The Necessary Conversation

Relatively new listener here and really love the show. Sometimes just listening to the mental gymnastics of Mary Lou as she slides around the question is exhausting, but I really admire Chad and Haley’s skill and patience in consistently bringing her back to the point. Also admire you all for your willingness to get into difficult conversations without taking it too personally, and your love for each other is palpable. I live in the PNW and have had to satisfy my need to support Hive Bakery with ordering merch, but I will get myself to TX to buy a gravestone cookie when the time comes! Love y’all.

I love this show. It’s a microcosm of most of our relationships with our parents. I’m just thankful my parents can follow a discussion and engage in debate in good faith after hearing the mom misconstrue everything. The father is lost cause and terrible human but I think it’s good for decent people to hear how these people really talk about others. It’s unbelievable how scared they are of, of anybody who isn’t white and it’s striking how uneducated and silly the parents make themselves look routinely while simultaneously looking down on others. It’s even crazier that their kids turned out so well and open minded and gives me a lot of hope.

Ten episodes in and I have had just about enough of your homophobic, genocidist father—it hits WAY too close to home with my own family, especially my dad’s side, and shows the influence one partner’s ideologies can have on another’s over a shared lifetime. (My mom is also part spiritual hippie, or at least she was pre-Trump. She was a paraprofessional who took such pride in helping underprivileged children, often POC, succeed; she loved recycling; and she always said if you had nothing nice to say about someone you shouldn’t say it at all.) It seems clear the version of America I had envisioned is over—MAGA is even running ads on Fox now showing a white woman who claims she’s too afraid to show her face because of “the new racists,” aka POC & liberals. The hate hasn’t died down any. The lying and fear-mongering to the brink of civil war continues. And I haven’t heard how talking about it may actually help anything…but maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe the future is already written and your personal goal isn’t to effectuate change, but, rather, to love your family through our breaking society anyway. If so, I admire you for that. I truly hope that part of this show involves calling your parents on the BS they spewed in 2022 that differs from the BS they spew now, and how the Hypocrisy Party justifies the inconsistencies. (Even as I say it, I’ve seen the rhetoric and deflection and I know exactly how it’ll go.) Knowing everything that happens between 2022 and now, and the fact that none of it has swayed your parents’ beliefs, shows me just how impossible loving someone back to normalcy actually is. Thank you for that. I had exhausted myself trying. I admire your love for your family despite the constant bullying by your father and his refusal to try to care about anyone different than himself. Who knows…maybe listening to you somehow love them both despite comments about how liberals should be hung in the town square for peaceful protest will remind me of how to talk to my own parents again despite their horrifically narrow-minded views. If nothing else, your show helps me to better understand the brainwashing that took my entire family (except for my sister) away from reality and away from loving thy neighbor first and foremost, even if they aren’t white. (For reference, I’m NPA and have been my entire voting life, as our 2-party, billionaire-funded system is wholly defunct. But I will absolutely continue to vote for the party whose policies reflect a concern for our overall society more than for themselves and for the 1%, which hoards enough resources to cure world hunger or, at the very least, provide necessary care for every sick and dying veteran and child in our own country. One would think so-called patriots would feel the same, but instead they’ve equated helping the needy with socialism.)

The parallels between the parents’ radicalization, beliefs, and specific Q anon terms they use and my parents is uncanny. I can’t talk to my parents about politics since COVID, and it’s cathartic to hear how you are handling the necessary conversations more tactfully than I can. I’ve mourned the loss of the people who they used to be, and it’s so important to share these conversations. I’m only in to episode 3, and I’m hooked. Thank you!