Ah, interesting! Yah, that’s a tough one. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into either, so discussing it with her was probably pointless.
There’s an effect where right wing talking points make their way into all levels and flavours of discourse, even on the left. Tort reform was a good example of that. At the height of the moral panic over that, even some of my lefty friends were ranting about the McDonald’s coffee thing.
My hypothesis is that this is because of how well focused and signal-boosted the right wing message is. They’re very good at crafting talking points with surface validity, then screaming those talking points over and over until everyone is repeating them and nobody knows where they came from. It becomes “a thing everyone just knows”. Manufactured consent.
