People like Wajahat Ali are exactly why it’s best that some liberals, maybe most of them, stay in their corners and let the rest of us remain in ours.
Ali, apparently a journalist of some kind, wrote Thursday in the New York Times that he has in the past four years “attempted” to find common ground with Trump supporters. His conclusion since then, though, has been that “it’s not worth it.”
Gosh, it sounds like he had a tough go of it, all this “reaching out” he did, only to come away so bitter. What a shame that his well-meaning and exhaustive efforts were in vain.
How could such a kind gesture go so poorly? Let’s look at what exactly Ali did to build bridges.
For starters, he recorded a video of himself and posted it on the liberal HuffPost website. “You might not like me, and I might not like you,” Ali said in the video, “but we share the same real estate.” With that heartfelt pitch, he wrote that he “really thought it might work.” Shockingly, it seems to have failed.
What else did he do? “In late 2016,” he continued, “I told my speaking agency to book me for events in the states where Trump won. … Over the next four years I gave more than a dozen talks to universities, companies and a variety of faith-based communities.”
You hear that? Ali, out of the goodness of his heart, gave Trump supporters the opportunity to hear him talk. Describing his speeches, he said that he “reminded” his audiences that even Italians and Irish Catholics were once discriminated against in the United States, and he “warned them that supporting white nationalism and Trump, in particular, would be self-destructive.”
Sadly, this overture, too, somehow failed to win Ali any new friends.
What else had Ali tried?
“In 2017, I was invited by the Aspen Institute — which hosts a festival known for attracting the wealthy and powerful — to discuss racism in America,” he wrote.
And now I’m just going to stop because it only gets more infuriating from there, and I don’t want to have to report a smashed keyboard to the I.T. department.
Ali is not a curious and open-minded missionary. He’s a self-important jerk, the type of person who can’t see outside themselves for two seconds and who is directly responsible for the steep and steady decline of trust in the media, which is both self-removed and condescending.
No one would be wrong for “reaching out” to others who aren’t politically compatible. But if liberals are going to do what Ali did, he’s right. It’s not worth it. They should, in fact, stay as far away as possible.
