This Left Wing Environmental Group Blocked Me on Twitter

I had to laugh when I noticed this last night:

I’m not sure why the Dakota Resource Council blocked me. For those of you not familiar with this group, they’re part of a national network of “resource councils” funded by the usual deep-pocketed, left-wing interests. Here in North Dakota the work to obstruct things like oil and coal development, not to mention production agriculture. They basically hate industry.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a tweet from the group before, let alone responded to them in any fashion. I don’t ever really care that they blocked me all that much, except in that it’s illustrative of what’s wrong in American politics today.

So many Americans, from the left to the right to the people in between, have lost the desire to seek out opposing view points. Social media has made this worse. Not only has it put the opinions of our friends and neighbors and co-workers in front of our faces in a way that’s far more pervasive than anything in the past, but it’s also given us the ability to silence those people we disagree with.

We can mute them. Or block them. Or unfriend them.

That’s really too bad. It’s particularly bad when an advocacy group like the DRC takes to blocking people who disagree with their advocacy. After all, isn’t it people like me (not to mention all the people who agree with me) that a group like the DRC is trying to persuade?

It’s really, really bad when a U.S. Senator like Heidi Heitkamp isolates herself from her critics, as I pointed out in this September print column.

Some of you readers will react to this post by suggesting that the DRC is right to block me. You will be saying this because you disagree with my point of view.

That makes you part of the problem.