
But that kind of patient, incremental relationship-building, while critical, is too slow for our present crisis. It’s also incredibly wearying because it’s so labor-intensive, and because of the immensity of the project: there’s a lot of brainwashing to undo, and most of what needs to be unwashed is quite subtle.
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