With Thanksgiving just around the corner, liberal news outlets have spun themselves into a frenzy trying to teach basic social skills to their readers so they can “survive” the annual holiday.
The New York Times’s Michael Barbaro — whose past stories have resembled Hillary Clinton erotica — put together a “guide” for talking to “loved ones who voted the other way.” “You may need to have this talk,” Barbaro wrote. “So we put together a guide for how to do it.”
Apparently worried that NYT readers might let word choice ruin a conversation, Barbaro offered this profound advice: “Don’t let imperfect word choice tank a conversation.” The bespectacled Barbaro recommended Times readers ask family members to “Describe your relationship to me.”
CNN’s AJ Willingham wrote a Thanksgiving “survival guide” that urged readers to “stick to nonthreatening conversations.”
People magazine brought in an “etiquette expert” to teach People readers how to “come together to eat dinner in peace.”
The Chicago Tribune went one step further, deferring to psychology experts about what Americans should talk about at the dinner table.
Esquire Magazine ran a piece titled “How to Talk Politics Over the Holidays Without Being a Dick.”
“We need to figure out how to have these conversations without turning them into screaming matches. We can’t avoid them,” wrote Esquire writers Matt Miller and Sammy Nickals. “We need to be able to talk politics in a civil manner with the people we love, the people we’re stuck with for life. If you can’t have a healthy dialogue in the house you grew up in, where did things go so wrong?”
Miller and Nickals went on to suggest, among other things, that Esquire readers only discuss politics over “group text,” even when in the same room as their interlocutors.
In a piece explaining “How to survive political disagreements with relatives this Thanksgiving,” the Washington Post’s Lauren Dockett passed along the groundbreaking advice of “be prepared to to listen.” That piece wasn’t even the only social skills explainer published in the Post.
NPR held a roundtable to debate how — or whether — Americans should discuss politics with their family members.
The Daily Caller, meanwhile, has yet to hector its readers about their private conversations.