I could also title this entry, "What It's Like to Go from Being on the So-Called 'Far Left' to Being on the So-Called 'Far Right' Without Actually Changing Anything at All About Your Value System, Because Society is Crazy." But that would have been a tad wordy.
I know there are a lot of other people out there who can relate. But for those of you who consider yourselves to be firmly in one camp or the other, contemplating a "switch" of such magnitude may seem unfathomable. It's much easier to understand if I break it down through a little personal narrative, after which I hope it will be clear that there really never was a "switch." I'm just me! Same person. Same values. Consistent. Throughout my whole life.
Let's start with how I was born in a predominantly Blue state, into a family in which everyone (on both the mother's and father's side) was a Democrat and had been for countless generations. Let me cop to the fact that I didn't feel very comfortable around conservatives, usually for two basic reasons: over-the-top religiosity that I didn't know what to do with, and homophobia.
Of course, as a kid in the 80's and 90's, normally it mattered very little whether classmates were "conservative" or "liberal," because in the first place, kids are not overly plagued by these labels in the absence of heavy indoctrination, which was much less present at the time, and also, it just didn't come up that much. But I do remember a few incidents that made me aware of the differences.
First, the religiosity: in the 7th grade or so, there was a girl who became hysterically upset - red as a beet and crying to the point of hyperventilating - over a history lesson about how Christian missionaries contributed to destroying the culture of the Native American tribes, and also inadvertently killed a lot of them by passing along deadly microbes. My friends and I tried to comfort her and calm her down by trying to make the case that the textbook wasn't saying Christianity was bad, just relating the factual events - but as you can imagine, that didn't work. This incident was indelibly etched in my memory because it disturbed me deeply. This girl's parents had essentially programmed her with an explosive trip-wire that was so sensitive it was liable to blow up their daughter in the course of any normal day. She had been made fragile instead of resilient. She couldn't exist in the presence of opposing viewpoints. I had watched her psyche implode over almost nothing. Let's just say it occured to me that this was less than ideal.
In another episode, around the same time, another girl, who was from a conservative Mormon family, kicked up a fuss when we were learning how to formally debate controversial issues. The teacher had assigned her to advocate for the viewpoint opposite to her own viewpoint on the abortion issue. The teacher was well-liked, and most of the kids seemed to agree that learning to argue convincingly from the opposing side was truly a valuable lesson and a lot of the whole point of debate. I also took this view. It made me sad and uncomfortable that this girl's rigid beliefs were bringing her into conflict with the teacher and the other kids. I felt sad for her that she was not allowed (by her parents) to grow intellectually because even the exploration of other ideas was forbidden. Her worldview was a weak and vulnerable house of cards that could be blown over by a passing breath. She could have grown strong in her faith and conviction through steel-manning the opposing side, or she could have come to a new understanding of the issue, but she missed both opportunities.
However, even then, I did wonder if this conflict between the girl and the teacher was really so cut-and-dried. The teacher stood his ground and refused to back down, saying she would get an 'F' if she didn't argue the topic as assigned. It seemed that he was standing up for intellectual and educational integrity. But then I caught a glimpse of the teacher in an unguarded moment of anger, and realized that in part, what the girl was telling me was true: the teacher was, at least to a certain degree, taking out his anger at conservatives on her. And another thing she told me made me think this wasn't a black-or-white issue: it was literally part of her religion that she could not stand up and say the things that the teacher was telling her she had to stand up and say. While no one else seemed to feel any sympathy for her on this account, I was intrigued by the complexity of what was going on. Do we believe in religious freedom or don't we? I thought. In the end, I seemed to find myself alone as the person who could see both sides, but ultimately, I didn't want to see this girl get ganged up on by the whole school. I admired her for doing as her conscience dictated, even though every single person seemed to be against her. How many others would have the guts to do the same, I wondered?
Likewise, much later, I would look back on the incident of the girl who was so upset about the lesson that seemed to take a big dump on Christian missionaries, and realize that it must have been scary for her to see a textbook, published words enshrined in the curriculum, and a classroom full of adversaries, maybe a whole culture of adversaries, looking down on her family, looking down on their beliefs, and feeling all alone, just a kid. On a heart-level, on a human level, I can connect with that feeling.
Once, in 8th grade Civics class, we were made to do a mock Congressional session, where each student had to be a representative, and here was the catch: you had to make a nametag for yourself, and it had to have either an R or a D after it. Or an I. Almost all of the kids put D's after their names, and one or two put R's. I was the only one who put an I. Now, why did I do that? I knew full well my family was Democrat and that my views were clearly liberal and more aligned with Democrats than Republicans. But this whole exercise just didn't sit right with me. Why were we being outed? Why were we being asked to decide, and so young? Why were we expected to blindly accept the label that seemed the most obvious given our own upbringing, when we were so young and so ignorant that we still knew absolutely nothing about the world, about the issues, about the news, about current events? And why are there only two choices? And why does everyone else seem satisfied with that? And how do the Republican kids feel being vastly outnumbered? By choosing to be an Independent in that mock Congress, I was saying: "Leave me alone. I'm still just a kid."
...
I have been strongly anti-homophobia from earliest memory, I suppose back to the point at which I first learned that being gay was a thing. I remember being eight years old, out on the playground, and witnessing a gang of kids torment a little boy with chants of "Fag! Fag! Fag!" It crushed my heart. The hell he must have gone through.
Later, in high school, I was severely annoyed that loudly denying being gay had become an obligatory custom as well as a compulsive tic. One by one, I watched every single other kid fall in line and conform to the new unspoken rule: If you don't say you're not gay, it means you're gay. And that means social death. I refused to play. I vowed that I would never do this. I knew it was a system that was set up to route out and intimidate any kids that might be gay, and if there were any, I wouldn't do that to them. I wouldn't participate. So I never said I wasn't gay. As a result, everyone thought I was gay. And I just had to put up with it. But I knew I'd never really have their approval anyway, even if I tried to play their games. So I knew I wasn't losing anything. I just wanted to live firmly planted in reality.
By high school, I had begun to learn, at least in broad strokes, all about the various issues that the left and the right took opposing sides on. People on the left were pro-choice on abortion, generally anti-war, advocated for gays, women, and minorities, and were in favor of Affirmative Action and entitlement programs like Welfare. Immediately, I ascertained that some of that was stuff I could actually understand and relate to my own values and opinions, and some of it was stuff that had to do with deeply complex policies and their outcomes, which was the domain of intellectuals and social scientists, and I was lost. However, it wasn't hard to grasp that when it comes to those difficult-to-understand issues, the thing to do is to trust the people on your own side, because clearly they are the smart, rational, compassionate ones. People on the right were for smaller government, budget cuts, tax cuts, and didn't like entitlements. All the people who didn't like gays and who were racist seemed to be on that side, for reasons I was sure would become clear to me at some point. These were the simple rules. Easy to pick up, easy to follow. As long as you don't start questioning it.
For a long time I didn't question it. Even if some of the arguments I heard from conservatives actually seemed to make sense, I totally trusted that somehow or other they were wrong. I would figure out how eventually, but in the meantime the best bet was to trust that my beloved lefties were correct, by virtue of their extra intelligence and compassion. For instance, once in 9th grade, a Republican kid said to me something to the effect of, "Big government is bad - because if a government has too much power, it can become corrupt and go totalitarian." And I thought to myself, "Oh yeah, that totally makes sense. But I'm sure that I'm just not fully understanding the issue yet. After all, you've got to have programs to help people in need." But one day, sitting in the school library reading an explicitly leftist magazine, as I was wont to do in those days, I came upon an article about the welfare program. It was the first time I had ever delved into the issue. It was because we were doing yet another one of those formal debates and I was supposed to pick a controversial issue. I thought, OK, maybe I'll pick this. So I'm reading this article, in which a professional, adult writer is trying with all sincerity to mount a strong case in favor of the welfare program. And I, a teenage reader, am fully expecting to have it well confirmed that the welfare program is the correct policy because it works. And then, for the first time in my life, a funny thing happened. The article cited study after study that showed conclusively that welfare does not work - that it actually harms black communities and increases poverty. And yet, schizophrenically, the author of the article maintained their position and threw out a few lame excuses for why the studies seem to invite the opposing conclusion. I didn't draw any final conclusions about this issue at the time. My reaction was something like, "Huh. Let's put a pin in that...I see we'll be re-visiting you someday..." And I continued on being very leftist for about ten more years, and forgot all about this until that point. (Incidentally, I decided to choose "drug legalization" as the topic for my debate, a funny foreshadowing of the fact that I later went full libertarian.)
Further on, in later high school years, partly spurred on by my palpable distaste for homophobia, I became enamored of lefty magazines like Utne Reader, Mother Jones, and Ms. I especially loved Ms., and feminism generally. I didn't like being confined to traditional gender roles. I didn't feel comfortable having to live in a developed, womanly body, because I didn't want to be objectified or put in the "meat market." I didn't want people to judge my appearance, especially not to evaluate whether or not I was a "hot girl." I wore a big, bulky army green coat all over the place, had very short dyed-pink hair, and wore storm-trooper blue cammo pants. Much later, looking back, I would realize that I was trying to delay womanhood because I'd had a difficult childhood in which I hadn't had enough opportunity to grow, and it was nothing more complicated than that. (If I had grown up in today's times, maybe friends or teachers or the culture generally would have had me wondering if I was transgendered.) Inspired by Ms. magazine, I would become a member of Amnesty International, loving the idea of standing up for political prisoners who were victims of cruel dictatorships and writing letters trying to get them released. Quite apart from anything the school had me doing, in my free time I was reading books like Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.
At some point in college, I remember getting my hands on a Sun catalogue, which could be used to order lovely paraphernalia for the super-lefty like myself. I got it from a friend, who had ordered a t-shirt that said, "God Used to Be My Co-Pilot...But Then We Crashed Into a Mountain and I Ate Him." I ordered a t-shirt that said, "Nuke a Godless, Communist, Gay Baby Seal for Christ." From my current vantage point, I feel a little embarrassed that we thought these slogans were hilarious.
I didn't learn to feel any shame about it until one day, when I was working at a used bookstore, wearing that t-shirt. A conservative, religious lady came up to the register and angrily demanded, "What does your t-shirt mean?! I want to know what that's supposed to mean! How could you wear that?! I'm very offended!" or something like that. This may sound pretty stupid, but I was actually shocked by the force of her reaction. A friend of mine at the time thought I was a wimp for going to put on a sweatshirt to cover it up. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," he said. The whole point of the T-shirt was to tweak their nose, he argued. But right then and there I realized something. I don't want to tweak their nose. I don't want to. What they feel is something that I cannot understand, but whatever it is, it's real. And I don't want to cause that. On top of that, from my current vantage point, I now realize that "Nuke a Godless, Communist, Gay Baby Seal for Christ" is a psychotic, haphazard assemblage of straw-man arguments. It's doing what I now hate: attributing a vast array of ridiculous, caricatured positions to one imaginary adversary (the stereotype of a conservative), and having a private smugness-and-hatred party at their expense. It's pretty much like holding a sign that says "All followers of Jesus Christ want to escalate nuclear armament and go around calling everyone godless heathens and Commies, and prop up Big Oil and make excuses for the the damage they do to the environment, and don't care at all when marine mammals and other aquatic life are killed in Exxon oil spills, and hate gay people. So FUCK THEM and the pony they rode in on." When I first bought the t-shirt, I only thought that the slogan was funny - REALLY funny. It made me laugh really hard. Partly because it so succinctly pulled in all those issues into one absurd sentence. But after that day, I was sensitized to its other meanings, as well as its careless assumptions, and I spent years thinking it over. I didn't wear the T-shirt that day to be nasty. But nevertheless, I was finally forced to conclude, it was sure enough a nasty message. And I'm just not gonna be about nastiness in this lifetime. I had to decide that.
A couple of years after that (in 2004-ish?), my sister, who I love and trust, introduced me to libertarian thought. The one book that really clinched it for me and started it all was How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, by Harry Browne. Since then I've had to weather the fallout resulting from the fact that progressives categorize libertarians as being on the hated "far-right," and their rejection has broken my heart many times over. And that's a long story for another time. But I didn't change. They did.
Organizations I once admired so deeply, from the ACLU to Amnesty International, don't seem to be willing to speak up for unvaccinated people in countries like Germany, Austria, and Australia, who are being confined without charges and barred from public life. They aren't standing up for the Trump-supporting protesters of the January 6 rally-turned-riot who are being falsely accused of domestic terrorism and sedition. Though to their credit, Amnesty International is speaking up for Julian Assange, thank God, they seem to have failed to notice that Western democratic nations are falling to authoritarian regimes that are turning against their own citizens.
I've been consistent throughout the years, and here's the proof: at the height of my lefty-ism, at the same time as I ordered the infamous T-shirt, I also ordered a beautiful yellow poster with butterflies on it and the most powerful and deeply true words:
I still believe in that. Do they?
...
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, please consider reading my other posts, such as: Political Polarization Is Really Just Rageaholism (on Crack).
I know there are a lot of other people out there who can relate. But for those of you who consider yourselves to be firmly in one camp or the other, contemplating a "switch" of such magnitude may seem unfathomable. It's much easier to understand if I break it down through a little personal narrative, after which I hope it will be clear that there really never was a "switch." I'm just me! Same person. Same values. Consistent. Throughout my whole life.
Of course, as a kid in the 80's and 90's, normally it mattered very little whether classmates were "conservative" or "liberal," because in the first place, kids are not overly plagued by these labels in the absence of heavy indoctrination, which was much less present at the time, and also, it just didn't come up that much. But I do remember a few incidents that made me aware of the differences.
First, the religiosity: in the 7th grade or so, there was a girl who became hysterically upset - red as a beet and crying to the point of hyperventilating - over a history lesson about how Christian missionaries contributed to destroying the culture of the Native American tribes, and also inadvertently killed a lot of them by passing along deadly microbes. My friends and I tried to comfort her and calm her down by trying to make the case that the textbook wasn't saying Christianity was bad, just relating the factual events - but as you can imagine, that didn't work. This incident was indelibly etched in my memory because it disturbed me deeply. This girl's parents had essentially programmed her with an explosive trip-wire that was so sensitive it was liable to blow up their daughter in the course of any normal day. She had been made fragile instead of resilient. She couldn't exist in the presence of opposing viewpoints. I had watched her psyche implode over almost nothing. Let's just say it occured to me that this was less than ideal.
In another episode, around the same time, another girl, who was from a conservative Mormon family, kicked up a fuss when we were learning how to formally debate controversial issues. The teacher had assigned her to advocate for the viewpoint opposite to her own viewpoint on the abortion issue. The teacher was well-liked, and most of the kids seemed to agree that learning to argue convincingly from the opposing side was truly a valuable lesson and a lot of the whole point of debate. I also took this view. It made me sad and uncomfortable that this girl's rigid beliefs were bringing her into conflict with the teacher and the other kids. I felt sad for her that she was not allowed (by her parents) to grow intellectually because even the exploration of other ideas was forbidden. Her worldview was a weak and vulnerable house of cards that could be blown over by a passing breath. She could have grown strong in her faith and conviction through steel-manning the opposing side, or she could have come to a new understanding of the issue, but she missed both opportunities.
However, even then, I did wonder if this conflict between the girl and the teacher was really so cut-and-dried. The teacher stood his ground and refused to back down, saying she would get an 'F' if she didn't argue the topic as assigned. It seemed that he was standing up for intellectual and educational integrity. But then I caught a glimpse of the teacher in an unguarded moment of anger, and realized that in part, what the girl was telling me was true: the teacher was, at least to a certain degree, taking out his anger at conservatives on her. And another thing she told me made me think this wasn't a black-or-white issue: it was literally part of her religion that she could not stand up and say the things that the teacher was telling her she had to stand up and say. While no one else seemed to feel any sympathy for her on this account, I was intrigued by the complexity of what was going on. Do we believe in religious freedom or don't we? I thought. In the end, I seemed to find myself alone as the person who could see both sides, but ultimately, I didn't want to see this girl get ganged up on by the whole school. I admired her for doing as her conscience dictated, even though every single person seemed to be against her. How many others would have the guts to do the same, I wondered?
Likewise, much later, I would look back on the incident of the girl who was so upset about the lesson that seemed to take a big dump on Christian missionaries, and realize that it must have been scary for her to see a textbook, published words enshrined in the curriculum, and a classroom full of adversaries, maybe a whole culture of adversaries, looking down on her family, looking down on their beliefs, and feeling all alone, just a kid. On a heart-level, on a human level, I can connect with that feeling.
Once, in 8th grade Civics class, we were made to do a mock Congressional session, where each student had to be a representative, and here was the catch: you had to make a nametag for yourself, and it had to have either an R or a D after it. Or an I. Almost all of the kids put D's after their names, and one or two put R's. I was the only one who put an I. Now, why did I do that? I knew full well my family was Democrat and that my views were clearly liberal and more aligned with Democrats than Republicans. But this whole exercise just didn't sit right with me. Why were we being outed? Why were we being asked to decide, and so young? Why were we expected to blindly accept the label that seemed the most obvious given our own upbringing, when we were so young and so ignorant that we still knew absolutely nothing about the world, about the issues, about the news, about current events? And why are there only two choices? And why does everyone else seem satisfied with that? And how do the Republican kids feel being vastly outnumbered? By choosing to be an Independent in that mock Congress, I was saying: "Leave me alone. I'm still just a kid."
...
I have been strongly anti-homophobia from earliest memory, I suppose back to the point at which I first learned that being gay was a thing. I remember being eight years old, out on the playground, and witnessing a gang of kids torment a little boy with chants of "Fag! Fag! Fag!" It crushed my heart. The hell he must have gone through.
Later, in high school, I was severely annoyed that loudly denying being gay had become an obligatory custom as well as a compulsive tic. One by one, I watched every single other kid fall in line and conform to the new unspoken rule: If you don't say you're not gay, it means you're gay. And that means social death. I refused to play. I vowed that I would never do this. I knew it was a system that was set up to route out and intimidate any kids that might be gay, and if there were any, I wouldn't do that to them. I wouldn't participate. So I never said I wasn't gay. As a result, everyone thought I was gay. And I just had to put up with it. But I knew I'd never really have their approval anyway, even if I tried to play their games. So I knew I wasn't losing anything. I just wanted to live firmly planted in reality.
By high school, I had begun to learn, at least in broad strokes, all about the various issues that the left and the right took opposing sides on. People on the left were pro-choice on abortion, generally anti-war, advocated for gays, women, and minorities, and were in favor of Affirmative Action and entitlement programs like Welfare. Immediately, I ascertained that some of that was stuff I could actually understand and relate to my own values and opinions, and some of it was stuff that had to do with deeply complex policies and their outcomes, which was the domain of intellectuals and social scientists, and I was lost. However, it wasn't hard to grasp that when it comes to those difficult-to-understand issues, the thing to do is to trust the people on your own side, because clearly they are the smart, rational, compassionate ones. People on the right were for smaller government, budget cuts, tax cuts, and didn't like entitlements. All the people who didn't like gays and who were racist seemed to be on that side, for reasons I was sure would become clear to me at some point. These were the simple rules. Easy to pick up, easy to follow. As long as you don't start questioning it.
For a long time I didn't question it. Even if some of the arguments I heard from conservatives actually seemed to make sense, I totally trusted that somehow or other they were wrong. I would figure out how eventually, but in the meantime the best bet was to trust that my beloved lefties were correct, by virtue of their extra intelligence and compassion. For instance, once in 9th grade, a Republican kid said to me something to the effect of, "Big government is bad - because if a government has too much power, it can become corrupt and go totalitarian." And I thought to myself, "Oh yeah, that totally makes sense. But I'm sure that I'm just not fully understanding the issue yet. After all, you've got to have programs to help people in need." But one day, sitting in the school library reading an explicitly leftist magazine, as I was wont to do in those days, I came upon an article about the welfare program. It was the first time I had ever delved into the issue. It was because we were doing yet another one of those formal debates and I was supposed to pick a controversial issue. I thought, OK, maybe I'll pick this. So I'm reading this article, in which a professional, adult writer is trying with all sincerity to mount a strong case in favor of the welfare program. And I, a teenage reader, am fully expecting to have it well confirmed that the welfare program is the correct policy because it works. And then, for the first time in my life, a funny thing happened. The article cited study after study that showed conclusively that welfare does not work - that it actually harms black communities and increases poverty. And yet, schizophrenically, the author of the article maintained their position and threw out a few lame excuses for why the studies seem to invite the opposing conclusion. I didn't draw any final conclusions about this issue at the time. My reaction was something like, "Huh. Let's put a pin in that...I see we'll be re-visiting you someday..." And I continued on being very leftist for about ten more years, and forgot all about this until that point. (Incidentally, I decided to choose "drug legalization" as the topic for my debate, a funny foreshadowing of the fact that I later went full libertarian.)
Further on, in later high school years, partly spurred on by my palpable distaste for homophobia, I became enamored of lefty magazines like Utne Reader, Mother Jones, and Ms. I especially loved Ms., and feminism generally. I didn't like being confined to traditional gender roles. I didn't feel comfortable having to live in a developed, womanly body, because I didn't want to be objectified or put in the "meat market." I didn't want people to judge my appearance, especially not to evaluate whether or not I was a "hot girl." I wore a big, bulky army green coat all over the place, had very short dyed-pink hair, and wore storm-trooper blue cammo pants. Much later, looking back, I would realize that I was trying to delay womanhood because I'd had a difficult childhood in which I hadn't had enough opportunity to grow, and it was nothing more complicated than that. (If I had grown up in today's times, maybe friends or teachers or the culture generally would have had me wondering if I was transgendered.) Inspired by Ms. magazine, I would become a member of Amnesty International, loving the idea of standing up for political prisoners who were victims of cruel dictatorships and writing letters trying to get them released. Quite apart from anything the school had me doing, in my free time I was reading books like Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher.
At some point in college, I remember getting my hands on a Sun catalogue, which could be used to order lovely paraphernalia for the super-lefty like myself. I got it from a friend, who had ordered a t-shirt that said, "God Used to Be My Co-Pilot...But Then We Crashed Into a Mountain and I Ate Him." I ordered a t-shirt that said, "Nuke a Godless, Communist, Gay Baby Seal for Christ." From my current vantage point, I feel a little embarrassed that we thought these slogans were hilarious.
I didn't learn to feel any shame about it until one day, when I was working at a used bookstore, wearing that t-shirt. A conservative, religious lady came up to the register and angrily demanded, "What does your t-shirt mean?! I want to know what that's supposed to mean! How could you wear that?! I'm very offended!" or something like that. This may sound pretty stupid, but I was actually shocked by the force of her reaction. A friend of mine at the time thought I was a wimp for going to put on a sweatshirt to cover it up. "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," he said. The whole point of the T-shirt was to tweak their nose, he argued. But right then and there I realized something. I don't want to tweak their nose. I don't want to. What they feel is something that I cannot understand, but whatever it is, it's real. And I don't want to cause that. On top of that, from my current vantage point, I now realize that "Nuke a Godless, Communist, Gay Baby Seal for Christ" is a psychotic, haphazard assemblage of straw-man arguments. It's doing what I now hate: attributing a vast array of ridiculous, caricatured positions to one imaginary adversary (the stereotype of a conservative), and having a private smugness-and-hatred party at their expense. It's pretty much like holding a sign that says "All followers of Jesus Christ want to escalate nuclear armament and go around calling everyone godless heathens and Commies, and prop up Big Oil and make excuses for the the damage they do to the environment, and don't care at all when marine mammals and other aquatic life are killed in Exxon oil spills, and hate gay people. So FUCK THEM and the pony they rode in on." When I first bought the t-shirt, I only thought that the slogan was funny - REALLY funny. It made me laugh really hard. Partly because it so succinctly pulled in all those issues into one absurd sentence. But after that day, I was sensitized to its other meanings, as well as its careless assumptions, and I spent years thinking it over. I didn't wear the T-shirt that day to be nasty. But nevertheless, I was finally forced to conclude, it was sure enough a nasty message. And I'm just not gonna be about nastiness in this lifetime. I had to decide that.
A couple of years after that (in 2004-ish?), my sister, who I love and trust, introduced me to libertarian thought. The one book that really clinched it for me and started it all was How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, by Harry Browne. Since then I've had to weather the fallout resulting from the fact that progressives categorize libertarians as being on the hated "far-right," and their rejection has broken my heart many times over. And that's a long story for another time. But I didn't change. They did.
Organizations I once admired so deeply, from the ACLU to Amnesty International, don't seem to be willing to speak up for unvaccinated people in countries like Germany, Austria, and Australia, who are being confined without charges and barred from public life. They aren't standing up for the Trump-supporting protesters of the January 6 rally-turned-riot who are being falsely accused of domestic terrorism and sedition. Though to their credit, Amnesty International is speaking up for Julian Assange, thank God, they seem to have failed to notice that Western democratic nations are falling to authoritarian regimes that are turning against their own citizens.
I've been consistent throughout the years, and here's the proof: at the height of my lefty-ism, at the same time as I ordered the infamous T-shirt, I also ordered a beautiful yellow poster with butterflies on it and the most powerful and deeply true words:
NO ONE IS FREE WHILE OTHERS ARE OPPRESSED.
I still believe in that. Do they?
...
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this article, please consider reading my other posts, such as: Political Polarization Is Really Just Rageaholism (on Crack).
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