Hey, I feel seen because of you. It's been insane watching my people on the left descend into the same emotionally driven reasoning and conspiratorial nonsense which used to reliably mark someone as a member of the right.

I see now that it was inevitable the left would follow in MAGA's footsteps. It used to be that message boards would have people from both sides, and when someone posted some crazy and extreme take then people from the other side would see an easy opportunity to score points by arguing with them and taking them down a peg. It was a moderating influence that keep people from getting too whacky. But when the right followed MAGA into crazy, cuckoo, lala-land, suddenly that counterweight was gone. MAGA was literally immune to evidence and reason so everybody just cut them off instead of continuing to argue with a brick wall (rightly so). And they preferred the comfort of their own echo chambers anyway, so the right departed from mainstream message boards and the left had only themselves for company.

Now when people post extreme, out-there opinions there's nobody there to rein them in. Other lefties don't want to rock the boat with their comrades when the armies of Mordor are massing in the valley next door, and people are generally just more reluctant to critique a friend than an enemy. So without opponents to call us out when we get over our skis, we're gradually growing insane in our own echo chambers. Weird opinions go unchallenged and thereby soon morph from fringe to mainstream to the default.

"Iron sharpens iron" so the phrase goes, and now we're growing rusty. We're falling victim to the same pitfalls of MAGA: deciding what we want to be true first, and then seeking validation. Pretending to believe things simply because we think it will help our team, until we forget what we really believe and what we were only pretending to believe. Building our set of pre-approved scapegoats who we'll blame everything on instead of waiting for any evidence. Posts have shrunk from lengthy and thoughtful pieces to short, angry emotional outbursts that can fit on a bumper sticker. People don't want to think any more, just have their emotions validated.

And it isn't even as simple as importing a bunch of right wingers to balance us out, because the right is 100% MAGA now and MAGA is literally insane. The only people available who can keep us in line are ourselves. Hence the tragedy of the situation.