Some people want to live in a completely politicized world, in which the very brand of ketchup you use makes a political statement.
This holds zero appeal for me, or any normal person.
Politics pits people against each other in a zero-sum game. The less it intrudes in our lives, the better.
But we all know people who, if you hold opinions that haven't been approved by the New York Times, will certainly shun you.
This seems sick and deranged to me.
And yet:
After nearly a year of COVID hysteria that has involved obviously voodoo science and sacrificing so much of what it means to be human (and as Florida would seem to demonstrate, there was no need to do this), I seriously wonder: can I really be friends with people who cheered this on?
James Delingpole, the British writer who was my guest for Tom Woods Show episode #1834, says he certainly can't. And frankly, I think he's right.
If you had a friend who destroyed your business, canceled a year of your children's lives, and deprived you of things that brought you joy, would you keep that person as a friend?
You may say: this is different. They thought they were helping.
But for heaven's sake, the evidence is everywhere, if anyone has the least curiosity to investigate, that none of this wound up doing a bit of good. So all right, you have a friend who would do these things to you while thinking he's helping people, but without bothering to look beyond a few headlines he saw in the Washington Post.
Still bad.
Yes, I'll be polite to the old high school friends who still show up in my social media timelines. But stay the hell away from me.
I'm genuinely sorry that it's come to this. On some things we can be friends with people who disagree with us. But at this stage of my life I for one am making a deliberate effort to seek out the company of people who opposed stealing a nontrivial chunk of my life from me.
Here, incidentally, is a group of precisely such people, at the ready to support you and help maintain your mental health as everyone else loses their minds -- the Tom Woods Show Elite, accessible here: