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Jimmy Kimmel’s wife, Molly McNearney, recently admitted on the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast that she’s lost relationships with relatives who voted for Donald Trump and even told listeners she wished she could “deprogram” herself from the anger she feels. What started as an offhand celebrity confession quickly blew up because it exposed something millions of hardworking Americans already know: in many elite circles, political disagreement has become a license to exile.
Fox-friendly commentators and social media users were quick to spotlight the exchange, and Greg Gutfeld didn’t hold back — asking the obvious question: why does this kind of estrangement seem to flow overwhelmingly in one direction? His point isn’t some sneering provocation; it’s a sober observation about a political culture that treats disagreement as a moral defect rather than an argument to be answered.
This isn’t just about one Hollywood producer and a family feud — it’s the symptom of a deeper problem on the left where politics has become identity, religion, and moral certification all rolled into one. Countless conservatives have been written off as “bad people” for the views they hold, while elites pat themselves on the back for their virtue signaling and moral purity. That dynamic destroys families, corrodes communities, and makes honest persuasion impossible.
There’s also empirical work that helps explain the phenomenon: some studies have found that liberals are more likely to view emotion as a functional guide in political life, which can translate into politics becoming tangled with personal feeling and self-worth. When policy disagreements are filtered through constant moral outrage, compromise and neighborly tolerance disappear — and estrangement becomes the only outlet.
What makes McNearney’s story galling to many conservatives is the hypocrisy of a cultural elite who once claimed to value “dialogue” and “inclusion,” but now reflexively exclude anyone who refuses to adopt their catechism. She admits she was once a Republican and even bought her father a Rush Limbaugh tie, yet now frames relatives’ votes as a personal affront to her family. That turnabout reveals how career incentives and coastal groupthink can eat away at common sense and basic charity.
Conservative commentators are right to call this out because defending free speech and the family goes hand in hand. If one side gets to weaponize politics into a social death penalty for dissent, then civic life will continue to fray and the American habit of neighborly pluralism will be lost. Families deserve better than being ground up in ideological purity tests imposed by the cultural elite.
Americans who work hard and love their families should refuse to accept estrangement as normal or inevitable. Call your relatives, listen more than you lecture, and refuse to buy into the left’s insistence that every disagreement proves your moral bankruptcy; that simple act of human decency is also political resistance. We can stand for truth and principle without turning our own people into casualties of a performative, elite-driven crusade.
If the left wants to be the party of compassion, they should start by showing some — especially toward the millions of citizens they insist are so badly misinformed. Until then, when celebrities and coastal elites cheer family purges as moral cleansing, ordinary Americans will keep asking the same plain question Greg Gutfeld put on social media: why does this estrangement only go in one direction?
