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November 8, 2022

I’ve leaned left politically my entire adult life…until recently. The nationwide riots in 2020 following George Floyd’s death, were a major turning point for me, although not the only ones. Although I felt Chauvin had acted negligently and callously, I couldn’t understand why the media insisted on injecting race into the dialogue without any reasonable basis. Wouldn’t this type of careless reporting only serve to worsen racial tensions? The rioting and destruction were only going to distract from real issues, unnecessarily claiming innocent victims in the name of a cause that was being overshadowed by its own destructive methodology.

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I could not find a fellow liberal who was willing to simply condemn, not the peaceful protests, but the actual riots.

My fellow libs were also taking nearly everything Trump said out of context. I pleaded with them to stop. “If we embellish everything Trump says, do we not run the risk of losing credibility?!” The ensuing pushback was uncharacteristically aggressive, while the credulousness reminded me of a lesson I’d learned earlier in my life.

I grew up in a cult-like Christian religion that disallowed questioning the faith. Fortunately, the conditioning never really stuck with me. Eventually, I defected to a liberal ideology where I thought science and facts mattered. I was content… and then Trump was elected. I became a Trump-deranged liberal, but I remembered my childhood and wondered if I’d again been conditioned by a false ideology.

Image made using man climbing stairs (kues via freepik).

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With a stubborn resolve and a willingness to prove myself wrong, I began reaching out to ardent Trump supporters and asking them to explain their support for him. Eventually, I had to admit I was making more productive inroads talking to Trump supporters than I was trying to convince my liberal friends that rioting was bad.

Where I was losing liberal friends for not aligning completely with their talking points, I was making new conservative friends…and I didn’t even have to agree with them! I was gaining insight into the way liberal media skews statistics to make their viewers think minorities are “disproportionately” treated in ways that somehow prove a racist ethos permeates America. I began to see the racist fallacy of thinking any black American who didn’t vote Democrat was somehow flawed. Why hadn’t I seen these things before? Had I left one religion to join another?

I rewatched Trump’s press conferences after the Charlottesville riots. Like many of my liberal friends, I was certain that Trump said there were good people on the side of Nazis, but he didn’t.

Charlottesville was also not the monumental racist flashpoint the media wanted us to believe it was. If anything, it proved this country has moved way beyond its racist past and the fringe groups still espousing racist adjacent ideas were so small that, even with a national spotlight, they could hardly muster a couple of hundred people. Counter-protestors outnumbered the white nationalists and neo-Nazis by 10 to 1. Everyone was armed to the teeth, but no one was shot.

When the crazed driver made the fateful decision that would ultimately kill Heather Heyer while injuring many more, the rioting all but stopped, and Charlottesville had the quickest medical response to an emergency of its kind in all its history. There were even reports that Proud Boys and BLM counter-protesters began having a dialogue. The consensus was clear: The murderous driver had gone too far, and no one wanted to be associated with him.

The following year, the alt-right leader who initiated the protests-turned-riots from the previous year attempted to return and memorialize the event but was met with so many counter-protesters he didn’t even take a step out of his vehicle. He saw he wasn’t welcome and just drove away. Outside of the tragic death, I’d call this an overall win for anti-racism, but Trump was still president and, despite the facts, the media chose fear over hope.