Steve, I'm sorry for not emphasizing the good in what you wrote.

I should have written, "Here you are *inadvertently* saying there are tens of millions of bombastic orange-tinted voices out there." I wrote this because it seemed to me that you were on the edge of seeing the deeper problem but you weren't seeing it. My intent was to agree with you on what you did see and yes, to antagonize you about what you didn't (seem to) see.

In writing this I admit I'm asking you to extend a more charitable interpretation of what I'm writing right now than I extended to you. You are right to react to the injustice of my assuming you didn't see the deeper issue. You are wrong in implying I thought - what, that you are racially incapable of it? I'm much more widely condemnatory than this. It seems to me that almost no one on the planet is capable of identifying the root cause of the destructive spin our society is currently falling into. The misdiagnoses and solutions being advanced are all just making it worse.

This regressive movement advances in part by using all the political wedge issues as human ideological shields. Defend the idea that the individual is the proper atomic unit of all civil rights and that group rights inescapably threaten individual rights and you find yourself accused of being a racist, or a transphobe, or a climate change denier. This is because only collectivistic solutions are proposed for each of these problems. Few can withstand this tactic. Meanwhile, the visible "right wing" opposition really is brain dead, vulgar and anti-intellectual, i.e., Trump-like. So there is no effective opposition.

I do see some hope. I see for one example Sam Harris. Except while Sam does seem to see the whole picture, he also claims that free-will is an illusion, which pulls the rug right out from under individuality, a contradiction in his thinking he seems not to grasp. His arguments against free will do not hold up on purely scientific grounds. I can see this, and if I finally find the courage to write rather than comment on the writing of others, this will be my first subject. It's the deepest and most pivotal question. Everything else rests on this, for if we are merely fleshy robots why should anything else matter?

I see Coleman Hughes. Incredibly, I find the views he has shared so far are essentially the same as mine. I find this surprising, not because his skin is not the same color as mine but because he is so young. I'm amazed and encouraged that it is still possible to make it through today's system of education and emerge with one's ability to reason intact and with divergent and individualistic views too.

There are a few others out there, but most are package deals where some things they write make sense and other things they say I find abhorrent.

I hope I didn't make it impossible for us to see eye to eye in the future.