A phenomenon you can observe if you spend enough time on any social platform:
Someone encounters a new topic they’ve never thought about before. Maybe it’s a Supreme Court ruling on some obscure administrative law question, or a scientific paper about microplastics, or a controversy involving a celebrity they couldn’t pick out of a lineup. Pick your poison.
Within minutes, they’ll have a fully formed opinion, complete with moral outrage or smug dismissal, delivered with the confidence of someone who’s spent years studying the subject.
And that opinion will be entirely predictable if you know which tribe they belong to.
Progressive tech workers will say one thing, conservative parents another, libertarian economists a third. Ask them why they believe what they believe, and they’ll give you reasons. Lots of reasons. Reasons that sound pretty good, actually. Reasons they clearly believe are their own.
They’re not lying.
They really do believe those are their reasons.