The following is the script of a video that I posted on my YouTube Channel, @siobhanbrieraguilar.

 

Vera Papisova is a tough Russian woman in a bleach-blonde bob.

 

A former tennis champion, Vera continues her dedication to fitness through Redbull races, weightlifting, and bootcamp classes. In her journalistic career, Vera has interviewed everyone from porn stars to Roger Federer. She is an open and opinionated feminist. As the wellness editor of Teen Vogue, she ran the magazine’s sexual assault awareness campaign, wrote about sexual harassment at Coachella, and won many journalistic awards. It is my impression that she holds herself and those around her to a high standard, and if you dare to interview her, she’s not shy about correcting you, disagreeing with you, and saying things to other journalists like: “I don’t think that’s the right question.”

 

But during the 2024 presidential election, as a journalist, Vera was running into a problem. She had been raised as a leftist, but now called Democrats, and I quote, “f*cking losers.” She became “Republican-curious” and tried to interview Trump supporters, but she found that in New York, and especially if she made herself known as a journalist for a mainstream media magazine, then many Republicans directly would not speak to her. 

 

At this time, Vera was single, and decided to make a profile on a conservative dating app as her alter ego, Veronica, to seek out the extreme right end of the political spectrum and let them take her out on dates so that she could ask them about their dating preferences, what they want out of a relationship, and what they expect from women.

 

If you’re new here, welcome. My name is Siobhan Brier Aguilar. I’m a writer and editor, so I take famous pieces of media, typically articles or books, and I use them as a vehicle to discuss related concepts that were in the article. 

 

Article Summary

Vera’s article is called “I Spent Nearly a Year on a Conservative Dating App as a Liberal—Here’s What I Learned.”

 

In it, Vera explains how, on the conservative dating app, as Veronica, she matched with 60 men, and ended up going on dates with 14 of them. She prioritized choosing men who were on the extreme right, or the “alt-right,” and emphasized in interviews that the men she met on these dates are not a representation of the overall Republican party or Trump’s base as a whole. She intentionally matched with men who had things in their profiles like “alt-right conspiracy theorist.” 

 

On the dates, there was one man whom it seemed like Vera genuinely liked. She describes him as “her favorite” and assigns him the pseudonym “Jared.” Vera followed a strict safety protocol on her dates and ran a background check on everyone she planned to meet with. But when she ran a background check on Jared, she found that just a few years prior, he had sent her an email personally promising to “kill her slowly.” He had sent this email to her at a time when she was a public champion for feminism, so she didn’t know if he would recognize her personally, or if he had simply found her email on a 4chan forum. 

 

When Vera met up with Jared, she was surprised to discover that he was shy, soft-spoken, and even sweet and self-reflective. He didn’t seem to recognize her or remember that he had sent her death threats. He was very tall and a former D1 athlete. He described a hobby of his that started during the pandemic, where he went alone to a series of restaurants around New York to try their desserts and keep a ranking of his favorites. She actually found Jared so interesting that he was one of the few men with whom she went on multiple dates. 

 

But when Jared started to talk about politics, he grabbed the table, and his leg began to shake. He shouted, “Liberal white women are a plague on our society.” He drank 11 iced coffees over the course of their date. At one point, he told a story about how a group of protestors harassed him for wearing a MAGA hat, and he reenacted the scene by standing up in the restaurant and shouting at Vera the same way the protestors shouted at him. People in the restaurant got frightened by his shouting and cautiously watched Vera and Jared for the rest of their date. Vera says that when Jared talked about politics, his eyes changed, and his behavior became erratic. He said to her, “If we lived in a different time, we would be hanging white liberal wh*res in the town square and dragging them through the street for the lies they spread.” Vera didn’t say this in the article, but in an interview, she mentioned that Jared did share that he had many concussions and traumatic brain injury symptoms from his years playing a contact sport.

 

Vera asked him to take a deep breath with her, which he did. He calmed down again and sat at the table. But later in the date, as Vera’s hand rested on the table, he grabbed her wrist, and his eyes changed again. He said, “[White liberal women] say horrible things about me and make everyone hate me and think I’m a bad person.” Vera says that at this point, he was no longer looking at her, but rather staring off into the distance, as if he were in a trance. Vera asked, “What did they say about you?” And Jared snapped out of it and said, “Oh, not me. I meant Donald Trump.” 

 

Vera says that he repeated this problem over a few dates together as she got to know him– he would speak about Donald Trump in the first person, as if he himself were Donald Trump. Vera writes, “It became clear to me that he truly loved Trump, not just because he identified with Trump the politician, but because he identified with Trump the person being considered ‘bad’ by progressive standards.”

 

On their second date, Jared remained calm the whole time. He described his childhood in the Northeast. He came from a nice family and went to a good school. He was a sports prodigy, but started drinking and doing drugs when he was just a teenager. Then he says, “something really bad happened,” so he got sober. Vera calculates that he was still dealing with addiction when he sent her death threats. 

 

Jared said, “For sports, I created an alter ego that helped me harness the violent and dominant energy I needed to tap into this stronger part of me. That was how I could do more than I thought was possible. The problem was that I couldn’t turn it off. As long as I was winning, my coaches didn’t care what I did. So I was always in it, always partying, anxious about guys from another school showing up to a party to beat the shit out of my teammates and me. I would drink and do drugs to calm myself down. And then we would go beat up the other guys.”

 

This quote, while troubling, was one of my favorite parts of the article, because it gives us some insight into how an otherwise “normal” and even talented person can become radicalized, and it speaks to a greater societal trend of how institutions and role models can encourage young men to foster violent or aggressive tendencies so long as it benefits the institution, like a nation’s military or a college football team, even if that comes at great personal cost to the young man in the form of traumatic brain injury or mental health problems or, in the case of Jared, loneliness, because it will be very difficult for him to find a life partner if he can’t control his violent outbursts even on a first date. Jared also shares that he spends his weekends helping young men with mental health problems.

 

On their last date, Vera and Jared were walking through a park when Vera told him that they couldn’t keep seeing each other because she disagreed with many of his beliefs. Jared was confused and told Vera that he thought they had agreed on most things. She said they did not agree on most things, and he would have recognized that if he had asked her any questions about herself. He attempted to kiss her, but she avoided it, and they never saw each other again.

 

While Vera was on the app, she made a note of a few patterns in what conservative men on this app were searching for in their dating lives. Here are some of those patterns:

 

• Men who called themselves “MAGA bros”
• Men who described themselves as European, looking for their “submissive, European dream girls.” 
• Multiple people labeled themselves on their profiles as white supremacists
• Vera met multiple men who believed that women should not have the right to vote
• On a few profiles, she saw men who compared the violence on January 6th with how violent they are in bed
• Many considered themselves conspiracy theorists
• Various men clarified on their profiles that they believe in ‘two genders only.”
• Many profiles used the word “pureblood,” meaning they are not vaccinated against COVID-19
• Multiple profiles mentioned a hatred of women with pink hair
• Many profiles designated themselves as “anti-feminists”

 

Vera says that she asked her matches about their relationship expectations and family values, and she writes, “Each [man] seemed to know exactly what he was looking for in a wife and articulated it before we even met. She was typically an unvaccinated Christian white woman willing to quit her job and commit to homeschooling children. Her hobbies might include “tending to a garden” and “feeding the animals.” 

 

She says that in her full year of dating conservative men, she never paid for a date, so she gives them credit for that. She wore things like floral dresses and cardigans on dates so as not to blow her cover. She says that a lot of the men she dated worked in finance and made a good living. Many of them came from educated backgrounds, and maintain a public image with their friends and co-workers in New York as generally liberal people, but then they go home and get on the Internet and have neo-Nazi beliefs. But they learn how to hide that so that they aren’t rightfully ostracized.

 

Another date Vera had was with a man whom she called Tom. They met up outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and she found him sitting on the steps wearing a Tweed suit and reading a paperback book. Vera describes the scene:

“’Veronica,’ Tom said, standing up and slipping his book into his jacket pocket. He offered me his hand to go up the stairs, like a prince ready to catch me if I lost my balance. Although I walk up five flights to my apartment every day, sometimes while carrying heavy things, I placed my palm in his. ‘It’s so refreshing to meet someone open to doing this instead of drinking at a bar,’ he said. That part felt nice for me, too.”

Tom informed Vera that he’s not religious, but he would like his kids to have Biblical values. Some of his more conservative beliefs may have come from the fact that when his mother died from cancer in high school, the women in his church cooked food for him and his father and took care of them in that way. Vera asked Tom about a term she had seen online among women who called themselves anti-feminist, “biblical patriarchy.” Tom responded by reciting, from memory, the verse in the Bible that calls on women to submit to their husbands. “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.” Tom continued: “Women should be submissive to their husbands, and some people believe they should be trained.” This is, again, date one. Vera remembered that she had seen on Tom’s profile that he was “anti-white genocide,” so she asked him if his future wife had to be white. He replied, “I believe, on principle, that white people have a right to maintain a positive identity, and our collective well-being must be maintained with healthy families. White guilt is poisoning kids.”

So, not what she asked, but I think we can take that as a yes.

On another date, Vera describes meeting a man whom she calls Bryan. She says she wore a long, black, ribbed dress and met him at a wine bar. When she met him, he put his hand on her lower back and said, “I love that you dressed up for me.” She asked him what he looked for in a relationship. He replied, emphasizing that he’s looking for a woman willing to fulfill her “natural feminine roles.” Vera asked what he thinks is the natural masculine role, and Bryan replied by saying, “A real man provides discipline, and any talking back or acting out is asking for punishment.” Vera said, “Besides obedience, what does a real man need to feel loved, and he said, “The feminists convinced women to be dominant. Where’s the love in taking away a man’s masculinity? Love isn’t always in the cards when people don’t know their roles. I’m trying to make enough money to support a family, which means I need someone who can be home and take care of everything there.”

 

So his position is that he is not yet making enough money to support a family, but he’s trying to, and for that reason, he deserves to be with a woman who doesn’t have a job and takes care of his home. I wonder if he would accept, in her place, a woman who stays home and “tries to” cook and clean, but falls short. It’s almost like he’s holding her to a standard of dichotomous gender roles that even he himself is incapable of meeting.

 

On another date, Vera describes meeting a man who, it sounds like, was drinking a lot. When she asked him why his last relationship came to an end, he said, “My previous girlfriend killed our child.” Vera said, “Like, she’s in jail for murder?” Her date replied, “No, but she should be. She got an abortion and killed our child without asking me.”

 

Vera went on a date with a man in his 40s whom she called Ron. He told her that he’s passionate about funding women’s health clinics. Vera said, “Like Planned Parenthood?” He replied, “That’s funny,” and explained that he was talking about crisis pregnancy centers, which are centers that typically have religious affiliations that target pregnant women to encourage them not to have abortions, sometimes through sharing medically incorrect information designed to frighten the women. 

Vera describes another date by saying, “At a chic omakase place, Matthew*, 25, from New Jersey was going off about how “we should have never let a woman be head of the Secret Service.” With each course, I fired off questions about his upbringing. He mentioned online groups where there were “others like him,” the kind where people whose radical-to-me beliefs find validation—and even more than validation, identity itself. Matthew later revealed he has a swastika tattoo.”

 

This wasn’t in the article, but in interviews, Vera explains that Matthew* brought her to “a political meeting.” She says that as a journalist, she can’t call this meeting a neo-Nazi meeting because they didn’t call it that in her presence. Matthew instead presented this to her as “a meeting of free-thinkers.” But when she got to the meeting, the people there didn’t discuss politics at all, and instead complained about their girlfriends and wives and offered each other tips as to how to “train” their partners to be more submissive. (The following few sentences describe some triggering stuff for domestic violence, if you want to skip ahead.) One man complained that his girlfriend kept “breaking his rules” by going out in co-ed groups, even though he had prohibited that behavior from her. So the other men in the group gave him tips to “make her obey him.” These tips included things like withholding money from her, not acknowledging her existence for 48 hours, and implementing a punishment and reward system. They described how he could force her to have sex with him if she refused. 

In the article, Vera ultimately comes to the conclusion that she would not be able to date anyone with alt-right political beliefs, and she admits that she struggled to even feel sexual attraction to them. 

 

In interviews, Vera summed up her experience by saying, “They were some of the most insecure men that I’ve ever sat down with.”

 

Before we move on, I must again mention that Vera had a strict safety protocol when going on these dates, and this isn’t an experiment that you should “try at home” as it were.

Article Critique

What I Didn’t Like

My biggest critique of this article is that I felt that Vera struggled to define the purpose of this study. In the subheading, she poses the question, “Have extreme political ideologies divided the dating pool?” In paragraph three, she says she went on these dates in an attempt to not just date but also understand men in the alt-right. In paragraph four, she says she wants to figure out where they were coming from and to see if they were misunderstood.

 

 

But then in paragraph five, she changes her tune slightly and writes: “And maybe I could answer another big question, one that seemed intimidatingly complex: As politics in our country grows more divisive, as the internet fuels hard-line cultural ideologies and social discord, as like-minded communities double down on rejecting anything different, is it possible for romantic connections between contrasting groups to even exist? Could dating be a way to help forge an understanding—of value systems, of experiences that drive beliefs— that could start to bridge the dissonance? Or at the very least, could it teach me about my own rules of attraction? Could I ever be physically enticed by (or even intimate with) someone with very different political views?”

 

And that is a very different question– you can understand someone’s political beliefs, but not necessarily want to date them. She also posed, by my count, four different questions in that last paragraph, which muddies our thesis and purpose. 

 

Then, around the middle of the article, which, I think, is late in the article to still be clarifying your objective, we get yet another paragraph stating another, slightly different “why.” Vera writes, “Part of what I was trying to explore—and push back against—is the idea that a person’s identity can be reduced to a one-dimensional entity based solely on who they voted for. Now more than ever, we think we can tell everything about someone on the “other side” just because they wear a red hat or a blue “I Voted” t-shirt. The job I’d assigned myself (I proactively started this research long before I began writing about it for Cosmopolitan) was to dig deeper, to learn more about these men on the “other side” of me—way on the other side, in most cases. And as someone who cares about bringing people together, I wondered whether it was me who had been excluding them.”

 

 

So now we are also trying to not just explore, but also push back against the idea that your political party defines you. 

 

I’m sure you’re beginning to see how having multiple theses in our article can make it hard for us to be successful as writers– it’s almost like setting too many goals for yourself, so you spread your writing thin, and instead of meeting one goal well, we struggle to meet three goals at all.

 

If we distill the somewhat unclear writing, this article told me that its goals were:

1. To see if we can understand people in the alt-right
2. To see if we can fall in love with people who disagree with us politically
3. To push back against the idea that we can define people based on who they voted for

 

 

So, to decide if the article was successful, let’s look at its stated goals. 

 

1. Did this article help you understand people in the alt-right better?

 

For me personally, I would say that in some cases, yes, but in general, not really. I was hoping that because Vera was getting to know these people in an intimate context, she would be able to learn things about them that we couldn’t learn about them just from interacting with them online. 

 

In interviews, Vera called these people, “The most insecure men [she] had ever met,” and while I think that’s interesting, I also know a lot of people who are insecure who don’t become Nazis. I wanted to know a bit more about their stories. 

 

My favorite parts of the article were about Jared, because he described, in his own words, how he had become radicalized, and he also appeared in this article as a complex character. On one hand, he says these horrible, violent things, but on the other hand, he volunteers with mental health organizations. 

 

I would have liked to hear some of the background of the other men as well: do they have families? Do their families agree with them? Have they been ostracized because of their beliefs? Was there a traumatic event that left them to isolate themselves? 

 

Many of them came across as almost cartoonishly evil, and I think it’s fine to portray them that way if that was our writer’s experience, but then I wouldn’t state the purpose of the article to “understand the other side better,” only to write about them in such a one-dimensional way.

 

2. Did this article help you understand if you can fall in love with someone who disagrees with you politically?

I think that of the three questions, this was the one that the writer was most successful in answering, because she ended the article by essentially saying, I now understand these people better, but I would struggle to date or feel attraction to them. She did talk about herself quite a bit in this article, and her personal compatibility with these men, rather than discussing generally, can we fall in love across party lines, can love be a way to bridge the gap, etc. So I do think that perhaps she should have revised her thesis slightly to say: “I want to see if I, personally, can be attracted to members of the alt-right party.”

And I say that for two reasons: one, because whether or not Vera Papisova, as this super disciplined, career-driven, New York City single woman in her 30s, can fall for someone who wants her to be a trad wife, isn’t really relevant to whether or not anyone who disagrees politically can fall in love with each other. I don’t think any of these men were going to lasso and domesticate this buff dim,e who was literally close personal friends with the president of Planned Parenthood. 

 

The second reason I would have revised her thesis is that this wasn’t really an article about whether or not a Democrat could date a Republican; this was an article about dating members of the alt-right, some of whom are actually further right on the political spectrum than Donald Trump. They’re in a category of their own, a category where extremely misogynistic beliefs are the norm and where their politics likely infect nearly every aspect of their lives. 

 

So, to answer the question, no, I don’t think that this article answered whether or not we can date people who disagree with us politically, but it did answer if Vera can date someone in the alt-right, and the answer was pretty clearly “no.”

 

3. Did this article push back against the idea that we can define people based solely on whom they voted for?

 

I think this was the aspect of the article that I most took issue with. The writer seemed to want to argue at first that we can’t define people based on who they voted for, but concluded at the end of her study that we can. She did, of course, come to this conclusion after intentionally choosing to date people who define themselves by their politics. 

 

If I were the editor, I would have removed the parts of the article where our writer sort of waxes poetic about not defining people based on their politics– not because I disagree with her points, but because I feel that an article about not defining people by their politics would be a different article entirely. 

 

Instead, this article almost reads as “Why you can and should define people by their politics while dating, because conservative men are crazy and insecure.” If she wanted to make the point that you can’t define people by their politics, then I think she (1) chose the wrong men, like I said, these are more cult members than just “men generally on the right,” and (2) she should have written more about their lives beyond their politics. 

 

 

In conclusion, if the point of the article was to get some interesting gossip about how men in the alt-right date, then the article was successful. It was fascinating to learn about these strange characters. But as writers, we must be honest and succinct about our goals. And given how extensive and dangerous the research process was for this article, I would have liked it if she had gone a little deeper than just “They’re crazy and wrong and I’m not attracted to them.”

 

One comment on this article on Reddit said:

“It’s an interesting read and the author has some keen perspective.

Ultimately, though, I don’t like these articles – it feels like it adds to the mystique of the Millenial, male, conservative without any substantive conclusions. It unintentionally glamorizes this subculture and only feeds fuel to the fire of ‘lying white liberal women.’

Further, she spends more time writing about her perspective on them, rather than their perspective on the world.

I don’t need undercover columnists telling me how angry and misguided they are. I know they’re angry and misguided.

It’s not a useless piece but it’s the journalistic equivalent of a cult documentary – entertaining in a, ‘Look how fucked up they are,’ way but doesn’t move the conversation forward.”

 

 

Another comment said: “I don’t know if I’m online too much (probs) but this article doesn’t say anything new, does it? The guys she went on dates with were mostly radicalized whackjobs who weren’t interested in her apart from her ability to birth children and be a mythical ‘homemaker’, big surprise.”

 

 

What the Article Did Well

 

 

Now, I wanted to say one thing that I really liked about this article, and that I think that Vera has done well for a lot of her journalistic career.

 

Growing up in a Catholic household and Catholic school, I learned that the ultimate moral standard was the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” I learned that empathy was a celebrated and encouraged trait, and that we should have empathy even for those who do us harm– turn the other cheek. And while I think that empathy can be very useful in coming to understand, explain, and even predict the actions of others, sometimes, in relationships, excess empathy for people who hurt you can make you remarkably vulnerable. 

 

When I was researching a YouTube video I made about Cormac McCarthy, I read a study about the main reasons that people go back to abusive partners or spouses after getting hurt by them. Aside from more predictable reasons like financial dependence or social pressure, one of the biggest predictors was: how much the victim empathized with or identified with their abusive spouse. Abusive partners can recognize your empathy and use it to manipulate you. In a circumstance like that, it can actually be a necessary survival skill to learn how to turn off your empathy.

 

Too much empathy can also sometimes cause us to over-intellectualize cruel or unjust actions for others when their motivation was actually very simple. Another article I read when researching the Cormac McCarthy video talked about a study where they asked men who had been convicted of domestic violence why they hurt their wives; what were the benefits of being abusive? A person who is in a relationship with one of these abusive men might twist themselves into pretzels to try to justify their behavior, saying things like “He had a tough home life and it was all he knew,” “He doesn’t want to do it but I made him because I upset him,” or “Deep down he really loves me and wants what’s best for me.” But when they asked this group of abusers what the benefits were of attacking their wives, the reasons were quite straightforward. They said things like:

• She’s scared and won’t go out and spend money
  She won’t argue
  Feeling superior: she’s accountable to me in terms of being somewhere on time: I decide
  Keeps relationship going—she’s too scared to leave
  Get the money
  Get sex
  Total control in decision making
  Use money for drugs
  Power
  Control the children
  She feels less worthy so defers to my needs and wants
  She will look up to me and accept my decisions without an argument
  Decide her social life—what she wears so you can keep your image by how she acts
  She’s an object
  (I get) a robot babysitter, maid, sex, food
  If she works—get her money
  Get her to quit job so she can take care of house
  Isolate her so friends can’t confront me
  Decide how money is spent
  Buy the toys I want
  She has to depend on me if I break her stuff
  She’s a nurse-maid
  She comforts me
  Supper on the table
  Don’t have to listen to her complaints for not letting her know stuff
  She works for me
  I don’t have to help out
  I don’t have to hang out with her or kids
  Determine what values kids have—who they play with, what school they go to or getting to ignore the process—dictating what they “need” food, clothes, recreation, etc.
  Kids on my side against her
  Don’t have to get up, take out garbage, watch kids, do dishes, get up at night with kids, do laundry, change diapers, clean house, bring kids to appointments or activities, mop floors, clean refrigerator, etc.
  Answer to nobody
  Do what you want, when you want to
  Proves your superiority
  Win all the arguments
  Don’t have to listen to her wishes, complaints, anger, fears, etc.
  Make the rules then break them when you want
  Convince her she’s nuts
  Convince her she’s unattractive
  Convince her she’s to blame
  Convince her she’s the problem
  I can dump on her
  Don’t have to talk to her
  I’m king of the castle
  Have someone to unload on
  Have someone to bitch at
  She won’t call police
  Tell kids don’t have to listen to mom
  Get her to drop charges
  Get her to support me to her family, my family, cops, judge, SCIP, prosecutors, etc. 

As you can see, sometimes I think we afford mean, abusive people more psychoanalysis than they perhaps deserve. (I also have to mention, if you didn’t already notice, how similar some of the language these abusive men use to the language that these alt-right men used in the article.) 

 

I don’t think that the men listing those reasons for abuse in that study needed more empathy– that would not have benefited them or their partner. If somebody is talking about you the way that the men talk in that study and the way that many of the men spoke about women in Vera’s article, I believe that the best thing you can do for yourself, your family, and your wellbeing– some would argue, the most morally good thing to do– is turn your empathy off, forget your “golden rule” training, and get out– get comfortable with being seen as, and called, an enormous, impossible, feral bitch. 

 

I still don’t like it when people go to the opposite extreme of empathy and say, “I don’t owe anybody anything,” because I don’t think that’s true. I do still think that you owe everyone a basic level of decency and respect. But you don’t owe anyone your own sexual attraction. You don’t owe anyone a romantic relationship. Especially if they don’t even respect you enough to believe that you deserve autonomy over your own life. I think Vera did a great job showing that. 

 

One person who read this article left this comment:

“I think a lot of the cultural discourse around modern gender war stuff really over-complicates things and tries to find more sophisticated or sympathetic explanations for why these men think and act the ways they do.

Intentionally or not I think this article actually lays it out extremely cleanly: for a very long time women were not afforded respect. Their needs and desires were considered subordinate, if not completely irrelevant. Thanks to the gains of feminism that is not as true as it once was, and women in many parts of the world have significantly more entitlement to respect and autonomy. And these guys don’t like that. Its really that simple.

There’s no version of the appeal to women to give guys like this a chance, or not judge them so harshly, or change their standards, or however else you want to dress it up, that isn’t actually just asking a woman to put up with someone who doesn’t respect her as a person (for…the other benefits of a relationship?) And I’m kind of tired of pretending like there’s something else going on.”

 

 

In this story, Vera was able to portray these men as dangerous without overintellectualizing their motivations. She also showed how their political values dominated the personal realm and affected what they expect from women. This portrayal from Vera can be beneficial to women who might still be interested in dating men in this alt-right cult, thinking, well, politics isn’t everything, or maybe I can save him. 

 

So to clarify, my critique isn’t that Vera didn’t have more empathy for these men; my issue was that she painted the purpose of the article as if it were about reaching across the aisle, and then didn’t really do that. I hope that makes sense– it’s a writing critique, not a personal critique; I don’t think that in real life, Vera has to have more understanding for these people who never extended her the same courtesy.

 

All of that said, I do not hate these men, and I am not enraged by their opinions. They are perfect strangers to me, and I believe that the bravado and the rage bait can prevent us from seeing these men as what they really are, which is victims.

 

Social media companies in the United States have been allowed by the government to knowingly engineer their products to be addictive, not beneficial and educational to a voting populace– addictive. And rage, and anger, and fear are what keep our attention glued to these devices, and people like Charlie Kirk, Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and even Donald Trump recognize that and use it to make themselves more wealthy and powerful. Especially in a country like the United States where car dependency keeps us away from local social circles, where a lack of government social supports (like free healthcare) makes us feel like we need to work all the time to make enough money to literally just survive, and where essentially unregulated food and other substances are making us constantly anxious, it is no wonder that people, especially young people are starved of social connection and authenticity. So we act as if influencers are our social circle when influencers are just the most effective foot soldiers at making you addicted to social media and putting more money in tech oligarchs’ pockets. It doesn’t matter if what they say is true; it only matters that it makes you more addicted to your screen. Recently, a young man contacted the influencer Nick Fuentes and said that he is in love with his girlfriend, but he worries about marrying her because she is Dominican and his children wouldn’t be white. Loving someone who loves you back is like lightning striking; it is a cosmic gift from the universe that gives your life joy and purpose, and this man looked at that gift and turned around to ask a podcaster whom he had never met for permission to love. That is some bleak shit, but hey, at least the owners of social media platforms have more money than God!

 

I also want to give Vera major credit for her bravery during this study. We even saw in the article that there were multiple times she had to deescalate dangerous situations, and although she had people helping her with her safety during the dating process, I’m sure that there are men she dated who heard about this article and were enraged by it afterwards– and I’m sure she knew that would happen and went forward with her writing anyway, which is tough as fuck. 

 

But I still think that the main question posed in the article is an interesting one. Should you date people who disagree with you politically? In 2025, when politics in the U.S. are so polarized, is it even possible to fall in love with people who vote differently from you? And I’m not talking about people who go to neo-Nazi meetings and don’t think women should have jobs. But let’s be honest about the fact that while most Gen Z women who voted voted for Kamala, most Gen Z men who voted voted for Trump. 

And this is happening in a lot of countries– people are having trouble dating because their partners have political opinions that aren’t compatible with theirs. I feel this article didn’t answer these questions, but let’s try to answer them here. 

Should we date people who disagree with us politically?

 

In 1948, a short story called “The Lottery” by an author named Shirley Jackson was published in The New Yorker. The story depicts a small town of about 300 people as they go through their yearly tradition they call “the lottery.” Everyone in the town gathers in the town square, almost as if for a church picnic, and they all select slips of paper from a big black box. Finally, when everyone in the town gets their paper slips, everyone’s is blank except for one woman, a young mother of three named Tessie. Tessie’s slip has a black dot on it. So, as is custom, the person who drew the losing slip of paper, in this case Tessie, is promptly stoned to death. So Tessie is murdered by everyone in the village, including her neighbors, friends, husband, and young children. 

 

The story seems to serve as a warning. That all of us are capable of acts that may seem horrifying out of context, so long as those acts have social support and years of precedent in our social traditions. This warning is as terrifying as it is true.

 

We would all love to read The Lottery and think that we would be the exception. We would go against our families and institutions, and we would prefer to be stoned before we stoned another. But a quick look at history demonstrates that even otherwise kind and morally sound people are capable of hurting and even killing, especially when some greater institution labels their victims as “outsiders.” Even institutions that were designed to maintain a high moral standard, like churches, have become our social justification, both historically and in the modern world, to hurt or kill our fellow man. But those social institutions that separate all of us humans into neat in-groups and out-groups don’t just have to be churches. I’ve seen people, in the same breath, criticize the brainwashed nature of church-goers, then turn around and exhibit the same exclusionary behaviors in the name of politics, a gang affiliation, gender, race, or even in the name of a sports team or a celebrity fandom. Now that much of our social lives are online, there is no shortage of passionate micro-groups that will be happy to give you an excuse to be cruel to other people for being different from you. 

 

Today, as we talk about in-groups and out-groups, I especially want to discuss political affiliation. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Shirley Jackson wrote “The Lottery” in 1948, likely in part due to the shock of seeing two World Wars incite and justify large-scale human-on-human inter-species violence. As Yuval Noah Harari pointed out in his book Sapiens, if an alien landed on Earth before the World Wars, they would have no clear or visible reason, no natural phenomenon, no fight for resources that would explain why all of these human beings suddenly killed all of these other human beings. Political affiliation that divides us into in-groups and out-groups can take humans who are otherwise thoughtful and gentle, or at the very least civil, toward their common man, and cause them to commit despicable acts of violence (or, at least, institutions can harness, justify, and organize violent urges that we are all born with on account of us being, ultimately, animals not gods).

 

Ages ago, I remember becoming curious about what makes people stereotype or act racist, sexist, or in any other way organize themselves into in-groups and out-groups. I remember wondering if it was because we were once hunter-gatherers, who needed to fight against and exclude any groups of wanderers who weren’t our own tribe. But I looked it up and learned that was actually not true– research has revealed that among early groups of humans, when they encountered other wandering tribes in the wild, they shared intel and even resources and gifts. But the same article said that studies have found that when people start to feel stressed or threatened, they become more exclusionary. They start to exhibit more behaviors like racism, sexism, or other phobias. Think about it from a safety perspective. For example, if I’m a visibly gender nonconforming person, and I develop the belief that all Christian people will hurt, judge, or exclude me because of the way I look, then am I stereotyping all Christian people? Sure. There are probably Christian people who wouldn’t be hateful toward me. But if I’ve seen it happen and I feel worried for my safety, then the logical conclusion will be that it’s better for my health and wellbeing to stay away from that “out-group” and stick with my “in-group.” And the more threatened or at-risk in the world I feel, the more I will stick to my niche in-group.

 

But the danger with that way of thinking is that dangerous people can exist within your in-group, and good people can exist within your out-group. So with any in-group/out-group model, you can end up trusting people who you perhaps shouldn’t, just because they are in your in-group, and you end up missing out on helpful and loving relationships with people in your out-group, just because they aren’t in the same religion as you. It’s a flawed way of thinking, but you might think, well, I’m not religious, so this doesn’t apply to me.

 

But what if, instead of looking at it from a religious perspective, I labeled my in-group, not as my religion, but as my political party– in my case, the political left? 

 

Many people watching this might resist this conflation– this idea that some of us treat our political in-group in the same way that a religious zealot might treat other members of their own religion. And in many cases, I think that resistance is fair. Your religious affiliation typically comes from where you were born and who your family is, especially in the case of ethno-religions. If you are born in a Buddhist country, you are much more likely to be Buddhist, and if you are born in a Muslim country, you are much more likely to be Muslim. This is why it wouldn’t be fair or justified for a benevolent God to send you to hell or heaven, essentially just because of where you were born. Politics, on the other hand, does involve more of a choice and tends to change more throughout life, with events like marriage, university, and travel having an impact on which political party you affiliate with. 

 

But I am still uncomfortable with how quickly we label all people who voted differently from us as evil or foolish. Are there people who voted for Donald Trump because they are hateful and angry? Uh, yeah. I think that’s safe to say. But there are also people who voted for him just because MAGA is their in-group, and maybe they never had the chance to question that belief set. 

 

It is, in a way, a relief when someone I like has the same political leanings as me– I did personally choose to marry somebody who aligns with me politically, but I’ve met people on the left (so, people in my in-group) who are racist or classist or exclusionary and embody the qualities they claim to oppose, and I have also met people on the right who were tolerant and welcoming. 

 

I recently created a poll on my YouTube channel asking my subscribers if they would date someone who didn’t align with them politically, and one comment said, “You’ll have to trust me when I say that I’m very socially liberal. It astounds me how fellow liberals can’t fathom conservatives. Consider that most modern liberals are exceedingly privileged, more than most conservatives.” 

 

I was curious about whether or not that was true, so I looked it up, and typically, urban, highly educated, wealthy people in the U.S. do have left-leaning ideals. According to OpenSecrets.org, high-dollar donors give to both parties, but Democratic candidates often raise more from wealthy urban areas like New York, L.A., and San Francisco, while small-dollar donations favor Trump and MAGA Republicans more, which reflects a more working-class populist base. Blue counties also contribute 71% of the money to the United States’ GDP.

 

 

Now, whether or not Trump actually shows up for a working class base is a different conversation, but I know that in my case, my left-leaning beliefs have been influenced by my education, by my parents’ education, and by the fact that I’ve lived outside of the U.S. for long tracks of time, and I do think it would be intellectually dishonest of me to then turn around and criticize people for not having the same opinions as me if many of those opinions came from privileges that I’ve been afforded. And I am uncomfortable with the rhetoric of some people on the left who treat everyone who disagrees with them as villains, and brandish their moral superiority almost as if it were a class indicator. The New York Times is full of stories like this; stories that don’t seem to realize how much of their ethics or “open-mindedness” is really just wealth: “Your son doesn’t like eggs? Well, have him visit a dozen French chefs, dear, he’ll come around.”

 

“Dear Ethicist, my husband’s family trust owns and collects income from an ICE Holding Facility, and I feel just horrible about it!”

 

And I think there absolutely are people who are liberals not because they want to posture about the moral superiority of a wealthy in-group, but because they believe in principles like correcting injustices and speaking out against violence. But let’s also keep it a buck and recognize that there are people who treat their Democratic beliefs and their cultural knowledge as a form of social capital– their ticket to an elite in-group that donates to the proper causes and uses the right words and judges those who don’t. A social club where you’ve never had to sacrifice your moral high ground for a paycheck because you never really needed that paycheck to begin with. When these people mock and belittle Trump supporters, you can’t help but hear the classist subtext; the way they put on a southern accent while they mock the other side’s lack of education, their stupidity, their religion– the message being: Don’t worry, I belong to your in-group. I’m one of the enlightened few, not one of the foolish masses.

 

This comment from one of my subscribers that I mentioned earlier expressed it well when they continued by saying: “Both poor whites and minorities don’t believe the government can/will protect their interests, and they’re not crazy to think that way. Yes, conservatives are wrong about a lot, but folks, you’ve got to understand that they are a product of their environment and social pressures, the same way inner city youth are. Doesn’t mean you gotta marry one, but for fork’s sake, quit demonizing them, and then maybe we’ll have a chance of getting their votes back one day.” 

 

That was a bit of a digression; the point I want to make is about the danger of idealizing and pledging blind loyalty to institutions. Because herein lies the concern: You come to institutions, like political parties or religions, to help you decide or recognize what is right and wrong, then those very same institutions become the very reason that we exclude, that we judge, and, in some cases, even that we hurt and kill. This reality necessitates something deeper: a moral system, your own personal non-negotiables, that you would follow even if your institutions called upon you to defy them. More on that later.

 

I left the United States in 2018. And since then, my friend group has consisted predominantly of other immigrants and expats. In groups like that, in order for the friend group to function, we do have to abandon some of our most rigid prejudices or political affiliations. Of course, we do, because we share dinner with our own nation’s allies and enemies and everything in between, and sometimes we even get along better than we do with our own blood families. What I’m describing is the idyllic, best-case scenario of people abandoning or even just questioning the in-group, out-group models that they were probably raised with. If you let go of your original party affiliation, your original religion, your original nation and university, and favorite brands and gender and race, and football team, then you can begin to choose and rebuild your values based on what you like best, and thus you become the master of your own universe: the ubermensch or uberfrau. 

 

My husband and I are from different countries, and we spent our 20s living in a series of different nations. As a result, we can, in theory, assemble our own home’s franken-culture: a little Argentine when we cook meat, a little Colombian when we dance, a little Mexican when we romance each other, then a little Irish Catholic when we decide that not eeevery emotion needs to be outwardly expressed. In an article I wrote about this concept called “All My False Gods,” I wrote, “I select my beliefs from different dogmas as if I’m choosing my favorite fruits from various baskets at the market, intentionally and carefully picking up the most delectable philosophies, regardless of which social group they come from.”

 

And wouldn’t it be nice if it were really that simple?

 

Letting go of belief sets and admitting that the institutions that once provided your life with structure is liberating and thrilling, sure, but it is also terrifying and exhausting. Institutions are comforting. If I decide that I want to follow my political party’s “approved list of beliefs,” then before an issue even becomes part of the public conversation, my political party has already decided for me how I should feel about it, and they will report news and pay influencers to inform me accordingly. Cool! For me, that’s one less thing to worry about. I’ve already been told what my opinions are. In the book Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which is about expats in Berlin, Latronico writes that the protagonists “would have liked to have been in their 20s for the summer of ‘68 or when the Wall fell. Previous generations had had a much easier time working out who they were and what they stood for. The problems back then might have been more urgent, but they also had clearer solutions. Now there were too many choices, with each one leading off on endless branches, preventing any real change.” 

 

That’s one aspect that makes it harder to build your own belief set with all your favorite bits from different political affiliations, different cultures, different religions– it implies more effort, more time, but, to be honest, many humans are actually okay with effort if they feel it’s worth it. What worries me more… is that if I am truly intellectually untethered, then I could get sucked up into any belief set that has the strongest gravitational pull. I’ve heard tell that those most susceptible to joining a cult are precisely those who think they are immune to cult indoctrination. I love the metaphor of choosing my favorite fruits from different baskets at the market, but not all fruits are equal and you shouldn’t treat them as such– we do still need some agreed-upon truths, some semblance of objectivity, otherwise we’ll treat the opinions in a peer reviewed study from a team of PhDs with the same weight as the opinions in a YouTube video made by a conspiracy theorist on the sex offender registry. 

 

Even if you hate certain things about institutions and you vow to free yourself from them, it remains true that scientific advancement, records of knowledge, political change, group mobilization, even things like modern healthcare and a lawful state without widespread anarchy, would not be possible without powerful, non-corrupt institutions, and it is a marvel, a testament to human intelligence and social organization that we have even been able to build such powerful institutions, even if they don’t always get everything right. And especially when you’re young, I think it’s important to be raised with a moral framework that comes from a strong nuclear family.

 

When Jordan Peterson was an unknown college professor, he wrote and presented lectures about how our political beliefs can blind us to the evil within ourselves and within our own group. He spoke about how Nietzsche predicted that political affiliations would replace religious affiliations, and that would lead to widespread conflict in the 20th century– a prediction that ultimately came true. Peterson appeared intellectually liberated and coherent. Fast forward a few decades, and Peterson has identified the North American left as the problematic modern equivalent of the 20th century’s most dangerous and violent ideologies. Then, when the January 6th attacks on the Capitol happened, Jordan Peterson struggled in interviews to understand and analyse the act of extremist violence, because it hadn’t come from the party that he had identified as “problematic.” He could not believe that the political right, the party that had rallied around him and supported him when he was shunned and cancelled, the party that seemed to have come to represent, in his mind, order and personal responsibility, could turn into the violent, murderous, irrational, revolutionary crowd that attacked the U.S. capital. Wouldn’t an academic who wrote and studied for years, the way that normal people can become radicalized through political ideology, have been able to predict that? Could it be his belief that he was immune to political radicalization that exactly what made him susceptible to it?

 

J.K. Rowling wrote one of the most popular book series of all time, with the main message being that everyone has both good and evil in them, and we have to choose to be good, to be loving, even when the crowd disagrees with us. Later in her career, J.K. Rowling began to dedicate her public persona to speaking out against transgender people, to the point of obsession. Transgender people are an extremely vulnerable minority population, and J.K. Rowling is throwing the validity of their very existence into question whenever given the opportunity, and even writing a book about a man who dresses up like a woman to kill women; it does real harm. As Natalie Wynn wrote, “Trans people are a population of people… We are not an ideology that’s up for debate.” I can’t help but wonder if, in her mind, J.K. Rowling sees herself as Harry when The Daily Prophet made public opinion turn on him, as if she were a misunderstood hero underneath it all, even in her moments of hatefulness. I can’t help but wonder if her belief in “going against the grain” and “being a free thinker” is exactly what blinds her to the immorality, and even the cruelty, of her own actions. Maybe she gets a buzz from disagreeing with other intellectuals, but sometimes your critics are right, and just because you’re going against the grain doesn’t mean your actions are morally sound. 

 

Whether you do everything you can to go with the majority, or everything you can to go against the majority, you are still allowing majority opinion to completely dictate your belief set– and in that sense, you are not free.

 

There’s one more point I want to make, which is a common fallacy I see among those who claim to be free thinkers on the Internet. There is a lot of criticism of universities as biased institutions that limit free speech and attempt to turn people liberal; this criticism especially comes from the disgraced academic crowd– the Jordan Petersons and Bret Weinsteins, also Candance Owens has been a huge critic of American universities– but one major fallacy I see in this line of thought is that the Internet and especially social media is often treated like the superior alternative; the intellectual playground where you can explore different viewpoints without being brainwashed. And maybe there was a time when the Internet was more of a neutral ground, but let’s admit that in 2025, social media platforms have become their own majorly powerful institutions with an agenda. On Elon Musk’s Twitter, if a user finds themselves curious about talking points on The Right, maybe because they’re interested in lower taxes or in smaller government, or maybe just because everyone around them is conservative, then their algorithm will almost immediately start to show them barefaced white supremacist, homophobic, sexist propaganda. Just a few years ago, these were considered fringe belief sets, and now they saturate social media, and the effect is that even if people don’t agree with these talking points, seeing them so often can normalize them and push the Overton window further toward the extremes. And if you aren’t anchored in some form of belief set or even some institutions, if you are entirely untethered, then you can easily get pulled down those social media political rabbit holes. We are especially susceptible to this when we’re young, and, personally, if I, God willing, have children one day, I will prefer that they spend their teen years exploring their opinions and building their core beliefs in a classroom as opposed to on TikTok.

 

So what are we left with? Is there any philosophical approach to being a decent member of society and an intellectually honest thinker? Can we think without cognitive dissonance? Is enlightenment possible, or is it just delusion?

 

I won’t speak for others, but speaking for myself, I have found that I do need a list of beliefs and values that are not necessarily aligned with any singular institution, but they should carry the same weight within my person as if they were sourced from a widely recognized and respected institution. I’ll call those your core belief set, and these usually take time to develop. 

 

When I was in my teens and 20s, it was sometimes frightening to me how quickly my opinions could change, how light and fluid they were, and I sometimes stubbornly held onto certain institutional belief sets to give myself some solid footing. But with time and with experience comes more certainty, and after a little while, you can look back retroactively at your behaviors, thoughts, and emotions and realize, ah, here’s a common thread. I guess that’s what I believe. And you can come back to those beliefs in moments of crisis. This is the belief set that you call back on when you are deciding if you agree with a certain institution, if you agree with the actions of the masses, or if you want to be an outlier. The idea is that, if pacifism is part of your core belief set, then even if you live in the town where they have The Lottery, you would refuse to throw a stone, or maybe publicly advocate against The Lottery by sharing social media links to anti-Lottery political organizations and anti-Lottery infographics.

 

So, to bring it back to dating, love, and marriage, I don’t think that your partner has to align with your in-group. To answer the question that I felt was neglected in this article, I don’t think that you have to date within your same political affiliation, nor do you have to date within your same race, religion, nationality, etc., but I do think that you and your partner should align on that core set of beliefs, those beliefs that go deeper than what your institutions and in-groups have told you is important. 

 

On the poll I shared on my profile about if you would date someone who disagrees with you politically, the top comment was:

 

“There’s political differences and there’s value differences. I support public transportation, and I think light rail is great. I would date someone that thinks that increasing bus lines is a better strategy than increasing rail lines. I wouldn’t date someone that thinks climate change isn’t real or important. I think increasing access to healthcare is important. I think increasing med school and residency spots could increase provider availability. I would date someone that thinks that increasing the number of PAs is a better way to increase affordable primary care. I wouldn’t date someone that thinks poor people should simply die of preventable illness. I’m happy to date someone that has different political ideas than I do, but I don’t want to date someone with values that conflict with mine.”

 

 

This is something that I’ve dwelled on a lot in the context of my relationship. My husband and I have the same politics, but we’re from different countries. So, especially when we first started dating, there were a lot of opinions or ideas that each of us took as a “given” that were not a given at all to the other person in the relationship, and we had to reconstruct our ideas about expectations and gender norms and family dynamics essentially from zero. And in the midst of these conversations that questioned everything, I remember I started to feel sort of shaken up, and I asked my husband, “How do we have any beliefs? If all of them are questionable? Is anything true?” And my husband was probably 25 at this time so I’m impressed with the maturity of his response, but he said you do need to have some core beliefs that you don’t question anymore, and in the context of our relationship, the core belief that you should never question is that I love you, and I’m not going to stop loving you. Dr. Orna Guralnik from the show “Couples Therapy” once said in an interview that she used to think that the greatest predictor of success in a marriage was an alignment, an inherent similarity, but now she believes that the greatest predictor of success in a marriage isn’t how similar two people are, but rather how able they are to love despite their differences. 

 

Someone messaged me anonymously to share her experience being married to someone who disagrees with her politically, and she said, “I wanted to share privately that I never thought I would date outside of my political beliefs, but my husband (of 4 yrs) and I do disagree on things. Notably, our moral and ethical values match completely, but sometimes opinions on policy, the role of government, regulations, etc., do differ. I really appreciate it, actually, as he challenges my opinions (rather than being an echo chamber) and helps me not demonize people who think differently.”

 

I’m connecting to you as a random person on the Internet speaking to probably a stranger, to say that what you see on the Internet is not an accurate reflection of how different people feel about things and feel about the world. What you see on the Internet is designed to be entertainment– to keep your attention first and foremost, even if you watch in anger. Now, I am not telling you to marry someone whose politics you are repulsed by. I married someone with whom I agree politically, so it would be hypocritical of me to give that advice. But I wanted to zoom out in this video, because I feel like every time I go on social media, there is somebody trying to convince me to hate someone, because they disagree with me, because they are a man, because they’re a woman, because they’re from somewhere different from me, or because they are a flawed human being. I have had in-person contact with people from all walks of life– I’ve had the opportunity to know and come to love a diverse collection of people with different thoughts and opinions and quirks and nuances, some of which drive my stubborn ass crazy with rage, and it has been one of the greatest gifts I’ve been afforded in this lifetime. Based on what I see in real life– real stories of people showing up for each other and taking care of each other and seeing past differences– I don’t believe that the divided and angry portrayal of human interaction that we see on the Internet is accurate.

 

So if you read this article and it made you angry, or if this video is making you angry, or if some other brainrot pissed you off today, just know that one of the most powerful acts of resistance against a social-media-addicted reality is to not let that anger and hate infect, and choose instead to be grateful and joyful for your life. I refuse to detest strangers because in my mind, they embody some stereotype. I refuse to become hardened and hateful. I refuse to harbor anger toward myself and others. I love mankind. I remain optimistic. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in a big mural in my hometown: “I have decided to stick to love…Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

 

 

I am almost certain that there will be people in the comments keen on letting me know that my opinions are overly optimistic and foolish, and I invite you to leave those comments and get it off your chest. I am actually… on my belated honeymoon. So I won’t be reading the comments much anyway.