No, the unpleasant truth is that when populations of new and different people (especially religious or racial minorities) move to new and different towns, they all too often encounter vicious bigots. They don’t create vicious bigots. We understand this clearly in the race context. Spend five seconds searching on the web, and you can see truly shocking video from the 1970s of racist white crowds chanting vile insults in residential neighborhoods in New York. When their new neighborhoods integrated, they encountered vicious racists. They didn’t create vicious racists.

My own family had a terrible encounter with racism during the political rise of Donald Trump. As I wrote more critically of Trump and eventually declared that I would never vote for him, my youngest daughter was subject to a torrent of horrific, racist abuse.

Naomi is African-American, adopted from Ethiopia, and as many readers know, alt-right bigots sent us pictures of her then 7-year-old face photoshopped in gas chambers, with a smiling photoshopped Donald Trump poised to push the button to kill her. Bigots filled the comments section of my wife’s blog with horrific pictures and videos of dead and dying African-Americans. Threats spilled into the “real world.” Even now, my family feels periodically under siege, with threats to our house and home.