The Silencing Read Online Free PDF

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To my father

INTRODUCTION
    I grew up during the 1970s with a feminist mother who was trailblazing her way across Alaska as one of the country’s few female archaeologists. She and my father, also an archaeologist, had set out for the “Last Frontier” on an adventure after earning their Ph.D.s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Although they divorced a few years later, my parents continued as colleagues at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks for three decades.
    The campus was a haven to the few liberals in Fairbanks, an otherwise overwhelmingly conservative town located in the center of the state. It was at my hippy day care center Enep’ut (the Yup’ik Eskimo word for “our house”) that I sat in front of a fuzzy black and white television to cheer with dozens of toddlers as Richard Nixon resigned. That triumph of right over wrong was my first taste of politics—and I was hooked. Mine was one of a few little hands that went up in favor of Jimmy Carter in 1976 when my teacher asked which nominee we supported for president—a trend thatcontinued through every presidential campaign until I graduated from high school. It’s unlikely many of my friends’ mothers were sobbing the night Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, as was mine.
    My political education occurred at the dinner table. Whether at my mother or father’s house, the topic invariably would be politics. It was there I was also taught how to defend my views. We viewed this as a necessary survival skill, as our family was surrounded by people who believed liberalism was the root of all evil. At my tiny Jesuit high school, I would debate my conservative classmates on issue after issue, whether it was feminism or caring for the poor. My friends’ parents were uniformly small-government conservatives, and their children followed suit. Ronald Reagan, their patron saint, was president. He could do no wrong.
    At my house, however, there was a very different storyline on the president. The Democratic roots in our family ran deep, as both my parents hailed from Irish Democratic stock. My father’s tribe was a mix of working class Catholics and Protestants. On my mother’s side was an army of Massachusetts-born Irish Catholic Democrats who idolized John F. Kennedy. The allegiance to the Democratic Party had been cemented generations before, when family members reached the shores of America. I was constantly reminded that the Democratic Party stood up for working people, for families like ours, and those that came later, and not just from Ireland.
    Despite this background, I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting that conservative views were illegitimate and unworthy of debate. I first encountered that attitude when I moved to New York City much later, where bumping into a conservative was less likely than spotting a unicorn. That unfamiliarity ultimately bred contempt.
    It was easy to stereotype conservatives because I no longer knew any beyond my childhood friends, whom I rarely saw. I had already been happily ideologically cocooned for much of my twenties as I worked as a political appointee in the Clinton administration. This isolation grew when I moved to New York in my early thirties and became enmeshed inDemocratic politics there, including working on Andrew Cuomo’s first race for governor and consulting for the New York State Democratic Committee, among other things. Even the few Republicans I knew were basically liberal.
    Two experiences unexpectedly put me in a regular relationship with conservatives: working as a contributor at Fox News and a later in life conversion to Christianity. The