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Actions speak for themselves. The right isn't a unified block. There are traditonal conservatives: god, guns, limited government. Mitch McConnell, David French
by freeone3000 6y ago
Actions speak for themselves. The right isn't a unified block.
There are traditonal conservatives: god, guns, limited government. Mitch McConnell, David French, Mitt Romney, Charlotte Lawson. I fundamentally have different values from these people, but their perspectives are useful, enlightening, and reading their viewpoints causes me to better defend my own, or even occasionally change. They are staunch defenders of individual rights and traditional liberty.
There are libertarians on the right. Rand Paul, Spike Cohen, Justin Amash. These people I share a surprising number of values with, but fundamentally disagree with on the conclusion. Due to an inherent argumentativeness, it's hard to get a good faith debate, but I acknowledge their opinions that the government uses its power poorly, that both political parties are primarily concerned with remaining in power, and so on.
And then there's the group who wear t-shirts with "Camp Auschwitz 2021", "6 million wasn't enough". Signs that say "Q Sent Me". Hats with "Make America Great Again". These people are absolutely racist neo-nazis. These people are pretending to believe that Italians stole the election. There's no true belief here, no fundamentally held tenant other than "my side is better". This is not a small group - a YouGov poll puts it at 18% of Republicans. And this is Parler's user base, self-selected. The reasonable ones are still on Twitter.
- jonathanyc 6y agoYep. I was just trying to discuss with another user on this site who seriously claimed all conservatives have been banned from Twitter. I proposed a smorgasbord of conservatives who haven’t been banned—George Bush (mainstream neoconservative), the Koch brothers (business libertarians or paleoconservatives), Ron Paul (moderate libertarian). Their response was that none of these were “true conservatives”. Their proof was an article by the Cato Institute (brainchild of the Koch brothers, ironically) saying Bush was not a conservative. Well, duh, that’s my point. A wide variety of conservatives with distinct ideologies have not been banned. None of these people have been banned. Why? Well they aren’t creating mobs who storm the Capitol chanting that they want to lynch Mike Pence. Claiming Twitter is banning conservatives is flat out wrong. Twitter is banning terrorists who assaulted our Capitol.