I think this onion is far too nested to directly peel.

If you try to go layer by layer, well if you start at the top then there are far too many “but what about this” alley ways that it becomes a mess and if you start at the bottom it’s too radical a shift in world view to possibly compute.

You gotta pill people. It’s the only way. Find something that gets them to start asking questions, start asking the right kind of questions and you peel that onion for itself.

The other major thing is that it seems most logical to move immediately to facts first since we are operating with an empirical mindset which means we believe that truth comes from observing what occurs in the world.

Most liberals are not empiricists or are only weakly empirical with by far the dominant form of reasoning being rationalism, meaning they believe that truth mostly comes from inquiry in the mind more so than from what’s observed in the world.

It’s why it’s so difficult to move past ideas like “the rules say we vote to decide government and therefore we control government policy” because that’s a fine rational argument but they’re blind to the empiricist perspective that observes the system actually works in a different way despite what the rules say.

There’s an empiricist v rationalist split us vs the mainstream dominant liberalism, which has really gotten much worse since the fall of the Soviet Union, is more close to people like Hillary Clinton and Stephen Pinker. The Obama and the Al Gore optimists who are so confident in the rightness of their vision that they permit themselves any methods to enforce it.

This empiricist vs rationalist thing very much goes alongside the materialist vs idealist split.

The difference is an entire mode of thinking. It’s like someone who views a cuckoo clock as a series of delightfully synchronized events vs someone who views a cuckoo clock as a system of cogs and pulleys.