Challenge accepted.
That’s my response to Rev. Andrea Ayvazian’s column “Ideas for healing divisions and finding common ground” [Gazette, Nov. 15] in which she urges community-wide events to “repair the divisions” among the people who disagree with each other. As an outnumbered conservative in the Pioneer Valley, I say set up the card table, let’s get together and find that common ground.
Of course, I can make this request confident in the knowledge it will never happen for one simple reason: the left doesn’t want a dialogue, it only wants a monologue. There’s only one side of the political spectrum that regularly engages in open forums of discussion, inviting those who disagree to the microphone first. YouTube is chock-full of conservative figures who go to protests to ask people exactly why they’re out in the streets; most of the time this request for discussion is met with stony silence. Here in western Massachusetts, Nathan Remillard of Yankee News regularly tries to talk to protesters. In Fall River, they called the cops on him for his effort at dialogue.
No less than liberal Bill Maher recently complained that the Democrats are afraid to appear on his panel discussion show. “We ask these people every week. They say, ‘No,’” said Maher. “And these are people, all people I voted for.” Democrats instead prefer a safe and unchallenging stop at Stephen Colbert’s (cancelled) show. Since 2022, Colbert has hosted 176 left-leaning guests and exactly one Republican (that “Republican” was Liz Cheney), according to one study. When liberal users abandoned Elon Musk’s X/Twitter for Bluesky, moderators on that site were overwhelmed with a seventeen-fold increase in reports for “harassment, trolling, or intolerance.” The poor dears.
Let’s face it: the left wants a political bubble, an echo chamber, and it is positively allergic to open debate. The only tolerance you’ll find over there is on the bumper sticker.
As Charlie Kirk said: prove me wrong.
Eric Lindholm
Belchertown