UPDATE AFTER MEETING MAGA! Ref: I'm meeting a MAGA tonight. If you had to tell him what is wrong with MAGA

[snot]

43. Why focus on why MAGA's wrong, instead of looking for common cause?

I find that a good starting point is our failure to prosecute the Wall St. banksters who caused the 2008 Great Financial Crash – instead, we bailed them out, allowed them to give themselves the biggest bonuses of their lives, and put them in charge of "fixing" economy. And we still haven't recovered. There are a lot of people who recognize that Wall St. has been sucking the real economy dry for decades.

There's also a lot of agreement that on way or another, we've been spending too much on defense. The Pentagon just failed its 7th audit; DOGE promised to include them in their efforts, but never touched it. A lot of MAGAts aren't too happy about that, and neither am I.

Another area of concern for people on all points of the political spectrum is mass, warrantless surveillance of US citizens. MAGAts may think it's a great idea when used against undocumented immigrants, but most of them aren't so keen on being surveilled themselves – look at what happened to the Jan. 6'ers.

And a lot of people are also concerned about free speech. Republicans used to complain about conservative voices being censored; now the party's eager to censor critics of Israel's actions in Gaza; but I think a lot of us on the ground are willing to put up with having to hear political opinions we don't agree with if it means we can speak and be heard about our own.

Liberals and conservatives may disagree about the details and solutions, but I find that most MAGAts & most genuinely progressive Dems share more concerns about the oligarchy, the MIC, Big Pharma, etc. than you'd ever guess just listening to either the conservative or the liberal MSM, both of which tend to focus on hot-button wedge issues (in part becuase they too are owned by the oligarchs).

So yeah, instead of arguing, I'd try to listen, and look for common ground. You may not chang any minds today, but you might start bridging the divide. And divided we fall, and all that.