Keeping Peace at a Holiday Dinner: Some Conversational Gambits to Placate Your Doomed Woke Kin, by John Zmirak

If you’re inviting self-righteous, moralistic vegans this year, be sure to provide them with suitable plant-based alternatives.

By John Zmirak, The Stream, November 22, 2022

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”

People often look up to me as someone with consummate social skills — a natural diplomat, whose cosmopolitan breeding, aristocratic manners, and stolidly Stoic temperament allow me to defuse confrontations over issues where honest people feel strongly, especially over their foolish and ignorant ideas on religion and politics.

On countless social occasions, from the Gothic dining halls at Yale to the battered tables of cafes in New York’s Greenwich Village and the sweaty faculty lounge of my English Ph.D. program, I’ve found it needful to emulate the Deepwater Horizon, and spread my oil upon the waters. What began as a tropical heated exchange of deeply held (if poorly reasoned) views, complete with hissing, shouting, and even pounding on tables, I have deftly transformed to Antarctic silence, an almost contemplative quiet where the only sound remaining was of heaving sighs and grinding teeth. I never ask for thanks. It’s just what I do. …

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