America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era

I've observed this weird cognitive dissonance with outdoorsmen, since I am quite fond of fishing.

They tend to be a pretty hardcore MAGA bunch, but also don't like pollution because it messes up their sport. When you ask them about stuff like this (how can you support someone who pretty openly wants to mess up your pastime?), they get mad or change the subject.

I get it - people are complicated and can care about many things at once. Nobody likes it when someone is seemingly poking at their belief systems. Still - you'd think it'd give them some kind of pause.

I think some of this is down to the inability of some folk (that to be clear, I think is stoked by the parties for marketing purposes) to differentiate between the beliefs of their party and their own personal beliefs. In this way, parties are not a matter of beliefs really as much as they're a matter of identity. I've witnessed this with my own family: my parents are and have always been Republican, and even though they hate Trump and virtually every policy he stands for, they still voted for him. When questioned why, you get various somewhat incoherent notions of hating Democrats. And... fair, as a Leftist, I also hate Democrats, haha. But I still voted Harris because as distasteful as I find the Dem establishment, they're closer to anything I want to see in the world than anything on offer on the other side.