Out of interest, what’s your thoughts on Daryl Davis? He’s a black man who made it a goal to befriend KKK members in order to lead them out of their racist ideology, back to normality.

Those people made objectively shitty, horrible decisions and were living bad lives. Yet, they were able to find a path to redemption. I’m not making excuses for this Byrd dude, I’m not American so I’ll never be faced with votiing for a KKK member (closest we’ve got here is Britain First, though not an exact match as they have ethnic minority members). But something I think about often is (and I hope you’ll do me the service of actually reading what I’ve written and think about it)…

Imagine you are born into a racist family in some majority-white racist town in American (can’t remember the name of it but there’s definitely at least one of those). You are surrounded by hard-right rhetoric from birth, your parents are racist, your friends at school are racist, your teachers are homophobic, you go to a church with anti-woke sermons, your media consumption is hard-right radio, hard-right TV, hard-right newspapers; you’d have to be an exceptionally-gifted logical thinker to escape the pull of that way of thinking. I sometimes wonder, how much agency does a person like that have in the views they acquire?