My conversations with young people have been trending towards going the exact same way as my conversations with MAGA boomers who are also very passionate about the disinformation they’ve found on the internet by “doing their own research.” Being upset on the internet isn’t something to be proud of.

Critical thinking is more important than emotion in the age of disinformation. Try harder to think more critically and less emotionally.

Critical thinking is not more important than emotion, you are a fool if you think it is.

Critical thinking relies on your head not being up your own ass to work, emotion on the other hand taps into a human learned intuition that has successfully gotten humans through innumerable challenges over our long evolutionary history. If it isn't your emotions that have guided you back to reason and kindness over and over again in your life, your relationship with your emotions is to be frank quite immature and stunted.

I would go a step further and say what makes the kind of centrism you are defending and leftists like me attack, so dangerous and insidious is it conflates adulthood with lobotomizing the relationship between your emotions and your politics in the pursuit of some logical construction of ideology that becomes more and more empty as it departs from the human condition and is lost in pedantic defenses of the status quo that aren't salient to people who are suffering and need actual change, not management of the status quo.

It is my emotions integrated with my politics in constant conversation that makes me able to actually evolve my views to new realities and new information, that is precisely what differentiates someone like me from a stereotypical toxic stereotype of a boomer. My emotions are what nag at my outmoded views, that keep reminding me of inconsistencies in my actions, my emotions are what keep my morale compass oriented and stop me from handwaving away the genocide of Palestinians because the tv news I watch tells me it is ok, they probably deserve to die...