My family and I were having a chaotic political argument about the policies of a school district 2,000 miles away when I realized we need to focus. We either need to talk about a specific event or general ideas about what should happen. It's very easy to alternate back and forth. If we're talking about specifics, let's look up and read the actual policy of the school district. If we're talking in general, then stop referring to one school district 2,000 miles away as evidence that it's a wide spread trend, and let's see if we can agree, in general, on the way things should be in the abstract.

Which brings me to my point, and my advice. Focus on feelings and abstract beliefs first. Don't talk about (e.g.) the specific spending bill, talk about whether military defense or caring for the poor is more important from a personal and moral perspective. Make it a small conversation, leave the paid-for "facts" out of it. What do you and I believe? Can we find common ground? After we find some common ground on a small scale, maybe we can talk about a larger scale. Maybe then we can look at the facts.

I think there are alternate facts. Both left and right have sources of information and narratives as to what is helping this country and what is harming it. Alternative facts are like alternative religions. Alternative orientations and life goals

They are, among other things, ideologies in the sense that they take experiences and narrativize them. It's important, and I think you get this already, is that the symptom of our time is that there's no getting outside of ideology. We can draw from Zizek for example, that the idea that we can be outside of ideology as blinding ourselves to whichever ideology we are using. That's sort of the final step and the bridge between post-modernism towards meta-modernism.

"alternate religions" implies there are real religions. How does that work?

I was at Wood St in Oakland, CA.

I was beat up by that black woman Ramona Cayce. I was washing dishes, and she stole the dish soap. What followed was a black woman hitting me, while people egged her on, and then I was blamed. She is a drug addict, as are almost all the residents, including T, the person who started ALL the fires, and P, who tried to control as much as the crime as possible, and G, who stole 3 cars a night. You want facts? I was there. No one, least of all the New York Times gives a shit about the facts.