It’s interesting to realize that the manner in which people communicate, the way in which they carry themselves, seems to have a great deal of pull. I am becoming more and more convinced that people who go into attack mode on Facebook, coming across as hyper-aggressive to the point of being obnoxious, may not actually be complete and total jerks in person. In fact, I strongly suspect that a person who behaves like a jerk on Facebook, if he was encountered in person by someone on the receiving end of his Facebook attack, would be somewhat embarrassed and subdued, perhaps even apologetic and meek. One can infer that the distance (and even, on occasion, the anonymity) on social media platforms such as Facebook have the ability to bring out the worst in some people.

Another example: Bill Maher is an interesting media personality. Clearly a man of the Liberal Left, and often crude, yet he has demonstrated in recent years that he is not a true-blue “Progressive Leftist” – in fact, he has often disparaged them as crazy, which they are. Yet Bill Maher will frequently try to browbeat his guests into attacking Donald Trump. For Maher, there simply isn’t one single redeeming quality in the former President. To Maher, Trump is an amalgamation of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Lucifer all rolled into one. And Maher seems incapable of giving an inch. Instead he chastises and steamrolls his guests into giving an unconditional surrender to the notion that Trump is pure evil. And pure stupidity. In doing so, Maher demonstrates that Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, and it affects even people with a certain level of intelligence.

What I have discovered is that when people are over-the-top with their bombast, and unwilling to listen to alternative views, they are operating from a place of weakness, not a place of strength. They have to appear invulnerable on the outside to opposing viewpoints because they are very vulnerable on the inside to narratives that do not fit comfortably in their worldview. They cannot so much as consider, or entertain, a perspective that clashes with their defiant dogmatism.

Truth is not their aim; forcing concessions is.