Actually, as Mr. French points out, "the common view of the American right," which he summarizes at length, is "rooted in multiple events [on the left] that are real and, in fact, unjust." So he is listing evils of the left and of the right. I see this essay as quite balanced.
But if anyone thinks he has been too hard on the Right, remember that he is an Evangelical Christian and a conservative. So being hard on the Right is a sign of balance.
I think it's a wonderful essay and gets at the deepest cause of polarization -- each side sees the other as evil (when they are not) and seeing someone as evil is the main cause of hate.
I've thought a lot about why people make this mistake -- why they see evil when they shouldn't. What I think most people miss is captured in a famous proverb: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The common (and best) interpretation of this is that "good intentions" means only that the person on the road to hell truly believes his intentions are good (although they are not).
So the proverb tells us that when you see someone on the road to hell (doing terrible things) they are likely doing them out of a desire to do good. If you understand that, then it's hard to see them as evil. They are just mistaken. They have been misled. Everyone knows the proverb, but few are able to apply it.
I read the book. It's balanced and fascinating. See my (zFacts) review on Amazon.
As someone on the center-left, I have been appalled at conspiracies such as President Bush 43 “knowing about 9-11 and doing nothing do he could use the excuse to invade Iraq.” The evidence is the Bush family relationship with the Saudi Royal Family dating from the 1930s. The reasoning is hatred of the same sort that your piece describes here, and is almost impossible to refute. All of this inability to even share a basic set of assumptions (such as Presidents don’t commit treason and candidates for the office don’t run pedophile rings from pizza parlors) is indeed very troubling. Thanks for your piece here.
As someone on the center-left: are you appalled by the 1619 project? By the attempted assassination of congressmen playing baseball? By cancel culture? By Antifa? By the selective and misleading coverage by the New York Times, CNN and the like? I have been looking very hard for such declarations from the center-left but all I hear are denunciations of the far right. If the aim is to persuade, the first step is to show people on the right where we have common ground. If you ask me, the Center Left, including our presidential nominee, has made a hash of that.
I’m center left and yes I am appalled by cancel culture, by the abdication of the duty of balanced reporting of the NYT and others, more than appalled by the attempted assassination of congressmen. I have not looked much into the 1619 project, because I’ve been more focused on finding the degree to which academia seems to be going along with the abridgment of the first amendment.
I’ll posit that one reason you’re not seeing more individual Democrats taking a stand is that we aren’t getting balanced reporting. I almost automatically assume anything on Fox is either an outright lie or badly exaggerated, which leaves me far more reliant on other news sources. That hideous mess with Evergreen College in 2017 ONLY got coverage on Fox - the mainstream media declined to give it space. I ended up going to direct source material from student cellphones on YouTube and a good documentary made by an independent filmmaker to find that what happened was appalling and very predictive on a miniature scale of the summer riots.
We need to recognize that when our news is curated as badly as it is right now, when reporting is edited to fit some external narrative, we risk losing our party to the fringes just as certainly as the Republicans lost their party to Trump.
Good for you, tracking that down. I met a couple who taught there and then I did the same. Eventually, that led to https://areomagazine.com/?s=evergreen , which might have the same video you saw, but it's worth looking around that site if you don't know it already. Pluckrose, who runs it, has a new book out on postmodernism, the root of identity politics. Thanks for checking out my books.
In broad terms, it is difficult to give your questions their due. Am I appalled by violence, which seems to be a principal thread of the manner you framed your response? Of course, in general terms, and that applies to the actions of the right wing at Charlottesville; am I appalled
by the manner in which the media frames its stories? Appalled is too
strong of a word, and I would suggest
that FOX and Brietbart are even more
slanted in their presentation of the
news. What particularly bothers me is the manner in which neither side is willing to allow themselves to consider that the other has a point and that they have turned policy positions into ideological absolutes. To me, that seemed the emphasis of the present article.
I’m not so sure that the NYT isn’t setting itself up to get just as slanted as Fox. I was very disturbed to read about the New York Times guild’s demand of putting their articles through sensitivity reads, which will inevitably result in massaging the facts to fit a narrative.
“Get it right from the beginning: sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.”
Let’s not do “whatabout” Fox or Breitbart. That won’t fix anything and that’s not a standard I want to compare myself to anyway.
I'm on the left (maybe center left, but left of Sanders on some policy issues) and I'm appalled by all the things you list, and I say so -- Loud and clear. Check out either of my two books on Amazon: Ripped Apart, and Why Democrats Win (by stoft). Or google them to get free pdf.
I am not sure that hatred is behind every conspiracy theory. Intense suspicion is not the same as hate. I have met conspiracy theorists who believe that the "media," or the "government," or some other nebulous group distorts the truth in order to protect its interests. You can believe this without necessarily despising those involved. All you need is a belief that you have been deceived or cheated, along with a theory that feeds into that belief. Any of this can turn into hate. But hate is not necessarily behind it. What, then, if not hate, leads people to believe such strange and convoluted theories? Maybe there's comfort in the thought that the problems of the world can be blamed on some group out there. It's easier to think this than to share in the responsibility.
Great piece. I've grown to hate both parties and I score in the 99th percentile of Openness in the 5 Factor Personality Inventory. Unfortunately, the more open I've been and the more research I've done, the more jaded I've become. Hatred is a natural response to feeling used, exploited and deceived again and again and feeling powerless to change it. At this point, I wish we could destroy this party duopoly and start fresh. The public seems to have no leverage to make these parties (and corporations for that matter) act in a principled manner. What else is left but impotent hatred?
Psychology research (the real stuff not pop) has demonstrated that conspiracy theorists are fundamentally antisocial people. Anti-socialism is a serious mental disability, these folk pretty much hate everyone and despise social structures. They believe that the world in general is scary and will hurt them if they engage. Understandably, then, we find conspiracists on both sides of the political spectrum because they aren't driven by political or any other organized social thinking, they are driven by fear. Accordingly, they cut themselves off from their neighbors and family.
Consider the strength of an internet platform for antisocial people. They have a voice without any commitment or engagement with others. They can live outside of society with no accountability to it and still be heard. To me it's a sad state for anyone to live in -- they deserve our empathy regardless of their message. Before the internet they would have been hidden and ignored.
What we are seeing today is artificially magnified voices of fringe members of society who can only talk through a screen. I worry that we are giving them too much credit and a larger platform than they have taken for themselves, or have earned. It will likely take a couple more decades before the modern world adapts to the impact of the internet. We haven't lived with it long enough to be able to discern when what we see is truly dangerous, so it all looks dangerous. Until then I am confident that these "theories" they espouse will have minimal impact on the rest of us because we just don't see the world as narrowly as they do. And we care about each other. I am very confident that it will all settle down given time.
Thank you for this excellent perspective. I particularly liked the phrase “in the grips of late stage hatred” as it’s so evocative of cancer, as hate really is a cancer of the soul.
Well, Mr. French, this column should have also been published over at the Dispatch. THE RIGHT is the problematic "side' right now. The right is having a problem with its adherents believing conspiracy theories. And particularly wild ones at that. Yes, the right HATES the left. They often speak in eliminationist rhetoric about the left.
So why would you publish this column only over here? Are you trying to "blame the victim" here, by telling the left "hey, if you just wouldn't fight so hard for women to have reproductive rights, then the right would not hate you so much?
At the very least, publish in BOTH places. But talking to liberals about it, is not going to solve anything. They are not the ones doing the "conspirerizing".
I suspect many conspiracy theories propagate because they cannot fathom a rational explanation for their opponents behavior or words, so they start reaching for the irrational explanations. Unfortunately, due to the inherit nature of the explanations being outside their own internal model, many of these explanations tend to be more wild.
I suspect that hate isn't at the root of (most) conspiracy theories, but deep fear. When you see someone in power acting in a way that appears to be irrational and unjustified, I begin to fear, "What will they do next?" My power of predicting the future (normality, stability) has gone sideways, so we begin to fear for our future.
I reserved the book at my local library. I would have liked to see the way the right characterizes the left actually detailed out in this article. It ended up reading like an opinion piece written by the right for consumption by the right, subtly undermining the point that he is making. But the point is good, needed, and welcome regardless.
Perhaps Mr. French's book is as evenhanded as he claims - I'll wait to read it and see. I can't "like" this essay, though. Not while all the evils of the Right are detailed to be denounced, and none of the Left. I agree with all of his condemnations, but still challenge the one-sidedness. Not a word about the claim that 1619, not 1776, is our birth date. Not a word about the people who elide Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (Lincoln!) with the Confederate traitors who truly should not be honored. Nothing about the lies that modern policing developed from slave patrols (Benjamin Franklin would love that one), or that the Three-Fifths Compromise was an endorsement of slavery, when it was only a pragmatic recognition of facts on the ground, to resolve an intractable dispute over taxation and representation.
Our public debate is polluted from two sides.
I hear at least as much secession talk from the Left as from the Right, if not more. I'll save my praise for essays that describe both sides of the threat.
I'm not a fan of the 1619 Project or most of what flows from it, but I would point out that it is not the moral equivalent of the Quanon theory. Tendentious interpretations of history can be found on both side, Quanon only on one.
Unfortunately, the problem isn't limited to tendentious interpretations of history. The extremes of both sides seem to agree that the American Project has and always has had White Supremacy as its objective. Q-anon et al. want to eliminate the people who don't fit their vision; Antifa et al. want to eliminate the Project itself and start over, to their own specifications. State suicide is not as morally reprensible as genocide, but it's still a false and evil choice.
It's unfortunate to end the conversation here. As Irshad Manji has highlighted in her conversation with Yascha, we need to stay engaged. This is the point of Persuasion - to keep the conversation going.
To Al, David French said, "In my book, I also walk through the left’s case against the right. Trust me, it’s every bit as compelling and infuriating: a long tale of hypocrisy, corruption, and violence—rooted in truth, yet caricatural in its simplicity." Let's take him, David French, at his word and at least suppose his book does highlight how simple the left's critique is of the right. That said, why is it so important that the blame is fairly apportioned? There is so much blame to go around that worrying about whether there is more or less on a given side seems to miss the point. Frankly, giving credit to someone that can see that there are two sides, let alone blame for both seems like an epiphany.
That said, James, "just articles in a newspapers"? Isn't everything, save for actions? Words are ideas and ideas are . . . . everything, at least for folks like us that are trying to figure a way out of this mess.
"Q-anon et al. want to eliminate the people who don't fit their vision; Antifa et al. want to eliminate the Project itself and start over, to their own specifications. State suicide is not as morally reprensible as genocide, but it's still a false and evil choice."
This statement to me seems like something Persuasion should engage in. Perhaps organizations like Q-anon and Antifa may completely sidetrack the conversation, but the core of the argument - eliminate the bad people and/or eliminate the bad system seems at the core of our discussions.
I am conflicted, both are completely unacceptable and frankly a fools choice. How do we get to the "and"?
How can we acknowledge the discontent of the existing 'order' as it loses its control over, not only its country but its understanding of how the world operates, and the discontent of those who have traditionally not had a say (or as much as they would like) in that order and their desire for a larger say in its direction. This to me seems like the crux of the conversation and I would like to continue to move it forward especially with folks who seem to be very secure in their beliefs that their perspectives are correct so we all can learn more about the various perspectives.
It's actually being proposed as part of the K-12 curriculum in CA, and I believe it has been adopted other places. It was recently mentioned in a mass email I received from the UC Berkeley chancellor, as a partial basis for her policies. It's not just "articles in a newspaper." And the NYT is not just "a newspaper" it's the premier US progressive paper. So 1619 is a strong indication of a very substantial trend in left thinking.
Hi James, I agree with everything you just said. Yes, all of it. But I don't think Al's phrase "the problem isn't limited to tendentious interpretations of history" was meant to "make [the 1619 articles] seem violent." I would read Al as saying that such writing influences people to go off the rails and, yes, sometimes become violent. Obviously, they got their ideas from some non-violent writing and/or speech. So I think there has just been a misunderstanding. Cheers, Steve
Actually, as Mr. French points out, "the common view of the American right," which he summarizes at length, is "rooted in multiple events [on the left] that are real and, in fact, unjust." So he is listing evils of the left and of the right. I see this essay as quite balanced.
But if anyone thinks he has been too hard on the Right, remember that he is an Evangelical Christian and a conservative. So being hard on the Right is a sign of balance.
I think it's a wonderful essay and gets at the deepest cause of polarization -- each side sees the other as evil (when they are not) and seeing someone as evil is the main cause of hate.
I've thought a lot about why people make this mistake -- why they see evil when they shouldn't. What I think most people miss is captured in a famous proverb: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The common (and best) interpretation of this is that "good intentions" means only that the person on the road to hell truly believes his intentions are good (although they are not).
So the proverb tells us that when you see someone on the road to hell (doing terrible things) they are likely doing them out of a desire to do good. If you understand that, then it's hard to see them as evil. They are just mistaken. They have been misled. Everyone knows the proverb, but few are able to apply it.
I read the book. It's balanced and fascinating. See my (zFacts) review on Amazon.
this is really great, thank you
As someone on the center-left, I have been appalled at conspiracies such as President Bush 43 “knowing about 9-11 and doing nothing do he could use the excuse to invade Iraq.” The evidence is the Bush family relationship with the Saudi Royal Family dating from the 1930s. The reasoning is hatred of the same sort that your piece describes here, and is almost impossible to refute. All of this inability to even share a basic set of assumptions (such as Presidents don’t commit treason and candidates for the office don’t run pedophile rings from pizza parlors) is indeed very troubling. Thanks for your piece here.
As someone on the center-left: are you appalled by the 1619 project? By the attempted assassination of congressmen playing baseball? By cancel culture? By Antifa? By the selective and misleading coverage by the New York Times, CNN and the like? I have been looking very hard for such declarations from the center-left but all I hear are denunciations of the far right. If the aim is to persuade, the first step is to show people on the right where we have common ground. If you ask me, the Center Left, including our presidential nominee, has made a hash of that.
I’m center left and yes I am appalled by cancel culture, by the abdication of the duty of balanced reporting of the NYT and others, more than appalled by the attempted assassination of congressmen. I have not looked much into the 1619 project, because I’ve been more focused on finding the degree to which academia seems to be going along with the abridgment of the first amendment.
I’ll posit that one reason you’re not seeing more individual Democrats taking a stand is that we aren’t getting balanced reporting. I almost automatically assume anything on Fox is either an outright lie or badly exaggerated, which leaves me far more reliant on other news sources. That hideous mess with Evergreen College in 2017 ONLY got coverage on Fox - the mainstream media declined to give it space. I ended up going to direct source material from student cellphones on YouTube and a good documentary made by an independent filmmaker to find that what happened was appalling and very predictive on a miniature scale of the summer riots.
We need to recognize that when our news is curated as badly as it is right now, when reporting is edited to fit some external narrative, we risk losing our party to the fringes just as certainly as the Republicans lost their party to Trump.
Good for you, tracking that down. I met a couple who taught there and then I did the same. Eventually, that led to https://areomagazine.com/?s=evergreen , which might have the same video you saw, but it's worth looking around that site if you don't know it already. Pluckrose, who runs it, has a new book out on postmodernism, the root of identity politics. Thanks for checking out my books.
Here’s the documentary that I found, which is quite good and concurs with other impressions from student videos that were posted.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FH2WeWgcSMk
I’m interested in the aeromagazine site, appreciate the link!
Thanks, I'd lost track of that and been looking for it. It seems to be Part 1 of the video on the Areo site.
Are you on Slack? persuademe.slack.com
In broad terms, it is difficult to give your questions their due. Am I appalled by violence, which seems to be a principal thread of the manner you framed your response? Of course, in general terms, and that applies to the actions of the right wing at Charlottesville; am I appalled
by the manner in which the media frames its stories? Appalled is too
strong of a word, and I would suggest
that FOX and Brietbart are even more
slanted in their presentation of the
news. What particularly bothers me is the manner in which neither side is willing to allow themselves to consider that the other has a point and that they have turned policy positions into ideological absolutes. To me, that seemed the emphasis of the present article.
I’m not so sure that the NYT isn’t setting itself up to get just as slanted as Fox. I was very disturbed to read about the New York Times guild’s demand of putting their articles through sensitivity reads, which will inevitably result in massaging the facts to fit a narrative.
“Get it right from the beginning: sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.”
Let’s not do “whatabout” Fox or Breitbart. That won’t fix anything and that’s not a standard I want to compare myself to anyway.
I'm on the left (maybe center left, but left of Sanders on some policy issues) and I'm appalled by all the things you list, and I say so -- Loud and clear. Check out either of my two books on Amazon: Ripped Apart, and Why Democrats Win (by stoft). Or google them to get free pdf.
I will check it out!
I am not sure that hatred is behind every conspiracy theory. Intense suspicion is not the same as hate. I have met conspiracy theorists who believe that the "media," or the "government," or some other nebulous group distorts the truth in order to protect its interests. You can believe this without necessarily despising those involved. All you need is a belief that you have been deceived or cheated, along with a theory that feeds into that belief. Any of this can turn into hate. But hate is not necessarily behind it. What, then, if not hate, leads people to believe such strange and convoluted theories? Maybe there's comfort in the thought that the problems of the world can be blamed on some group out there. It's easier to think this than to share in the responsibility.
Great piece. I've grown to hate both parties and I score in the 99th percentile of Openness in the 5 Factor Personality Inventory. Unfortunately, the more open I've been and the more research I've done, the more jaded I've become. Hatred is a natural response to feeling used, exploited and deceived again and again and feeling powerless to change it. At this point, I wish we could destroy this party duopoly and start fresh. The public seems to have no leverage to make these parties (and corporations for that matter) act in a principled manner. What else is left but impotent hatred?
Psychology research (the real stuff not pop) has demonstrated that conspiracy theorists are fundamentally antisocial people. Anti-socialism is a serious mental disability, these folk pretty much hate everyone and despise social structures. They believe that the world in general is scary and will hurt them if they engage. Understandably, then, we find conspiracists on both sides of the political spectrum because they aren't driven by political or any other organized social thinking, they are driven by fear. Accordingly, they cut themselves off from their neighbors and family.
Consider the strength of an internet platform for antisocial people. They have a voice without any commitment or engagement with others. They can live outside of society with no accountability to it and still be heard. To me it's a sad state for anyone to live in -- they deserve our empathy regardless of their message. Before the internet they would have been hidden and ignored.
What we are seeing today is artificially magnified voices of fringe members of society who can only talk through a screen. I worry that we are giving them too much credit and a larger platform than they have taken for themselves, or have earned. It will likely take a couple more decades before the modern world adapts to the impact of the internet. We haven't lived with it long enough to be able to discern when what we see is truly dangerous, so it all looks dangerous. Until then I am confident that these "theories" they espouse will have minimal impact on the rest of us because we just don't see the world as narrowly as they do. And we care about each other. I am very confident that it will all settle down given time.
Another great piece Mr. French. I am blessed to be a part of the Persuasion community and so have such wonderful journalism at my disposal. Thank you.
Thank you for this excellent perspective. I particularly liked the phrase “in the grips of late stage hatred” as it’s so evocative of cancer, as hate really is a cancer of the soul.
I am not sure hate is even necessary; contempt and indifference suffice. Dehumanization proceeds from the absence of love, even before hate crystallizes. And a "degree of grace and tolerance" may not suffice. The protection of liberty may require love, "not romantic love but the love of humanity," as Yegor Zhukov said at his sentencing in December, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/a-powerful-statement-of-resistance-from-a-college-student-on-trial-in-moscow.
Well, Mr. French, this column should have also been published over at the Dispatch. THE RIGHT is the problematic "side' right now. The right is having a problem with its adherents believing conspiracy theories. And particularly wild ones at that. Yes, the right HATES the left. They often speak in eliminationist rhetoric about the left.
So why would you publish this column only over here? Are you trying to "blame the victim" here, by telling the left "hey, if you just wouldn't fight so hard for women to have reproductive rights, then the right would not hate you so much?
At the very least, publish in BOTH places. But talking to liberals about it, is not going to solve anything. They are not the ones doing the "conspirerizing".
I suspect many conspiracy theories propagate because they cannot fathom a rational explanation for their opponents behavior or words, so they start reaching for the irrational explanations. Unfortunately, due to the inherit nature of the explanations being outside their own internal model, many of these explanations tend to be more wild.
I suspect that hate isn't at the root of (most) conspiracy theories, but deep fear. When you see someone in power acting in a way that appears to be irrational and unjustified, I begin to fear, "What will they do next?" My power of predicting the future (normality, stability) has gone sideways, so we begin to fear for our future.
I don't think this can be fully remedied by by discussion. I think we need a new understanding and qualification for secular and religious ideology. See: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/06/postmodern-religion-faith-social-justice/
I reserved the book at my local library. I would have liked to see the way the right characterizes the left actually detailed out in this article. It ended up reading like an opinion piece written by the right for consumption by the right, subtly undermining the point that he is making. But the point is good, needed, and welcome regardless.
Great read. Just bought the book and I am eager to start reading it!
Perhaps Mr. French's book is as evenhanded as he claims - I'll wait to read it and see. I can't "like" this essay, though. Not while all the evils of the Right are detailed to be denounced, and none of the Left. I agree with all of his condemnations, but still challenge the one-sidedness. Not a word about the claim that 1619, not 1776, is our birth date. Not a word about the people who elide Jefferson, Washington, and Lincoln (Lincoln!) with the Confederate traitors who truly should not be honored. Nothing about the lies that modern policing developed from slave patrols (Benjamin Franklin would love that one), or that the Three-Fifths Compromise was an endorsement of slavery, when it was only a pragmatic recognition of facts on the ground, to resolve an intractable dispute over taxation and representation.
Our public debate is polluted from two sides.
I hear at least as much secession talk from the Left as from the Right, if not more. I'll save my praise for essays that describe both sides of the threat.
I'm not a fan of the 1619 Project or most of what flows from it, but I would point out that it is not the moral equivalent of the Quanon theory. Tendentious interpretations of history can be found on both side, Quanon only on one.
Unfortunately, the problem isn't limited to tendentious interpretations of history. The extremes of both sides seem to agree that the American Project has and always has had White Supremacy as its objective. Q-anon et al. want to eliminate the people who don't fit their vision; Antifa et al. want to eliminate the Project itself and start over, to their own specifications. State suicide is not as morally reprensible as genocide, but it's still a false and evil choice.
Clearly, we disagree. Respectfully, which, on the Internet, is progress.
It's unfortunate to end the conversation here. As Irshad Manji has highlighted in her conversation with Yascha, we need to stay engaged. This is the point of Persuasion - to keep the conversation going.
To Al, David French said, "In my book, I also walk through the left’s case against the right. Trust me, it’s every bit as compelling and infuriating: a long tale of hypocrisy, corruption, and violence—rooted in truth, yet caricatural in its simplicity." Let's take him, David French, at his word and at least suppose his book does highlight how simple the left's critique is of the right. That said, why is it so important that the blame is fairly apportioned? There is so much blame to go around that worrying about whether there is more or less on a given side seems to miss the point. Frankly, giving credit to someone that can see that there are two sides, let alone blame for both seems like an epiphany.
That said, James, "just articles in a newspapers"? Isn't everything, save for actions? Words are ideas and ideas are . . . . everything, at least for folks like us that are trying to figure a way out of this mess.
"Q-anon et al. want to eliminate the people who don't fit their vision; Antifa et al. want to eliminate the Project itself and start over, to their own specifications. State suicide is not as morally reprensible as genocide, but it's still a false and evil choice."
This statement to me seems like something Persuasion should engage in. Perhaps organizations like Q-anon and Antifa may completely sidetrack the conversation, but the core of the argument - eliminate the bad people and/or eliminate the bad system seems at the core of our discussions.
I am conflicted, both are completely unacceptable and frankly a fools choice. How do we get to the "and"?
How can we acknowledge the discontent of the existing 'order' as it loses its control over, not only its country but its understanding of how the world operates, and the discontent of those who have traditionally not had a say (or as much as they would like) in that order and their desire for a larger say in its direction. This to me seems like the crux of the conversation and I would like to continue to move it forward especially with folks who seem to be very secure in their beliefs that their perspectives are correct so we all can learn more about the various perspectives.
It's actually being proposed as part of the K-12 curriculum in CA, and I believe it has been adopted other places. It was recently mentioned in a mass email I received from the UC Berkeley chancellor, as a partial basis for her policies. It's not just "articles in a newspaper." And the NYT is not just "a newspaper" it's the premier US progressive paper. So 1619 is a strong indication of a very substantial trend in left thinking.
Hi James, I agree with everything you just said. Yes, all of it. But I don't think Al's phrase "the problem isn't limited to tendentious interpretations of history" was meant to "make [the 1619 articles] seem violent." I would read Al as saying that such writing influences people to go off the rails and, yes, sometimes become violent. Obviously, they got their ideas from some non-violent writing and/or speech. So I think there has just been a misunderstanding. Cheers, Steve
Try the book. It’s excellent and I found the treatment of both sides to be very evenhanded.
so great. can't wait to read this book!