1/ I doubt I have that many Democrats following me anymore. A tolerant old-fashioned or more centrist few, perhaps. But those of you who do happen to see this, I have news for you. You won't like it:

You've been radicalized by the mainstream media.

Sorry. Let me explain.

2/ I don't mean merely that the mainstream media is biased (of course they are). I mean that, especially as of the last several years, the topics, angles, sources, wording—everything—of journalism aimed at you makes the most ridiculously radical positions seem reasonable.

3/ If you take the reporting you consume at face value, as many Democrats still do, the world will have been so colored and radicalized in your mind that *of course* Republicans are evil and *of course* whitey is racist and *of course* Trump is the second coming of Hitler.

4/ Your opponents are more or less the same as they have been for the last thirty years. But you liberals, progressives, and socialists? You've been increasingly made to think in absolutes and extremes, so that you now regularly dehumanize anyone who doesn't agree with you.

5/ Now, I know this is all going to sound idiotic to you.

That's because *everything* you disagree with has come to have an idiotic overtone for you, because whenever a contrasting viewpoint is presented to you in your media, it is made to look utterly ridiculous.

6/ If you are under 30, you must know that not that long ago, the left fairly routinely was intellectual, calm, and serious when addressing the points of conservatives. Substantive debate across the aisle was a thing.

That is now almost completely gone.

7/ Once upon a time, it was possible to think the decline of political discourse in the U.S. was totally bipartisan, just a matter of a deepening "partisan divide."

One can't reasonably hold that view today. It's too obvious that the left is just radicalized.

8/ Conservatives are just reacting to your overreach. We aren't racist. We do not want to shoot you; we just want law and order (and the right to self-defense). We do not like disease any more than you do; we are just reasonably suspicious of brand new global schemes of control.

9/ There's a certain kind of "centrist" and liberal who will, even today, say that I'm being unreasonable to think the irrationality and radicalism is all on one side.

But nope. Consider the positions that have become standard on the left. It's amazing, if you think about it.

10/ Conservatives are not the ones pushing to abolish the police; force healthy people to stay home and businesses to shut for months at a time; make vaccines mandatory; open borders; release criminals; let looters, vandals, and rioters operate with impunity; and a lot more.

11/ These and other positions you occupy are *radical* positions. They aren't middle-of-the-road. Every one of them would have been utterly unthinkable even ten years ago.

Think about that. What you're told is now obvious and commonsensical would've been insane ten years ago.

12/ It is not radical to oppose radical policies. But it is radical to advocate for them.

I'm saying this now because I think some of you are starting to wake up. You're seeing the craziness advocated on your side, and that the other side is actually...humane and reasonable.

13/ Look, I'm not saying you people on the left are bad. Of course you aren't. But you've been badly misled by your political leaders and maybe especially higher education and the media class.

And you don't have to give up your views about liberalism and a compassionate state.

14/ I'm just encouraging you to take it seriously, at least a little, that only one side here is truly (in large numbers) radicalized, agitating as it does for violent revolution and other insane policies, and that, sorry, but maybe...you shouldn't ally yourself with such people.