You know, most of my family and a fair whack of my friends are pretty bog-standard lefties. I still like love them, though, and more or less get along with them most of the time. Mostly because I know not to bring up climate change, Covid, Dan Andrews…
Anyway, I’m sure a lot of you are much the same. Because you’re probably not lefties. Surveys have shown that “liberals”, women especially, are the quickest to reach for the “block” button on social media and the most likely to throw politically motivated tanties. In other words: “Agree with me, or I won’t talk to you!”
On the other hand, conservatives have been shown to be the most open to listening to opposing viewpoints. They don’t agree with them, but they won’t try and shut them down like a lefty Q+A panellist (a tautology, of course).
Which is a shame: because if the lefties stopped screaming in their little echo chambers and actually got out and talked to people they disagree with, they might find that the evil righties aren’t that scary, after all.
Which is exactly what happened to a female journalist from that bastion of bien pensant, leftist, Huffington Post when she “infiltrated” a “right-wing mom’s group”.
For several years now I have been worried about the increasing right-wing views that I have noticed in my demographic (white suburban women). Before 2016, I always thought of Nazis as mainly historical villains that belonged in Indiana Jones movies or old news reels or the sad stories my grandfather told me. Now, however, as the last Holocaust survivors are dying, I am aware that fascism is creeping back into the world at large in terrifying ways.
Nazis! Fascists! All that’s missing from her leftist Bingo card are the White Supremacists… Oh, wait, no…
Some of these people literally do not believe white privilege exists because, according to them, the Union soldiers who fought in the Civil War were overwhelmingly white. (No, I don’t understand that argument either.)
Neither do I, sweetie – probably because I have literally never heard anyone making such a stump-dumb argument. But this sort of straw-manning is all-too-common on the left.
To learn more, I joined a local right-wing Facebook group for moms […] The moderator sent me a thumbs-up emoji and let me into the group.
What, they didn’t issue you with a pointy hood and a swastika flag? What kind of useless Nazis are these?
Once inside, I found the members were all stripes of Republican and I was pleasantly surprised to see opinion was not monolithic in the group. Several moms argued against the more far-right posters.
Well, now we begin to understand her confusion. Leftists are, after all, so used to robotically agreeing with whatever talking point they’ve been issued this month, that the very notion of not marching in lockstep is obviously shocking.
Oh, and of course our HuffPo lefty is a Mask Karen.
When I joined the meeting, I saw that nobody in the packed room was masked. I gritted my teeth and sat down anyway. I was fully vaccinated and my son wore a mask. He was the only one.
Oh. My. God. I bet the vicious, science-denying anti-vaxxers turned on her in an instant.
Well… no. No one said a thing.
In fact, much to her obvious shock, HuffPo Karen found that these baby-eating, goose-stepping fascists were, in fact, just normal folks.
Despite my uneasiness, I couldn’t help but find myself liking the women in the room. They were charismatic. They were energetic. They had no problem letting my low-functioning autistic son play with their children, which is unfortunately rare among a lot of the other mothers I’ve encountered. But this made me even more uneasy.
Huffington Post
And I bet she still calls them “bigots”.