Every conservative-leaning person has heard the stereotypes, yes? The rumors that conservatives don't care about women's issues, don't care about prejudice towards minority groups, and want to leave poor immigrant children out in the slums to starve?

While it's not ever a pleasant thing to be accused of bigotry, especially by some smug, white liberal who is usually just as privileged as the people he or she claims to be against, these stereotypes are becoming more difficult to argue against. The new wave of alt-right racists who pretend to be conservative just fulfill all the negative ideas about mainstream conservatives that we have tried to disprove.

The alt-right may have hijacked the Republican Party thanks to Donald Trump, but they are not conservative, no matter what they call themselves. Conservatism is about equal liberties and opportunities for individuals. Therefore, as conservatives we should be the first ones to call out racial, ethnic, gender, religious and all other forms of discrimination. Conservatives should be leading the movement to bring about comprehensive immigration reform. We should be leading the movement to rid law enforcement and the justice system of corruption and discrimination. We should be leading the movement to bring justice to all survivors of sexual assault. We should support religious liberty for every single group. Because as conservatives we know that, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation or religion, everyone is endowed with the same God-given rights to life and liberty.

For too long, people have considered issues like immigration reform, criminal justice reform, sexual assault and prejudice against LGBT individuals to be liberal issues. The truth is that social problems should be human issues, not partisan issues belonging to one side or another. True, we all have different ideas about what social problems look like, what is their root cause and how we should handle them. But sometimes in order to fix problems, swallowing your pride and compromising with the other side is necessary.

In our day and age, words like "racism," "sexism," "bigotry" and "social injustice" have been really watered down, and I understand how annoying that can be. But the alt-right neo-Nazis are not the correct answer to politically correct, SJW madness. The correct response is to figure out which issues are legitimate social problems and to fix them. Discrimination still exists, mostly at the individual level rather than the systemic level. But it's still a present issue that needs to be fixed, and not just by one political party.