Jon, please show me where I’ve argued anything like you’re suggesting. Where have I said your skin pigmentation means you should have to pay for anything your ancestors have done in the past? What I’ve been arguing this whole time is that this is a strawman of what many or most liberals are saying. Maybe you’re content to make uncharitable assertions without supporting them with anything even remotely approaching evidence, but I am not.

So let me rephrase. There is a big difference between being blamed for things that happened in the past and being expected to reflect on them. I believe the majority of liberals concerned with social justice are emphasizing the latter more than the former. I don’t actually believe many are wanting to hold white people accountable for things in the past that they themselves had no control over. They’re seeking restitution from the government above all — the government that infringed on rights they should have had long ago.

I’m not going to defend all liberals, and I know some may be unreasonable and aggressive, just as some conservatives are. But often what I see is that conservatives don’t distinguish between what a liberal criticizes in their thinking and action versus the connection that a liberal may draw to past offenses against marginalized people. It’s one thing to say slavery happened and another for a white man to downplay it, justify it, or refuse to accept that it can still have consequences for many people today. Even when it may feel like someone in that situation is being criticized for slavery happening over a century ago, that’s not what they’re being criticized for in actuality. It’s rather the attitudes, thinking, and behavior they’re exhibiting about that issue that is being criticized. I can’t speak to every liberal you’ve ever talked with, but I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that liberals are universally or collectively asking you and every other white person to atone for something that took place way before you were born. I think what you may be hearing is criticism of your apparent unwillingness to reflect on the problems and concerns that matter to people of quite different backgrounds from your own.

And please be fair when you accuse someone of lying. Lying is a deliberate act. I would only be lying in saying your concerns matter if I honestly believed or knew that they don’t. I neither believe nor know that. A problem doesn’t need to matter to everyone or to an arbitrary number of people in order to matter. Likely you’re upset that your concerns don’t matter more in our culture, which is fair enough. It isn’t a conspiracy or a liberal plot, though. I’ve seen feminist authors write about male suicide not to dismiss it but to call attention to the problem, and I’ve seen the same with racial justice authors writing on how the opioid crisis has affected white communities, among other things. Your concerns may not be as popular with the general media right now as you’d like them to be, but they do matter to a lot of people, regardless of their race, gender, age, etc.

It would be an amazing and miraculous thing if there could be more constructive bipartisan criticism of the media. I wish our society could get beyond letting the media dictate what matters so much of the time. But it would be unreasonable and counterproductive to pretend that only the liberal media is guilty of that.