So when I do my job people hate me.
In fact, the better I do my job, the more people hate me.
And no I am not a meter maid and I am not an undertaker,
I am a progressive lesbian talking head on Fox news.
So you all heard that right?
Just to make sure, right I am a gay talking head on Fox news.
I am going to tell you how I do it
and the most important thing I have learnt.
So I go on television.
I debate people who literally want to obliterate everything I believe in.
In some cases, who don’t want me and people like me to even exist.
It’s sort of like Thanksgiving with your conservative uncle
on steroids with a live television audience of millions.
It’s totally almost just like that.
And that’s just on air. The hate mail I get is unbelievable.
Last week alone, I got 238 pieces of nasty email
and more hate tweets that I can even count.
I was called an idiot, a traitor, a scourge,
a cunt, and an ugly man and that was just in one email.
So what have I realized?
Being on the receiving end of all this ugliness?
Well my biggest takeaway
is that for decades we have been focused on political correctness.
But what matters more is emotional correctness.
Let me give you a small example.
I don’t care if you call me a dyke. I really don’t.
I care about 2 things. One I care that you spell it right.
Just a quick refresher it is D Y K E. You’d totally be surprised.
And second I don’t care about the word.
I care about how you use it.
Are you being friendly? Are you just being naïve?
Or do you really want to hurt me personally?
Emotional correctness is the tone, the feeling.
How we say what we say.
The respect and compassion we show one another.
And what I realized is that political persuasion doesn’t begin
with ideas or facts or data.
Political persuasion begins with being emotionally correct.
So when I first went to go work at Fox news, true confession,
I expected there to be marks in the carpet from all the knuckle dragging.
That by the way in case you are paying attention is not emotionally correct.
But liberals on my side,
we can be self-righteous, we can be condescending,
we can be dismissive of anyone who doesn’t agree with us.
In other words we can be politically right but emotionally wrong.
And incidentally that means that people don’t like us right?
No here’s the kicker.
Conservatives are really nice.
I mean not all of them and not the ones who send me hate mail.
But you would be surprised.
Sean Hannity is one of the sweetest guys I have ever met.
He spends his free time trying to fix up his staff on blind dates
and I know that if I ever had a problem, he would do anything he could to help.
Now I think Sean Hannity is 99% politically wrong,
but his emotional correctness is strikingly impressive.
And that’s why people listen to him.
Because you can’t get anyone to agree with you
if they do not even listen to you first.
We spend so much time talking past each other
and not enough time talking through our disagreements.
And if we can start to find compassion for one another,
then we have a shot at building common ground.
It actually sounds really hokey to sort of say it standing up here,
but when you try to put it in practice, it is really powerful.
So someone who says they hate immigrants,
I try to imagine how scared they must be
that their community is changing from what they have always known.
Or someone who says they don’t like teacher unions,
I bet they are really devastated to see their kid’s school
going in to the gutter and they are just looking for someone to blame.
Our challenge is to find the compassion for others
that we want them to have us. That is emotional correctness.
I am not saying it is easy.
An average of like 5.6 times per day,
I have to stop myself from responding to all of hate mail
with a flurry of vile profanities,
this whole you know sort of finding compassion and
common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like
a political spiritual practice for me.
And I ain’t the Dalai Lama.
I am not perfect. But what I am, is optimistic.
Because I don’t just get hate mail,
I get a lot of really nice letters.
Lots of them and one of all my time favorites begins
I am not a big fan of your political leanings,
or your sometimes tortured logic,
But I am a big fan of you as a person.
Now, this guy doesn’t agree with me yet,
But he is listening.
Not because of what I said, but because of how I said it.
And somehow even though we have never met,
we have managed to form a connection.
That’s emotional correctness.
And that’s how we start the conversations that really lead to change.
Thank you.