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I’ll Never Trust Conservatives Again

Amber Fraley
4 min readNov 14, 2022
Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

There’s a lot of talk about how divided the country is. I know I tend to be a Negative Nelly anyway, but I honestly don’t see a way to end the division.

Many people point the finger at the right wing media machine for spreading propaganda and brainwashing viewers, but there’s a flip side to that coin: Conservatives consumed the media they wanted to see and hear. They never even attempted to push back on the lies and bigotry. They embraced it all and were happy to make a ton of money on lies and bigotry to boot.

Back in the early 1990s, I worked for a small business paper run by conservatives. Not like middle of the road conservatives, but church going, American flag-waving, abortion-hating, anti-environment, anti-gay-marriage, pro-business, anti-evolution-being-taught-in-Kansas-schools, hard-boiled conservatives.

Their beliefs made me ill, but I stayed a closet liberal at work and was polite to my bosses and my conservative coworkers. I figured it was a free country and they were entitled to their beliefs, and they were nice enough to me, so live and let live, right?

Oh, how young and naive I was. There were so many things I didn’t understand. I knew my conservative coworkers were racist, but I didn’t understand they’d be willing to burn down the country and trash the constitution in response to other…

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Amber Fraley
Amber Fraley

Written by Amber Fraley

Writing about abortion rights, mental illness, trauma, narcissistic abuse & survival, politics. Journalist, novelist, wife, mom, Kansan, repro rights activist.

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