Yeah, there's simply no question that things have improved. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with racial history should find that impossible to deny. It's not even a matter of experience. By any measure you care to name, life is better for black people in America today than it was 60 years ago.
Yeah, there's simply no question that things have improved. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with racial history should find that impossible to deny. It's not even a matter of experience. By any measure you care to name, life is better for black people in America today than it was 60 years ago.
As you say, things aren't perfect today. Far from it. But what drives me mad is that the people who insist on pretending that nothing has change divert time and attention form the issues that would actually improve people's lives.
Read 'Woke Racism' yet? John McWhorter notes that antiracism gets this idea because fighting racism gives them a purpose in life and to acknowledge progress is to detract from the purpose. (Honestly, his book should be called 'Woke Everything' with the subtitle Everything Wrong With The Left). I've never understood this bizarre idea (it's my issue with feminism, natch) as it's clear that all social movements face a loooooong list of things that could be much better. McWhorter notes how much of how 'woke' antiracism (and woke etc.) window dresses and performs, but fails to enact any real change. I have these same arguments with feminists when they piss and moan about 'the patriarchy' but kick the dirt and mumble to themselves when I say things like, "And how do we get women to press charges more against men who rape and assault them rather than sweeping it under the rug and letting him get away with it?" That would help women IMMENSELY but no one wants to talk about that, much easier to 'cancel' someone for cracking a joke from fifteen years ago that isn't 'woke' enough today.
This afternoon I broke open a novel I published on Amazon close to ten years ago and it's so 'unwoke' today - not offensive then, but would probably be considered offensive now, not because I was too ignorant to know what not to say, but because I humorously write about three different religions, New Yorkers, Canadian men, satirize the Israeli/Palestinian land conflict, and feature several non-white characters which, on the face of it should be laudable, but white people writing about anything other than white people gets you canceled so if I were to publish it today I'd probably get murdered on Twitter :) Or perhaps not since JK Rowling in stature I ain't :)
If anyone's regressing, it's the political left and right, both of whom have turned into an army of toxic babies who differ from each other only in who they hate.
Also, not that I'm interested in bothsidesism either, I think describing some of the more worrying aspects of the Left this way is a serious mistake. The Left (by which I mean the fringes, just as the "plurality of murderous conservatives" are the fringes of the Right), and their capture of academia and much of the media, have the potential to do real damage over the next few decades.
For example, the growing culture of celebrating children (mainly girls) as they have their breasts cut off and take hormones that could have serious long-term consequences is entirely a creation of the Left. Race essentialism in schools and workplaces? Almost entirely the Left. Abolishing the police? The Left.
I agree that bothsidesism is a dangerous path (I don't really think Nicole was engaging in this), but so is moral relativism. The problems on the political Left go far beyond a few attention-starved SJWs. Of course there's very good reason to be concerned about the excesses of the Right. But we mustn't let that blind us to the excesses of "our side".
I apologize for the word and I have edited it out. I have no excuses but it's been a pretty rough few weeks.
You'll get no argument from me about Teh Left other than the word; The true American left died in 1939 with the revelation of how things were really working under Stalin. What we call Teh Left mostly strike me as people seeking attention through shock; in a nation without police yeah fewer black men would be shot obediently reaching for driver licenses but cities would be ruled by mobs. Nobody sane wants that. But "defund the police" probably carries the same membership qualification as "Trump won."
Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?
But yes I agree with the symmetry. Conservatism once meant strong defense and fiscal moderation; now it means cruelty and hate. American leftist politics used to be about fair wealth distribution and equality of of opportunity; now it's about pronouns and bathrooms and defunding the police.
In my mind there is no more significant issue in the world than the mass extinction we are heading into. Seeing taxidermied specimens in the Smithsonian labeled "extinct" at age ten actually made me throw up. Yet todays so-called "leftists" care more about transgenders' bathroom use than the disappearance of wildlife.
"Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?"
Hey Chris, sorry for the delay, Substack isn't sending me notifications for new posts for some reason..
Here are two stories that sprang to mind just because I saw them recently, but as Nicole says, it's not hard to find them on Google. Just search for "top surgery."
For 'cutting off breasts' just Google it. There's plenty of information out there. I've been investigating the transgender movement from both sides - I've been radicalized by Medium's final takedown, LOL! Also I was arguing with Elle "I Hate The Patriarchy' Beau who was more interested in defending the rights of chicks with dicks than in protecting women from those same dicks.
The left is why the right will probably win. At the end of the day the right can put all their internal disagreements aside and rally together for a common cause (The Republicans have pretty much mastered this, and it involved trampling all over individual rights and *demanding* everyone work together. It may suck but it Gets Shit Done even if you don't like the shit they're doing.) The left, on the other hand, eats its own and cancels its own...because the left has shame and the right doesn't.
That's why I hew closer to the Murky Middle, where you don't always like the company you keep. As, it seems, do you.
Good point about how America has adopted - let's call it what it is - female genital mutilation. That's been bothering me a lot too, and it IS violence against girls (maybe boys too...not sure if they're mutilating boys yet surgically but I know they're being harmed by hormone blockers et al.)
OK, I realize this is the first time I've seen you use this, and so what I'm about to say may not apply to you personally.
But I'm getting really tired of other people who, whenever they hear any criticism of the left and the right, throw out 'bothsideism' or 'false equivalence' as if that was a magical error handkerchief on the ground.
Typically, I'm not even trying to say which side is worse nor that they are the same (for reasons noted below), but they imagine I'm trying to say both sides are exactly the same, and they use that like a strawman, distracting from my real points. I want to save society from the excesses of both, not to referee a moral p*ssing match between left and right.
Both sides are dangerous in different ways which are like apples and oranges. Trying to weigh in about who is worse is usually a way to distract from looking at something uncomfortable. "Well, the other side is worse, so shut up". I don't really care about weighing apples and oranges, I want to understand the different pitfalls of each side.
The right, today, is closer to violence, albeit not likely on a large scale. The left may be closer to soft fascism through control of institutions, and could well become violent in the future (they might use proxies to commit the violence of course). The dangers are different but neither becomes less dangerous because the other side is dangerous too!
Both sides have authoritarian tendencies, but the neo-progressive left's has in my opinion more proclivity towards totalitarianism - not just wanting power to enrich some elite at the expense of the neglected poor, but wanting to control every human interaction at a granular level. Pronouns, vocabulary, attitudes - stamping out all wrongthink. At least today, the right doesn't seem likely to want political commisars everywhere to make sure everybody thinks the right thoughts, but I do see the seeds of that kind of control on the left (only for the most noble of purposes of course).
So I'm very willing to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of extremists on both sides as separate issues.
And we need to pay attention to the way that the extremes on one side both inflame and justify the extremes on the other. These two sides bring out the worst on the other side. It's too common to hear "why are you criticising a tiny number of crazies on our side when the other side has more and worse crazies'. And the other side uses the same tactics. We have to break that cycle if we want to regain a sane society.
And in most cases, the characterization of 'bothsidesism' and the accusations of 'false equivalence' have been, at least in my experience, PART of that unconscious attempt to shield one dysfunction by pointing at the other.
I pretty much agree with a lot of what you say, and I guess I only part ways, slightly, with the notion that we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side - which in my case is pointing out what's wrong on my own, the left. Just as the right is wrong in thinking that everything wrong with America is the left, the left likewise points fingers and wallows in its own self-righteousness. I don't tend much toward criticizing the right because it's rather a lot like fish in a barrel, and everyone else is doing, most people much better. I criticized the right more when I still lived in the States, stuck with Reaganism/Bushism.
However the left needs to be reminded of its own imperfections, and they need to hear it from one of their own, which is why I liked writing for Medium. Lots more extremists there to challenge - the man-haters (I was big on challenging victim feminism), the whitey-haters, the virtue signallers. Challenging the deeply flawed and scientifically-challenged trans movement is what ultimately, I believe, got me kicked off, although I can't swear antiracist snowflakes didn't have a hand in it.
That's where I think I have something more original to add - not bashing Trump, or COVIDiots, or MAGAt terrorists, but in pointing out how the left contributes to political/social divisiveness and how we need to get over some of our conceits, like that we don't have elements every bit as subject to ludicrously unscientific arguments (like that biological sex means nothing and that you can declare yourself one or t'other based on the way you 'feel') and that we don't subscribe to dumbass conspiracy theories either (plenty of stupid-ass anti-vaccine arguments swallowed uncritically on the left, including in the black community, which is why, when some elements complain about the lopsided effect COVID infections and deaths have on the black community, and healthcare irregularities and disparities and yadda yadda yadda (all valid) I pop up to say something annoying like, "Well, could y'all please knock it off with the damn Tuskegee experiments crap? NO BLACK PERSON IS DYING OF COVID WHILE VAXXED UNLESS THEY HAVE SOME CO-MORBIDITY OR OTHERWISE COMPROMISING HEALTH PROBLEM!"
It's too easy to think of your own side as holy and forget, or just blithely ignore, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I'm not much for Christianity these days but I thought Jesus put it very well about removing the log from one's own eye first.
Actually, we are pretty much on the same page, and I agree with all that you have said.
I did not mean to give any impression that "we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side". It was more about the tendency to avoid consideration of one's own side by changing the subject to the more comfortable topic of the other side's faults.
I am today somewhat of a rogue progressive liberal, who strongly dissents from the direction that neo-progressives have taken the movement. And I direct a lot of my critical thinking at the neo-progressive left ("woke", "successor ideology", "PC", "the elect"), because as you say, there is more need for it, at least where I live. Critiques of the right (even exaggerated critiques) are the water we swim in here. Voices from the left or center, with measured criticism of the neo-progressive ideology (or religion as McWhorter frames it) are in serious undersupply by comparison. Also, having been on the progressive left for half a century, I know the roots of this subculture, and hope to be able to speak to it.
I sense a substantial authoritarian undercurrent to the current neo-progressive approach, so I am concerned about where that is leading if they get and use more power to remake the world in their vision. But I also fear that they are going to trigger an over-reaction which brings right wing authoritarianism into power. If voices more in the middle cannot bring the neo-progressives into more sanity, then force from much further to the right may do so. Or the attempt from the right will trigger & justify the latent authoritarianism of the left.
So I agree about the need to pay attention to the log in our own eye, not just the mote in the eye of the other. (Except I'd say they are both logs, albeit differently shaped ones).
I will note that in addition to citing the long ago Tuskegee experiment as a reason to avoid medical care today, another supposed gross injustice often cited in the same breath is the case of Henrietta Lacks. She was not publicly credited as the cell donor from whom a line of research cell cultures was derived, and she herself did not give permission nor receive compensation (other than free health care). But that's hardly a logical reason to not get vaccinated! She was not harmed in any way, and did not receive bad care.
I used to be very much in favor of digging out "the seamy underside of democracy" and exposing every historical injustice, with the belief that this would help us improve the future. I am coming to doubt that it's having a net positive effect, because every example is being exaggerated and weaponized to support a narrative of perpetual oppression; it's not used to rebalance and reflect, but to gain power and twist the popular understanding, albeit in a different direction. I think that I may be another in the long list of casualties from failed expectations of rationality.
Part of what makes the Right so dangerous is its religious fervor; fundamentalist Christianity, which has permeated the right since the earliest Reagan days (they helped elect him, after Jimmy Carter turned out to be a huge disappointment), has grown more corrupt and far more dangerous. They hold their noses and support Trump because, well, progressivism is a way worse sin I guess! The Left has been entirely subsumed by the *same* sort of religious fervor, albeit for a secular religion without gods or afterlives. Read Woke Racism, and you''ll see what's wrong with the Left in the ways Steve notes below. The Left can get violent too - look to its history in the '60s and '70s. What do you think will happen if Trump steals the next election? I'm not sure we can trust the Left to *not* get violent, although I don't know they're at the point yet where they'd attempt to riot on the Capitol like the right.
There's nothing wrong with 'bothsidesism' - looking at both sides. I think what you object to is 'false equivalency' - the notion that one side is just as bad as the other. With the political US divide today, the right is unquestionably more violent but I'm not sure the left isn't as equally *capable*, and just haven't gotten there yet. When it comes to religious extremism, I'd put them both on an even plane there. The excesses of racist-tinged CRT (not, itself, a racist field of study, but you can make *anything* racist) as well as what the trans nuts are doing to screw kids up about gender and sex, are both pretty toxic agendas (feminism has fallen behind, but its excessives regard men as the enemy, rather than white people or 'cis-het' people). The left is adopting the EXACT SAME TACTICS the right has been utilizing for four decades, going in at the ground level - school boards, city councils - which is how Christian fudnamentalists baked their anti-science, anti-history, toxic agenda into American life (and the left is no better - the two sides merely disagree on which science to support, and which to blow off). I don't like what the left has become which is what has driven me closer to the centre.
Maybe you could use a little more 'bothsidesism' because you sound like you're just as blind to the excesses of your side as the MAGAts are to the excesses of their own side.
Yeah, there's simply no question that things have improved. Anybody who has a passing familiarity with racial history should find that impossible to deny. It's not even a matter of experience. By any measure you care to name, life is better for black people in America today than it was 60 years ago.
As you say, things aren't perfect today. Far from it. But what drives me mad is that the people who insist on pretending that nothing has change divert time and attention form the issues that would actually improve people's lives.
Read 'Woke Racism' yet? John McWhorter notes that antiracism gets this idea because fighting racism gives them a purpose in life and to acknowledge progress is to detract from the purpose. (Honestly, his book should be called 'Woke Everything' with the subtitle Everything Wrong With The Left). I've never understood this bizarre idea (it's my issue with feminism, natch) as it's clear that all social movements face a loooooong list of things that could be much better. McWhorter notes how much of how 'woke' antiracism (and woke etc.) window dresses and performs, but fails to enact any real change. I have these same arguments with feminists when they piss and moan about 'the patriarchy' but kick the dirt and mumble to themselves when I say things like, "And how do we get women to press charges more against men who rape and assault them rather than sweeping it under the rug and letting him get away with it?" That would help women IMMENSELY but no one wants to talk about that, much easier to 'cancel' someone for cracking a joke from fifteen years ago that isn't 'woke' enough today.
This afternoon I broke open a novel I published on Amazon close to ten years ago and it's so 'unwoke' today - not offensive then, but would probably be considered offensive now, not because I was too ignorant to know what not to say, but because I humorously write about three different religions, New Yorkers, Canadian men, satirize the Israeli/Palestinian land conflict, and feature several non-white characters which, on the face of it should be laudable, but white people writing about anything other than white people gets you canceled so if I were to publish it today I'd probably get murdered on Twitter :) Or perhaps not since JK Rowling in stature I ain't :)
If anyone's regressing, it's the political left and right, both of whom have turned into an army of toxic babies who differ from each other only in who they hate.
Bothsidesism is bad. Please quit it.
You're comparing a tiny group of pathetic and attention-starved SJWs to the substantial plurality of murderous conservatives.
Why would anyone want to read a book like that, forewarned? I didn't read Jonah Greenberg either.
"Contemptible"? Be nice Chris.
Also, not that I'm interested in bothsidesism either, I think describing some of the more worrying aspects of the Left this way is a serious mistake. The Left (by which I mean the fringes, just as the "plurality of murderous conservatives" are the fringes of the Right), and their capture of academia and much of the media, have the potential to do real damage over the next few decades.
For example, the growing culture of celebrating children (mainly girls) as they have their breasts cut off and take hormones that could have serious long-term consequences is entirely a creation of the Left. Race essentialism in schools and workplaces? Almost entirely the Left. Abolishing the police? The Left.
I agree that bothsidesism is a dangerous path (I don't really think Nicole was engaging in this), but so is moral relativism. The problems on the political Left go far beyond a few attention-starved SJWs. Of course there's very good reason to be concerned about the excesses of the Right. But we mustn't let that blind us to the excesses of "our side".
I apologize for the word and I have edited it out. I have no excuses but it's been a pretty rough few weeks.
You'll get no argument from me about Teh Left other than the word; The true American left died in 1939 with the revelation of how things were really working under Stalin. What we call Teh Left mostly strike me as people seeking attention through shock; in a nation without police yeah fewer black men would be shot obediently reaching for driver licenses but cities would be ruled by mobs. Nobody sane wants that. But "defund the police" probably carries the same membership qualification as "Trump won."
Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?
But yes I agree with the symmetry. Conservatism once meant strong defense and fiscal moderation; now it means cruelty and hate. American leftist politics used to be about fair wealth distribution and equality of of opportunity; now it's about pronouns and bathrooms and defunding the police.
In my mind there is no more significant issue in the world than the mass extinction we are heading into. Seeing taxidermied specimens in the Smithsonian labeled "extinct" at age ten actually made me throw up. Yet todays so-called "leftists" care more about transgenders' bathroom use than the disappearance of wildlife.
"Cutting off breasts? Do you have a link for that?"
Hey Chris, sorry for the delay, Substack isn't sending me notifications for new posts for some reason..
Here are two stories that sprang to mind just because I saw them recently, but as Nicole says, it's not hard to find them on Google. Just search for "top surgery."
https://www.tiktok.com/@archiebeshort/video/7027517844942294277
https://twitter.com/StandingforXX/status/1472988554125058049?s=20
For 'cutting off breasts' just Google it. There's plenty of information out there. I've been investigating the transgender movement from both sides - I've been radicalized by Medium's final takedown, LOL! Also I was arguing with Elle "I Hate The Patriarchy' Beau who was more interested in defending the rights of chicks with dicks than in protecting women from those same dicks.
The left is why the right will probably win. At the end of the day the right can put all their internal disagreements aside and rally together for a common cause (The Republicans have pretty much mastered this, and it involved trampling all over individual rights and *demanding* everyone work together. It may suck but it Gets Shit Done even if you don't like the shit they're doing.) The left, on the other hand, eats its own and cancels its own...because the left has shame and the right doesn't.
That's why I hew closer to the Murky Middle, where you don't always like the company you keep. As, it seems, do you.
Good point about how America has adopted - let's call it what it is - female genital mutilation. That's been bothering me a lot too, and it IS violence against girls (maybe boys too...not sure if they're mutilating boys yet surgically but I know they're being harmed by hormone blockers et al.)
OK, I realize this is the first time I've seen you use this, and so what I'm about to say may not apply to you personally.
But I'm getting really tired of other people who, whenever they hear any criticism of the left and the right, throw out 'bothsideism' or 'false equivalence' as if that was a magical error handkerchief on the ground.
Typically, I'm not even trying to say which side is worse nor that they are the same (for reasons noted below), but they imagine I'm trying to say both sides are exactly the same, and they use that like a strawman, distracting from my real points. I want to save society from the excesses of both, not to referee a moral p*ssing match between left and right.
Both sides are dangerous in different ways which are like apples and oranges. Trying to weigh in about who is worse is usually a way to distract from looking at something uncomfortable. "Well, the other side is worse, so shut up". I don't really care about weighing apples and oranges, I want to understand the different pitfalls of each side.
The right, today, is closer to violence, albeit not likely on a large scale. The left may be closer to soft fascism through control of institutions, and could well become violent in the future (they might use proxies to commit the violence of course). The dangers are different but neither becomes less dangerous because the other side is dangerous too!
Both sides have authoritarian tendencies, but the neo-progressive left's has in my opinion more proclivity towards totalitarianism - not just wanting power to enrich some elite at the expense of the neglected poor, but wanting to control every human interaction at a granular level. Pronouns, vocabulary, attitudes - stamping out all wrongthink. At least today, the right doesn't seem likely to want political commisars everywhere to make sure everybody thinks the right thoughts, but I do see the seeds of that kind of control on the left (only for the most noble of purposes of course).
So I'm very willing to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of extremists on both sides as separate issues.
And we need to pay attention to the way that the extremes on one side both inflame and justify the extremes on the other. These two sides bring out the worst on the other side. It's too common to hear "why are you criticising a tiny number of crazies on our side when the other side has more and worse crazies'. And the other side uses the same tactics. We have to break that cycle if we want to regain a sane society.
And in most cases, the characterization of 'bothsidesism' and the accusations of 'false equivalence' have been, at least in my experience, PART of that unconscious attempt to shield one dysfunction by pointing at the other.
Let's stop that.
I pretty much agree with a lot of what you say, and I guess I only part ways, slightly, with the notion that we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side - which in my case is pointing out what's wrong on my own, the left. Just as the right is wrong in thinking that everything wrong with America is the left, the left likewise points fingers and wallows in its own self-righteousness. I don't tend much toward criticizing the right because it's rather a lot like fish in a barrel, and everyone else is doing, most people much better. I criticized the right more when I still lived in the States, stuck with Reaganism/Bushism.
However the left needs to be reminded of its own imperfections, and they need to hear it from one of their own, which is why I liked writing for Medium. Lots more extremists there to challenge - the man-haters (I was big on challenging victim feminism), the whitey-haters, the virtue signallers. Challenging the deeply flawed and scientifically-challenged trans movement is what ultimately, I believe, got me kicked off, although I can't swear antiracist snowflakes didn't have a hand in it.
That's where I think I have something more original to add - not bashing Trump, or COVIDiots, or MAGAt terrorists, but in pointing out how the left contributes to political/social divisiveness and how we need to get over some of our conceits, like that we don't have elements every bit as subject to ludicrously unscientific arguments (like that biological sex means nothing and that you can declare yourself one or t'other based on the way you 'feel') and that we don't subscribe to dumbass conspiracy theories either (plenty of stupid-ass anti-vaccine arguments swallowed uncritically on the left, including in the black community, which is why, when some elements complain about the lopsided effect COVID infections and deaths have on the black community, and healthcare irregularities and disparities and yadda yadda yadda (all valid) I pop up to say something annoying like, "Well, could y'all please knock it off with the damn Tuskegee experiments crap? NO BLACK PERSON IS DYING OF COVID WHILE VAXXED UNLESS THEY HAVE SOME CO-MORBIDITY OR OTHERWISE COMPROMISING HEALTH PROBLEM!"
It's too easy to think of your own side as holy and forget, or just blithely ignore, overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I'm not much for Christianity these days but I thought Jesus put it very well about removing the log from one's own eye first.
Actually, we are pretty much on the same page, and I agree with all that you have said.
I did not mean to give any impression that "we shouldn't point out what's going wrong on the *other* side". It was more about the tendency to avoid consideration of one's own side by changing the subject to the more comfortable topic of the other side's faults.
I am today somewhat of a rogue progressive liberal, who strongly dissents from the direction that neo-progressives have taken the movement. And I direct a lot of my critical thinking at the neo-progressive left ("woke", "successor ideology", "PC", "the elect"), because as you say, there is more need for it, at least where I live. Critiques of the right (even exaggerated critiques) are the water we swim in here. Voices from the left or center, with measured criticism of the neo-progressive ideology (or religion as McWhorter frames it) are in serious undersupply by comparison. Also, having been on the progressive left for half a century, I know the roots of this subculture, and hope to be able to speak to it.
I sense a substantial authoritarian undercurrent to the current neo-progressive approach, so I am concerned about where that is leading if they get and use more power to remake the world in their vision. But I also fear that they are going to trigger an over-reaction which brings right wing authoritarianism into power. If voices more in the middle cannot bring the neo-progressives into more sanity, then force from much further to the right may do so. Or the attempt from the right will trigger & justify the latent authoritarianism of the left.
So I agree about the need to pay attention to the log in our own eye, not just the mote in the eye of the other. (Except I'd say they are both logs, albeit differently shaped ones).
I will note that in addition to citing the long ago Tuskegee experiment as a reason to avoid medical care today, another supposed gross injustice often cited in the same breath is the case of Henrietta Lacks. She was not publicly credited as the cell donor from whom a line of research cell cultures was derived, and she herself did not give permission nor receive compensation (other than free health care). But that's hardly a logical reason to not get vaccinated! She was not harmed in any way, and did not receive bad care.
I used to be very much in favor of digging out "the seamy underside of democracy" and exposing every historical injustice, with the belief that this would help us improve the future. I am coming to doubt that it's having a net positive effect, because every example is being exaggerated and weaponized to support a narrative of perpetual oppression; it's not used to rebalance and reflect, but to gain power and twist the popular understanding, albeit in a different direction. I think that I may be another in the long list of casualties from failed expectations of rationality.
Part of what makes the Right so dangerous is its religious fervor; fundamentalist Christianity, which has permeated the right since the earliest Reagan days (they helped elect him, after Jimmy Carter turned out to be a huge disappointment), has grown more corrupt and far more dangerous. They hold their noses and support Trump because, well, progressivism is a way worse sin I guess! The Left has been entirely subsumed by the *same* sort of religious fervor, albeit for a secular religion without gods or afterlives. Read Woke Racism, and you''ll see what's wrong with the Left in the ways Steve notes below. The Left can get violent too - look to its history in the '60s and '70s. What do you think will happen if Trump steals the next election? I'm not sure we can trust the Left to *not* get violent, although I don't know they're at the point yet where they'd attempt to riot on the Capitol like the right.
There's nothing wrong with 'bothsidesism' - looking at both sides. I think what you object to is 'false equivalency' - the notion that one side is just as bad as the other. With the political US divide today, the right is unquestionably more violent but I'm not sure the left isn't as equally *capable*, and just haven't gotten there yet. When it comes to religious extremism, I'd put them both on an even plane there. The excesses of racist-tinged CRT (not, itself, a racist field of study, but you can make *anything* racist) as well as what the trans nuts are doing to screw kids up about gender and sex, are both pretty toxic agendas (feminism has fallen behind, but its excessives regard men as the enemy, rather than white people or 'cis-het' people). The left is adopting the EXACT SAME TACTICS the right has been utilizing for four decades, going in at the ground level - school boards, city councils - which is how Christian fudnamentalists baked their anti-science, anti-history, toxic agenda into American life (and the left is no better - the two sides merely disagree on which science to support, and which to blow off). I don't like what the left has become which is what has driven me closer to the centre.
Maybe you could use a little more 'bothsidesism' because you sound like you're just as blind to the excesses of your side as the MAGAts are to the excesses of their own side.