my agenda is to get people to start thinking for themselves and be unafraid to stand against political manipulation where ever they encounter it.

This is a beautiful mission statement, Ake, and I applaud it.

However, it should never be found so dazzling as to blind you to human wrongdoing in its name. All politics is persuasion, by its nature, and it is wiser to choose among voices by reason rather than simply stand against all of them. There's a fuzzy line between persuasion and manipulation.

But aside from that general principle, the intention to have equal civil rights equally administered is not manipulative; it is simply a desire to see equable justice under the higher principles of our great experiment over here, to make a democratic republic work under the law and strive for an ideal of justice.

A