People rightly ask why I focus my ire on progressives and rarely conservatives and, while there is an idiosyncratic personal history there (I almost solely criticized conservatives for my first 25 years), the real answer is just that conservatives are currently irrelevant.
Conservatives don’t make policy in my area, they don’t set the agenda, they don’t control the message, and there are almost none at any of the companies I would like to work for. Conservatives here can barely even say what they think at a dinner party.
It is basically inconceivable that I would ever face personal consequences for saying something “too progressive.” Conservatives are irrelevant. There is no point to criticizing people who are irrelevant.
I grew up in a rural conservative county in a state with Republican leadership and, wouldn’t you know it, I criticized conservatives basically the entire time I lived there. In that milieu progressives were irrelevant.
I took the “Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins criticizing religion” thing to its limit. I know every single one of those arguments and I’ve made them 1000 times. It’s just not interesting to me anymore, nor is it relevant to anything currently happening in my life.
Because progressives are almost definitionally on the vanguard, they self identify as weak and oppressed, but just as a plain accounting, they are in power everywhere in my life that it matters.
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