I am not going to apologize for the length of this post.

This is my dad except he's a lib who voted for Bernie twice, but now he supports Biden, even though I can't get him to mention a single policy of Biden's which actually aligns with my dad's beliefs. Basically Biden good because coronavirus gone. (And honestly, although mass vaccination began before Biden took office, I'm not sure that coronavirus would have "gone away" had Trump won the election. Either that, or liberals would be freaking out about our current coronavirus rates rather than celebrating them—or claiming that the president has nothing to do with how they've decreased—or claiming that they haven't actually decreased at all and that we're still in immense danger (this last part is true!). If someone wants to argue that coronavirus would have decreased with Trump in power, I guess you can, although honestly both of these guys are dog shit.)

Anyway, my big thing with my dad is getting him to stop swallowing the nonsense from the liberal media. He actually pays for the Washington Post and I just can't fucking get him to stop. He comes from a wealthy Jewish family, spent his entire life working in kitchens, and just inherited a buttload of money. We live in a pretty peaceful liberal area that is insulated from all the shit that's going on everywhere else, at least for the time being. The result of this is that we just had a huge fight about the Wuhan lab leak theory. His argument was that "everything should be investigated," even though he would have called the same theory a conspiracy just a few months ago when Trump was talking about it. I told him that these fuckers in the corporate press have done nothing but lie and distort since the day he was born—they've done nothing but ruin his life—but he still pays for their lies! We're kind of getting over the fight now but things are still a little tense. He says I called him a fascist, which I honestly don't recall doing. I did say, however, that if you spout racist and fascist talking points (the Wuhan lab leak), I'm going to call it what it is.

Usually every few weeks we'll spend like an hour or two walking and talking. He'll come around to whatever I'm saying because liberals possess, at best, a superficial worldview while communists go to the roots. Then, after a few days, he'll be repeating whatever nonsense he saw on The New York Times front page about how we must incinerate every Chinese person now (while celebrating AAPI Pride) and getting angry at me when I say that fucking place is owned by pedophile billionaires. His childhood friend is a reporter there who "took down" one of the previous corrupt governors, which proves that the system works, right?

He also got so angry at me when I referred to him as a boomer. With liberals, either everyone's at fault, or no one's at fault. The idea that there could be groups, and that certain groups could be more guilty than others, is anathema to them, especially since they usually belong to these groups. (I have met actual socialist boomers who somehow survived the '80s and '90s with their beliefs intact, but we all know that generation is extremely bourgeois in the USA; most of the cool boomers are dead.) They will say that it's wrong to generalize about anyone because it seems racist, even if we aren't talking about races; they will also say, contrary to all historical evidence, that human races are not social constructs and have existed in exactly the same form since the dawn of time.

But yeah, I think it's pretty insightful to call this Joe Rogan syndrome and also to bring up the Mass Line. (I too suffer from JRS because I don't believe that the corporate media lies about everything, just nearly everything, and that what they choose to emphasize and how they interpret events reveals their fascist bias.)

My dad has said positive things about Mao and claims that one of his teachers in school was on the Long March—a white woman who lived in China so long that she apparently forgot how to speak English. He thinks that Cuba is good, that Venezuela has been sabotaged, that the CIA is full of Nazis, etcetera, etcetera. But his emotional attachment to Biden and to the corporate press—we would watch Dan Rather blame Republicans for every last problem in the universe every evening at dinner time when I was a kid—is just amazingly poisonous, and he really does think that he's just kind of this neutral arbiter (as you say) taking in information from all sides. He gets so upset when I say the corporate press is full of shit—the idea that they would ever lie or distort is so painful to him even though it's so easy to point to these massive examples (like the Iraq War) where the consensus is that they did exactly that, and no one was ever punished for it and nothing was ever reformed. He claims that everything is biased—which is actually true and the kind of point that Zizek would make—and I just tell him that I'm biased in favor of the global 99% while he's biased in favor of the global 1% because he actually pays for a newspaper owned by the world's richest man and thinks that it's absurd that they would ever do anything improper!

I asked him a few weeks ago what kind of future he saw for my kids, his grandkids. And he admitted that the best he could hope for was that we managed to "hold the line." Basically, nothing can actually get better. For whatever reason—we have no idea why!—the USA is a pit of despair which only a handful of bright liberal luminaries like Joe Biden can just barely hold at bay. Although liberals rarely think about the future (or much of anything), it's still such a profoundly bleak worldview that honestly goes beyond the most depressed predictions of the future I've seen among leftists. Like, with leftists, we admit that everything can stay the same or get much worse. We are fully aware of that. But we also hope for things to get so much better. We know there's a chance of that happening, too. But with liberals, there is no chance. The best they can hope for is to keep things as they are now, which is completely and obviously impossible.