Screaming into the Wind

I was in my late twenties, arguing with my father-in-law about his nutty pseudo-scientific beliefs and conspiracy theories, when I realized I had a problem. To defend my own beliefs, I had to examine them. Really examine them. And I discovered I couldn’t defend them. My entire worldview—built on seven generations of LDS faith, on binary either/or thinking, on the certainty that comes from never questioning—fell apart the deeper I dug into the evidence against it.

I lost my faith. But the binary thinking continued. For years.

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape 
You don’t spit into the wind 
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger 
And you don’t mess around with Jim

Jim Croce

I became an atheist because I couldn’t find a framework to support both the evidence and a belief in God. I was still thinking in terms of either/or: either God exists and science is wrong, or science is right and God doesn’t exist. I couldn’t see a third option because I’d been trained not to look for one. Mormons are a historically persecuted people, far more insular and tribal than most people suspect. That conditioning runs deep.

Time passed. Divorce. Remarriage to a woman with a completely different epistemological framework—geology background, raised by linguist professors, comfortable with ambiguity. She’s more liberal, I’m more conservative. She was an activist, I’m a veteran. She taught me a lot. Still does. Every day. We’ve both mellowed, moved from the edges toward the center politically.

She encouraged me to get professional help for my depression and other mental health issues. She encouraged me to revisit faith—not because she believed, but because she knew at my core I’m a person of deep faith. I started dialectical behavior therapy. I investigated different religions. I found in the Catholic Church—despite all its flaws and historical scandals—a framework that aligned with my need to balance science and faith. Catholic theology is dialectical, very both/and rather than either/or.

Between my extensive research into Catholicism and ongoing therapy, I learned to embrace and/both. I grew past binary thinking. By then we had two new daughters, my oldest son had come out to me, and I’d spent considerable time simply listening to my wife’s lived experiences as a woman of color and daughter of immigrants, instead of arguing. The bubbles I lived in popped year by year, bit by bit.

It took decades. And it required nearly every aspect of my life to be restructured. I didn’t reason my way out—I lived my way out, over years, with help, with failure, with loss.

I had to have a personal epistemological crisis I couldn’t avoid. The intellectual honesty to follow evidence even when it destroyed my worldview. Years of time to process and rebuild. A partner with completely different epistemological training who had both the patience and the credibility to guide me. Professional mental health support that specifically taught me dialectical thinking. A religious tradition that happened to offer a non-binary framework when I needed it most. Direct, intimate relationships with people whose lived reality contradicted the narratives I’d been taught and believed.

How many people have even half of that?

And that’s why we’re facing what we’re facing in America today. Individual transformation is possible but doesn’t scale.

A friend recently described watching her father-in-law—a chemistry PhD who manages his insulin-dependent diabetes with scientific precision—completely reject climate science. He can follow the evidence about chemical interactions in his own body, adjust his treatment based on data, think scientifically about his health. But get him on climate change? The same analytical framework disappears. He pattern-matches to whatever his podcasts tell him, and that chemistry background might as well not exist.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

John Maynard Keynes

Her mother-in-law knows HIPAA inside and out from years of medical billing. Knows the regulations, understands the system. But ask her about free speech or academic freedom? She confidently asserts things that are flatly untrue, applying the vocabulary and concepts in ways that make no sense. The expertise she has in one domain doesn’t transfer. She’s pattern-matching—using familiar words in familiar patterns—without actually thinking.

My friend’s own husband can see her health struggles with his own eyes. Drive her to the retina clinic, sit through her surgeries, work the phone to get her medications covered by insurance. And yet when it comes to COVID precautions? He’s “humoring” her. Going through the motions. Not actually integrating the evidence he’s witnessing daily. Not changing his mind based on undeniable reality.

These aren’t stupid people. They have the information. They have the capacity. They have the tools.

What they lack is the internal contradiction that makes it impossible to keep pattern-matching. And we can’t create that for them. It has to come from inside, and it might never come at all.

You can define mass and weight and volume, pass the test, use the concepts correctly in approved contexts. But when someone asks if heavy objects fall faster, you revert to the pattern. The knowledge that was supposed to be integrated becomes just another thing you can recite when prompted.

This is what my friend saw after years of teaching: students who could do textbook problems quickly without gaining the expertise that lets you apply those concepts everywhere. Pattern-matching that looks like learning but isn’t. And now she sees it in her family. In people she loves. In competent adults who should know better.

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I made a specific observation recently on Twitter about rhetoric that got considerable backlash. I pointed out that left-leaning dehumanizing language tends to use moral categories: calling someone racist, fascist, homophobic. These are harsh judgments about beliefs and behaviors—sometimes applied too broadly, often unfair, but still fundamentally about what people think or do.

Right-leaning dehumanizing rhetoric increasingly describes people as things: vermin, poison in the blood, abominations. This isn’t making moral judgments about humans. It’s portraying certain groups as non-human, as existential threats, as inherently corrupting.

I wasn’t saying the Left is more virtuous. I was saying these are fundamentally different rhetorical strategies with different historical outcomes. One is harsh political discourse. The other is the specific type of language that historically enables atrocities.

What I got accused of: “You think people with our beliefs are morally reprehensible.” “You’re saying we’re all problematic.” “You’ve painted conservatives as evil.”

Nothing in what I’ve ever said supports that reading.

I’ve tried to clarify. I’m pro-liberty, pro-2nd Amendment, anti-cancel culture. I share the core values most conservatives hold. I’m a traditional Republican voter. My criticism is aimed at specific extremist rhetoric and behaviors within our movement I fear are becoming normalized—I’m not attacking conservative principles or conservative people as a whole. When I talk about “dehumanizing rhetoric” or “extremist elements,” I’m referring to specific language patterns, not broad values.

I’ve explicitly stated: “I’ve never said I think conservatives are ‘morally reprehensible’ or ‘problematic’ as a whole. Individuals, yes, and on both sides, but entire groups? Never.”

But it doesn’t matter.

My publisher’s core audience is abandoning me. Some are even calling for my cancellation, as ironic as that is. The people I was writing for don’t want to hear it. I’ve lost followers—not dramatic numbers, maybe 2.5% on Twitter, 10% on Substack—but the nature of the loss matters. This isn’t random churn. It’s ideological rejection for making distinctions.

This is how the tribal immune system works. Specificity is irrelevant once you’re marked as other. Any critique of dangerous patterns gets translated into blanket condemnation of the tribe. The boundary redraws itself to exclude you. Even explicit denial of the accusation doesn’t stop the accusation.

The system doesn’t engage with the argument. It expels the messenger.

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I’m not completely alone. I have my wife. I have close friends. I’ve made new connections through speaking up. There must be other conservatives out there saying similar things—I can’t be alone on the right as a whole.

But in my circles—in my actual lived experience, in the spaces I occupy—I feel like I’m the only one saying anything.

Others see it but stay quiet. Why? Exhaustion maybe, fear of the costs, hoping someone else will speak up. I don’t know. What I know is that I’m the one absorbing the backlash while others who share my concerns maybe send the odd supportive DM but remain publicly silent.

That’s its own kind of isolation. Not “no one anywhere” but “no one I actually know.”

The losses are modest in raw numbers but real in nature. My publisher’s audience turning away. Readers unsubscribing. Friends going quiet or hostile. Not because I attacked them—because nuance became betrayal. Because pointing out specific dangerous patterns got heard as total rejection.

But I can’t stop. Because if someone says people like my late immigrant Muslim mother-in-law are an “existential threat to civilization,” or my wife is somehow “less American,” or my son is an affront to “God’s perfect law,” I will continue to shut them down. Hard. Replacement theory, blood and soil rhetoric, overt homophobia—these aren’t topics I tolerate. Nor should anyone who values basic human decency.

This isn’t abstract. It’s personal. These are my people. My family. My son.

I have support, but I still feel alone in my circles doing this—being willing to take these hits, absorb these costs, watch these relationships strain and break.

That’s the specific loneliness: having people worth fighting for, but fighting alone in the spaces where the fight matters most.

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The early warning signs of patterns that experts have identified as leading to atrocity are right in front of us. The dehumanizing language. The classification of groups as existential threats. The systematic discrediting of institutions and evidence. The preparation rhetoric—lock and load, when the time comes, they’re coming for us.

People on the Left see it. My wife sees it. I’m probably not alone on the Right as a whole, but I’m alone in my circles speaking up about it.

And here’s the most terrifying part: the people who could most credibly sound the alarm within the tribe are either not seeing it or not saying it. When people on the Left point it out, it gets dismissed as partisan hysteria, Trump Derangement Syndrome, radical leftist fearmongering. The tribal antibodies activate immediately.

But when someone from inside the tribe says it? You just get expelled. The boundary redraws to exclude you. I thought having conservative credentials would give me credibility to deliver the warning. Instead, it just made the expulsion more decisive.

My friend’s father-in-law won’t listen to his son who studies atmospheric physics. Her mother-in-law won’t listen to her, an expert being dismissed as “too young to know better.” My former allies won’t listen to me despite my military service and conservative history.

He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

Thomas Paine

Anyone who might successfully challenge the threat assessment gets preemptively disqualified from doing so.

This is the mechanism that makes atrocity possible: the systematic expulsion of everyone who might interrupt the path from dehumanizing rhetoric to dehumanizing action.

I’ve called out tribalism on both sides. Posted about the manufactured division, the false narrative that we’re at war with half the country. But that nuance gets flattened too. You become the enemy for refusing to be tribal enough. For insisting we’re more aligned than divided. For pointing out that bad actors are exploiting our differences to radicalize us.

The nightmare isn’t just watching it develop. It’s watching the circuit breakers get removed one by one. Every person who might slow it down, might introduce friction, might make people question—expelled. The path from rhetoric to action gets smoother with each expulsion.

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I probably can’t change minds from inside the conservative movement. The tribal dynamics are too strong. The epistemological bubble too self-sealing. The expulsion mechanism too efficient.

But I can’t be silent. Not because speaking up is working—it isn’t. But because silence is complicity.

We’re not going to reach them. We’re not going to create that internal contradiction they need. We’re not going to scale transformation to the millions who would need it to prevent what I fervently pray won’t happen.

But we can document the pattern. We can be on the record. We can make it impossible for people to later claim ignorance. We can show that some conservatives did see it, did speak up, did try to warn people.

And maybe—maybe—it matters for the person who’s where I was at 28. Defending positions they’re not sure they can defend. Starting to notice contradictions. Not quite ready to admit the worldview doesn’t hold together. They need to know there’s a path out. That you can be conservative and evidence-based. That you can have faith and accept science. That questioning the narrative doesn’t make you a traitor.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Attributed to Thomas Jefferson

Maybe I can’t save the tribe from inside. But I can refuse to be silent while it happens. I can be a witness. I can make sure that when people look back, they see that some people knew, some people spoke up, some people tried.

My friend left teaching because it didn’t matter—students could pass tests without actually learning. Now she watches the same pattern in her family, in competent adults who have the tools but won’t use them outside approved contexts. She’s maintaining the Zoom subscription, sending the presents, keeping the relationship infrastructure intact while protecting herself emotionally. Strategic withdrawal while refusing to completely give up.

I’m watching my professional life as an author crater. Watching my audience walk away. Documenting a pattern I can’t stop.

But maybe that’s what we do when we can’t fix something: we refuse to let it happen without witness. We maintain what connections we can. We protect ourselves while staying engaged enough to document what’s happening. We keep speaking up when we can and hope that somewhere, somehow, it creates just enough friction to matter.

We’re not alone in seeing it. We’re not alone in the exhaustion. We’re not alone in the decision to protect ourselves while refusing to completely give up.

We don’t have answers. Just solidarity. And the knowledge that if enough of us keep documenting this, keep speaking up even when it doesn’t work, keep maintaining those relationship threads even when it’s exhausting—maybe we create enough collective witness that it matters.

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Is that enough to prevent what I fear is coming?

No. Probably not.

Is it enough to live with myself?

That’s the only question that matters now.

Someone has to say something. In my circles, that someone is me. Others exist somewhere—I’m sure of that. But in my actual lived experience, in the spaces I occupy, I’m doing it alone.

That’s not enough. But it’s what I have.

I’d rather be expelled from the tribe for speaking up than stay silent while they aim their decisive action at the wrong targets. I’d rather lose my publisher’s support than watch my son, my wife, my late mother-in-law’s community be dehumanized without pushback.

The responsibility of those of us who can still see clearly isn’t to have all the answers. It’s to keep saying, loudly and repeatedly, even when no one’s listening: we’ve identified the wrong enemy. We’re using language that historically enables atrocities. We’re removing every circuit breaker that might stop us.

That’s not betrayal. That’s exactly what loyalty requires.

Even when it feels like pissing into the wind.