I fully appreciate your response here, but as this is a public forum I will follow up on a couple of points that occurred as I read.
I understand your ‘citation aversion from academic disillusionment’ - I share it to some degree. When an opinion piece is being formed in freeflow in particular the academic approach can stultify and stagnate what is essentially a stream of consciousness harvesting relevant material from a lifetime of absorbtion. That said – the writer themselves can then do a ‘quick Google search’ (or preferable right now, DuckDuckGo!) and guide their reader to relevancy, when so much that is irrelevant is likely to arise. I would have appreciated that guidance from you, I suspect an unguided search would be significantly less worthwhile.
Q symbolism – fully concur. It has been pointed out that the ‘team jersey’ 17 instance actually referred to the number of championships won by that team, but even so, the synchronicity is notable too.
Quite agree that ‘convincing anyone’ is a futile exercise – and I would add that it also tends to ride roughshod over legitimate concerns of personal sovereignty. However – there are many people now (I would intuit perhaps the vast majority) who are quite simply lost and do not really know what to think for themselves at all – beneath the superficial views they have swallowed undigested from the global meme pool. Presenting viable alternative views concerning the nature and context of the current human situation does not have to be an issue of persuasion – it can be a gift, freely given, to be accepted or rejected as each individual finds suits them. As such the onus is simply to be honest, thorough and authentic, and let the pieces fall as they may. This – to me – is a legitimate and ‘efficient’ use of the ‘powers of persuasion’, and it is well not to throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater.
Yes, the ‘liberals’ as you call them (I would call them authoritarians) will indeed dismiss so much of this subject as delusional conspiracy theory – they will cling to their beliefs as long as they can. And soon they will be crying, and many of them falling apart. I am dreading this. They are our brothers and sisters and they have been terribly damaged. We will have much work to do.