Ms. Bray, I take offense at your attack on white males, as if we — I am a white male — should not have a fair chance. We are not each individually responsible for the injustices that you cite. I didn’t do those things. Your attitude is as prejudiced as the attitudes of those very white males.
I also agree with Henry Wismayer’s basic thesis. I live in the US, and I did not vote for Donald Trump — but I could not vote for the alternative either. Indeed, I think that Russia deserves a Pulitzer for exposing the awful stuff that was going on with Clinton. Not only that, but the fact that the Democratic party was going to make sure that Hillary got nominated, no matter what Democrats at large wanted — what a scandal, and yet the liberal press had completely drowned out these important revelations by making such a noise about Trump’s involvement with Russia — which is an issue, but what the Democrats and Clinton did are issues too. Conservatives look at that and shake their heads: “See, the mainstream press is in the pockets of the liberals”, and they are right.
Then when Trump won, some people hung a flag saying “RESIST” on the Washington mall. Resist who? — the people who voted and legally elected Trump? I didn’t want Trump, but our system chose him. Now liberals were saying we should reject the legitimate choice of our political system. That “RESIST” message is viewed by conservatives as yet more evidence that liberals are extremists.
Wismayer’s point that liberals don’t know when to stop is exemplified by environmental policy in the US. The US has vast expanses of arid land that is always in the sun, and there have been many efforts to create solar power stations to tap the solar energy, but until on recent years, almost every effort to do so was stopped by environmental groups, claiming that a solar farm would endanger some little lizard. These environmental groups are single agenda groups and do not know how to look at the big picture, and so they are seen again by conservatives as extremists — which they are.
The other elephant in the room is that right wing groups are just as extreme. No argument there. But the important point of Wismayer’s article is that left wing groups are every bit as toxic as the right wing ones. How many people were murdered in Russia in the name of communism? — supposedly to create a fair economic system? The struggle between right and left is really just a power struggle: among those who are setting the agendas, fairness and equality have little to do with it.
Finally, I am not a conservative. At this point I know that you think that I am. I am not a liberal either; but it is clear that in your mind, the choice is polar, and that only an extremist who buys the entire left wing agenda is a true “liberal”. This is exactly what Wismayer is talking about: you have proven his point.
