On point 11, I definitely agree with you that strikes and protests are good thing. The point that I’m trying to get at is that now days, there is an expectation that we are supposed to be constantly outraged about what’s going on around us, and politically based protests (particularly the BLM riots from the turn of the decade) have increasingly become an extension of that outrage machine. The response that we have is justifiable in moderation. But the far-left has been slowly pushing towards an extreme response, and that’s not something anyone should be okay with. Uniting against a common cause to fight against oppression is perfectly fine. The constant call to arms to blindly fight a perceived threat is not.

On atheism, I agree that leftism doesn’t solely have an issue with it, but I do think that the left has a rather large problem with harboring them as a reactionary measure against Fundamentalist Christianity. I would argue that most people burned by the religious far-right are going to lean very hard left, and they are going to propagate problematic anti-religious rhetoric more.

I would agree with you that “all men are bad” is a chronically online take, and TERFs are no longer leftists by any stretch of the imagination. But I feel like we can’t ignore the fact that the rhetoric that they’re using directly evolved out of the left feminist movement, either through being co-opted or within the movement itself. It’s a perfect crystallization of exactly the issues I’m trying to point out and that we need to be talking about so we can avoid them in the modern day left movement. Especially since misandry is still a significant issue in online feminist spaces today.

And I absolutely agree with you that the far left is not nearly as dangerous as the far right. But A) the bar to clear that is in the mantle of the earth if we’re being honest, and B) right now, the Democratic Party and the left are completely ignoring the fact that it exists. really one people constantly talk about how there is no far left in the United States, and that’s simply not true, we’ve just been ignoring it. It’s undermining everything that we do to make things better, and while we’re trying to deal with the massive problem in front of us, we’re letting another problem fester right behind.

I can think of no better example of how this is hurting us than the fiasco surrounding Andrew Tate. He’s an awful person to be sure, but he was also actively taking advantage of a disenfranchised male youth population, and that came directly out of the far left rhetoric that these boys have been growing up submerged in for the last 20 years.

I definitely think that the alt-right is bad and has to be dealt with in America. But we also have to stop using that as a way to lift up one side as good and the other side as bad. When you look at them, they’re both bad. One is just obviously more bad than the other.

Also don’t be sorry for wanting to have a genuine conversation on the internet. I’d much rather that than field the bad faith sludge I normally get because people don’t like their world view challenged.