It's Time to Ignore Worthless Opinions

The hate mail was delivered on pink paper because the sender thought I was gay, so it would offend me.

As a newspaper reporter for The Chronicle in Willimantic, Connecticut in 2005, I led a series on the newly legalized “civil unions” in the state for gay and lesbian couples. Connecticut was one of the first states to move in that direction, years before gay marriage became legal nationwide.

Our staff wrote and published dozens of stories that week. I interviewed several gay and lesbian couples, which completely changed my life. At the time, I was a young conservative, fooled by W’s “compassionate conservatism” and belief in smaller government. Couple after couple railed against Republicans at every level of government who made their lives miserable. Connecticut may be a blue state, but rural, eastern Connecticut is not.

My publisher, a genuinely good man, knew that we’d get blowback from the moment I pitched the idea to editors, but he was on board. He felt it was a worthy story to tell. We made sure to give Republicans and those opposed a forum in the series to express their opinions.

When the series started that week, we began to get inundated with the hate mail. For every “thank you” note, we would receive at least ten telling us to, well, I can’t repeat what they said.

But the one on pink paper lingered because it was so purposely hateful. The last line of his hate letter said he wrote it on pink paper purposely because he “knew” I was a (f-word) and that I would enjoy the color. It annoyed me. The rest of the journalists, all older than me, took it in stride.

One of the editors, affectionately known as TC, laughed about it. She then told me something that has stuck with me for going on 16 years:

“Some opinions are worthless. This guy made that clear.”

Those pieces of hate mail were written under the guise of “Letters to Editors” because they wanted it printed. They wanted their hate to gain an audience. In a pre-social media world, their hate was never seen by the general public because we didn't let it. Though we had a bulletin board where the best worst pieces gotten put up as a reminder, their hatred never saw the light of day. I looked at that pink paper every day for my final two years with the newspaper. It’s a big reason why I left the Republican Party. 

Since then, social media has unlocked the venom that previously only I had been privy to as a reporter. I remember telling my friends at happy hours about the awful things people would say to me, on the phone, via mail, or even in person at town halls and city council meetings. They found it hard to believe at the time. The MAGA era of hate was always there. 

In recent years, it exploded thanks to our country electing a bigot to run our country. We’ve now run out of chances to put that genie back in the bottle. And the notion that light would help alleviate the problem has been proven false, as it’s only let the racists in towns like Willington, Connecticut find out that there are racists in every town across the country. Social media connected them and made them stronger.

We’re left with the untenable situation where the lunatic racist fringe has now succeeded in completely taking over a major American political party. The Republican Party of my youth – or at least what I thought it was – has transformed into an authoritarian party based upon hatred of anything and anyone that is not straight and white.

We are defenseless because human nature makes us more likely to say something when we’re mad. It’s the power that fed our former President. It’s the power that feeds current trolls like Ted Cruz or the two Q women elected to Congress or the Congressman from North Carolina who lied about getting into the Naval Academy. They are not legislators. They troll for attention. We give it to them.

There’s no way to stamp this out quickly, especially as the last election showed the draw of racism to infrequent voters, as well as the ability for “good” Republicans to gladly accept racism as a means to defeat Democrats.

I don’t have a great answer, but I do have a suggestion. Let’s stop giving oxygen to these trolls. Their power is our anger. No matter how many times we “dunk” on them, they only come back for me. We need a better response than dunking.

Twitter has a block button. Let’s use it. Facebook, well, you should delete Facebook entirely. But we need to start ignoring these trolls. Their power is our engagement. Let’s take that away. The 2020 election removed them from power. Let’s cut them off now before we use our collective strength at the polls in 2022 to wipe them away. Let them shout into the void while we focus on fixing the problems in our country.

The stain of MAGA will never fully wash off. We can still make it fade away by ignoring it. I know I’m as guilty of giving in as anyone. Today, I’ll start by blocking all of them on Twitter and pledging not to engage.

Will you join me?

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