Consider how it'd look if she was a member of a Nazi Party. Nobody would accept that. There's no difference.
Convincing people requires that you work forward from the assumptions they hold toward your views. I'm not sure what asserting that other people actually do hold your assumptions when they keep telling you they don't accomplishes.
1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.
2. Anyone who does think that communism is not any longer an extreme position, is simply not well informed. Communism itself hasn't changed. Go look at the state of Xinjiang to see this. It's supposedly full of concentration camps.
Okay, and if you continue to communicate the way you are, those are the only people who will be interested in your ideas. You have to play the same game as your audience if you want to win.
You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.
Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.