By Terry Manning
When Hillary Clinton observed that some of Donald Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,” some of them took that as a challenge. A standard to sink to meet. A badge of honor, even.
So why am I surprised at one reader’s response to my column on women being asked to choose which they would rather encounter in the woods, a strange man or a bear?
“I am unclear if the bear was a black bear or a brown (grizzly) bear?” the reader begins.
“If it was a black bear, which is much more timid around humans, I guess you could argue one way or another. Any woman stuck in the woods with a brown bear would choose that instead of a guy, well they deserve what they would get which is likely killed.
“It just goes to show the absurd nature of these discussions.
“Your examples of bears are nice but to me fits the liberal agenda. Weak men. I am sure you saw that poll about a month ago with liberal women complaining they can’t find a good man. I am not surprised.”
Looking past the absurdity of his parsing the bear species, I challenged the notion that men being nice equals being weak.
The reader’s response: “If all they are is nice. Then yes.”
I decided exploring that conversation would likely be fruitless (“if all they are is nice?”) so I requested a link to the poll that was mentioned suggesting liberal women had trouble finding “good men.”
I received a link to an article published on MSN with the clickbait-y title, “Liberal woman complaining the lack of masculine liberal men while refusing to date conservative men.” The author was listed as “Asir F.”
My first thought was the article was referring to a liberal woman, not liberal women as a group. Then I read and discovered it wasn’t a poll as much an opinion piece swiped from another site, a news outlet referred to as The Independent News.
I went ahead and described to the reader that MSN is an aggregator. It has agreements to republish content from other sites and sometimes even pays people to rewrite content from other sites. Aggregators have cost a lot of good journalists their jobs by stealing web traffic, but I won’t get sidetracked by that debate.
The Independent website has no homepage, no About page, and no Contact page. Easily confused as being connected to the British Independent newspaper (I found no indication it is), it is another of those damnable aggregators that draw clicks for stories swiped from other sites. In this case, it posted conservative stories rewritten from conservative news sites. The author Asir F. directly based their post on an article from The New York Post.
The story that ran in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Post, the first story in this chain of anti-liberal missives, was about one woman’s dating problems she shared on TikTok. I have to say, the original story wasn’t nearly as negative about liberal men as the subsequent rewrites. It was just one woman complaining — and then she shared she later found exactly the kind of progressive man she had been looking for.
The Post story ran a year ago but it keeps being churned because it advances a right-wing narrative against liberal men, that being progressive (or simply nice) makes us less desirable.
A conservative website (MSN) pulling a story from another conservative site (The Independent) that pulled a story from a conservative newspaper site (The New York Post) is exactly how ideological echo chambers work. It is how agendas — and misinformation — are propagated.
People with an axe to grind take a molehill, tell other folks it is a mountain, and then those folks point to the “mountain” and accuse the rest of us of being fools because when we look all we see is a molehill.
“Everybody knows that’s a mountain!” they insist, when more often than not, it’s closer to an anthill. I explained this to the reader, who responded about as shrewdly as they did to my previous column:
“I guess a lightly educated guy like yourself thinks they can read at a higher level. Stop drinking the cool aid.”
With guys out here who think like this reader, oblivious to larger points, comfy inside their bubbles, and defensive in the face of reason, I can see why women would continue to prefer woodland creatures.
Bears haven’t seemed this safe a bet since the ’85 Super Bowl.
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
