Yesterday evening my wife and I dined at the Austin home of her female first cousin, once removed. Others in attendance were the cousin’s husband, the cousin’s parents (the father is my wife’s first cousin), the cousin’s brother and his wife, and my wife’s sister and her husband. The cast was white, college-educated, professional (the host and hostess are lawyers), and various shades of left (except for me). The topics of conversation — other than children, grandchildren, and renovations — included Trump, Rand Paul, guns, abortion, stereotyping, and the Austin school-bond proposal, which passed 70-30 on November 7.

You can guess how it went:

Trump is crazy and evil. People who voted for him didn’t know what they were doing.

There was an initial “cover up” about the extent of Rand Paul’s injuries. (Actually, he didn’t realize their extent for quite a while after he was blind-sided by his neighbor, Rene Boucher.) So maybe there’s some hanky-panky involving Paul and the attacker’s wife. That one was pulled out of thin air, but there was no mention of the more credible, widely discussed, political motivation for the attack. As one source puts it, “Boucher is a registered Democrat. He is shown through Facebook postings to be highly critical of President Donald Trump, Boucher is also an advocate for gun control and healthcare reform [i.e., Obamacare].” (I strongly suspect that Boucher is a James Hodgkinson without a rifle, a one-man Antifa mob.)

Guns should be controlled, but not “my” guns.

Men have no business deciding what women do with “their bodies”, as if an unborn child were an appendix.

Stereotyping is bad. This topic was introduced by a woman who recalled that an “ignorant” woman once made anti-Semitic remarks in her presence, not knowing that she is Jewish — because “I don’t look Jewish”, she said. So she was actually stereotyping Jews while objecting to stereotyping. And there was much stereotyping of people who voted for Trump, people who own guns (themselves excepted, of course), rural types, and all the other usual suspects.

It’s wonderful that the school-bond proposal was adopted, even though (no one said this) it will drive more low-income families out of Austin and cause “liberals” to find more ways to subsidize “affordable housing” (i.e., try to keep Austin from becoming entirely white), even though such subsidies will cause taxes to rise even more. (“Liberals” never seem to grasp the connection between their voting habits and their tax bills.)

I kept my mouth shut, of course, having no wish to upset my wife or spoil the feeling of smug unanimity that prevailed. Further, I actually like those people. They are truly nice, and good company when they’re not virtue-signalling to each other.