Ronan Cray
1 min readOct 7, 2023

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Your take on discussions of extremism are so on point. What I've struggled with over the last 15 years, as a Democrat and liberal, is how we too often feel extremism exists on only the opposite end of our spectrum. It's extremist when a conservative Republican says it, swaying the center to dangerous territory, but not extremist when one of ours do. The three I've focused on are racism, feminism, and climate change. We seem to have a collective blind spot for the harm of extremists in this territory (being white is automatically racist, kill all men, climate refugees) and do the lions share of promoting extremist views that will sway the center in those directions (tearing down monuments, encouraging childlessness in favour of career, blowing up pipelines). Yet we expect our polar opposites to somehow resist and oppose extremism on their end while we can barely acknowledge the equally dangerous extremism of our own. How does one combat this bias?

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Ronan Cray
Ronan Cray

Written by Ronan Cray

Ronan Cray moved away from New York City to live in New Zealand. Author of horror novels Red Sand and Dust Eaters, he finds non-fiction more terrifying.

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