Instead of making divinations, Balentine should have used his first column of 2022 to make New Year’s resolutions. One such resolution might have been to abandon the tiresome “own the libs” schtick and adopt a calmer, more reasoned approach.

I started to notice patterns in Balentine’s columns. First, he uses inflamed rhetoric. Second, he resorts to divisive innuendo. Third, he cherry-picks history with one-sided historical revisionism.

In 2021, Balentine deployed some hyper-aggressive and rather desperate tactics. First, in the July 4 column, he made the intolerant remark that only “real Americans” subscribe to his extreme views.

Second, in the Thanksgiving column, Balentine demonizes his opponents. Suddenly, the entire Democratic Party has views that are uniformly “anti-freedom, anti-individual and ultimately anti-American” and seeks to “destroy our country from within.” Really?

Balentine might just have trouble expressing his thoughts. Whatever the reasons, I suggest Balentine up his game in 2022.

Ryan Evans
Portland