American political engagement is thoroughly atomized. Americans have no immediate political vehicles for their frustrations or ideals outside of things like charity, they have no ideological struggle into which they can plug in as community or a real participatory agent. Instead, they have media “discourse”, like TV, radio, podcasts, streamers, YouTube videos, where their role is as an observer slotting themselves into the chair of some pundit and seeing how far they can agree with or defend them. They do not curiously investigate and inform themselves on a topic, but they feel desperate to have an opinion so that they can “win” and be condescending to their “enemies”. Under this thought regime, "I don’t know " is a sign of weakness and means you aren’t political and don’t care and aren’t a good person.

It’s important to understand that, accorsingly, Americans’ political opinions are usually worthless, they are inconsistent propaganda premisesed on contrarian aggressiveness and dismissiveness with nothing below the surface to back it up. This is annoying but it is also fragile, so you, as a much cooler person that does know things, can have a lot of power over a conversation and can go in basically any direction that you would like to - so long as you practice keeping your cool (not that they deserve it, it is just a valuable tool).

For example, let’s say this is a friend or family member and you want to convince them. This is actually mostly about how much they like you and whether you can get them to listen to positive cases for what you advocate for. If you make them feel good for listening to you and get them to watch some videos or read a book or attend actions, you will probably eventually win, as in get them to adopt much better positions. They may need to process this information for some time and may come back to you to tell you about them as if they made these discoveries all on their own and without your help, lol. It can be useful to debunk some of the things they say, but without a displacing narrative they will probably not have a good way to resolve the cognitive dissonance this creates. For example, why support PSL? Well you can provide your own case of course, but I might say something like, “we need to advance socialist working class organizations to build a just alternative for humanity’s sake and this is one small and easy way to do so.” You can of course say why the two genocidal capitalist parties are inadequate, but this will lead to long and rambling discussions. And while doing so, you want a calm, patient, and friendly attitude where what you really want them to do is to read Blackshirts and Reds or something. You want to get to the point of making a specific ask because them understanding your perspective is important to you and it would be a supportive thing for them to do and you will read it with them. That kind of thing. Or get them to join a propaganda action. Move them towards personal connection and involvement. Obviously there is a caveat: if the person is abusive towards you disregard all advice and take care of yourself.

Or let’s say they are an acquaintance and you just want to shut them up. Well then you can be critical as shot. They will fall apart in seconds.