HOLIDAY WISHES FROM THE ATLANTIC! Deprogram your relatives this Thanksgiving:

Some people (like my friend Tom Nichols) think that you should spend your Thanksgiving playing nice, pretending that your cousin doesn’t follow QAnon and that your uncle doesn’t believe the election was stolen and also that the Cyber Ninjas are a bunch of cucks for not uncovering voter fraud. Tom believes that Thanksgiving is a time for harmony and niceties and gratitude. I love Tom, but he’s completely wrong.

Spending a holiday sitting around, pretending your crazy relatives aren’t crazy, is one of America’s time-honored traditions. In normal times, you could be the dog in the house-fire meme declaring, “This is fine” while taking a sip of doggy coffee, but we are not in normal times.

Last Thanksgiving, many of us didn’t see our families, because the pandemic was raging. Now, 773,000 dead Americans later, we have vaccines and boosters. And while the unvaccinated are still dying at a pretty rapid clip, we are finally able to more safely get together with our parents and grandparents and weird cousins and uncles.

This is your chance to deprogram them. Facebook knows its algorithm radicalizes users. This is your chance to tell your aunt that maybe the news she gets from it isn’t all that reliable. And that maybe the MAGA news network is not giving her unbiased news, either.

Or to put it another way:

UPDATE: Past performance is no guarantee of future results: “What the FBI Had on Grandpa” — also from Molly Jong-Fast, earlier this year.

(Updated and bumped. The last link via Dan McLaughlin, who tweets, “Life comes at you fast.”)