I’ve leaned left politically my entire adult life…until recently. The nationwide riots in 2020 following George Floyd’s death, were a major turning point for me, although not the only ones. Although I felt Chauvin had acted negligently and callously, I couldn’t understand why the media insisted on injecting race into the dialogue without any reasonable basis. Wouldn’t this type of careless reporting only serve to worsen racial tensions? The rioting and destruction were only going to distract from real issues, unnecessarily claiming innocent victims in the name of a cause that was being overshadowed by its own destructive methodology.

I could not find a fellow liberal who was willing to simply condemn, not the peaceful protests, but the actual riots.

My fellow libs were also taking nearly everything Trump said out of context. I pleaded with them to stop. “If we embellish everything Trump says, do we not run the risk of losing credibility?!” The ensuing pushback was uncharacteristically aggressive, while the credulousness reminded me of a lesson I’d learned earlier in my life.

I grew up in a cult-like Christian religion that disallowed questioning the faith. Fortunately, the conditioning never really stuck with me. Eventually, I defected to a liberal ideology where I thought science and facts mattered. I was content… and then Trump was elected. I became a Trump-deranged liberal, but I remembered my childhood and wondered if I’d again been conditioned by a false ideology.

Image made using man climbing stairs (kues via freepik).

With a stubborn resolve and a willingness to prove myself wrong, I began reaching out to ardent Trump supporters and asking them to explain their support for him. Eventually, I had to admit I was making more productive inroads talking to Trump supporters than I was trying to convince my liberal friends that rioting was bad.

Where I was losing liberal friends for not aligning completely with their talking points, I was making new conservative friends…and I didn’t even have to agree with them! I was gaining insight into the way liberal media skews statistics to make their viewers think minorities are “disproportionately” treated in ways that somehow prove a racist ethos permeates America. I began to see the racist fallacy of thinking any black American who didn’t vote Democrat was somehow flawed. Why hadn’t I seen these things before? Had I left one religion to join another?

I rewatched Trump’s press conferences after the Charlottesville riots. Like many of my liberal friends, I was certain that Trump said there were good people on the side of Nazis, but he didn’t.

Charlottesville was also not the monumental racist flashpoint the media wanted us to believe it was. If anything, it proved this country has moved way beyond its racist past and the fringe groups still espousing racist adjacent ideas were so small that, even with a national spotlight, they could hardly muster a couple of hundred people. Counter-protestors outnumbered the white nationalists and neo-Nazis by 10 to 1. Everyone was armed to the teeth, but no one was shot.

When the crazed driver made the fateful decision that would ultimately kill Heather Heyer while injuring many more, the rioting all but stopped, and Charlottesville had the quickest medical response to an emergency of its kind in all its history. There were even reports that Proud Boys and BLM counter-protesters began having a dialogue. The consensus was clear: The murderous driver had gone too far, and no one wanted to be associated with him.

The following year, the alt-right leader who initiated the protests-turned-riots from the previous year attempted to return and memorialize the event but was met with so many counter-protesters he didn’t even take a step out of his vehicle. He saw he wasn’t welcome and just drove away. Outside of the tragic death, I’d call this an overall win for anti-racism, but Trump was still president and, despite the facts, the media chose fear over hope.

Another gut-wrenching turning point for me was the disastrous Covid response. I’m a germaphobe and initially was as scared as anyone. We wore masks and cleaned our groceries off, but when I saw the first social media comment suggesting we all should be mandated to wear masks, I knew the beginning of the end was fast approaching for me concerning my political affiliation.

What was happening? Was Trump-Derangement real? Why couldn’t my liberal friends think for themselves? The people whom I thought understood how dangerous a theocracy could be were suddenly embracing one that seemed centered around rebelling against anything “Orange Bad Man” said or did. We may have had some life-saving therapeutic protocols in place had Trump not mentioned them himself. The moment Trump said what he did, the pharmaceutical companies knew that demonizing cheaper potentially life-saving generic drugs would be easy with the help of Trump-deranged hysteria.

Regardless, my liberal friends simply didn’t care if their actions were hurting people, and this is certainly one of the big reasons I will not be voting Democrat for the foreseeable future. I challenged my poor lost liberal friends to ask themselves why they were reacting with knee-jerk disgust. Was it simply because Trump said it? Shouldn’t they be demanding we pursue every avenue to try and save lives? This quite frankly sickened me. What had happened to them?

I wouldn’t exactly call myself a Trump supporter now, but my liberal friends are missing the point about what Trump represented. Virtually all of America was worried about a Trump presidency but, as it turned out, Trump is the kind of disruption our American political landscape clearly needs and nothing solidified that more than the behavior of Democrats, liberals, and progressives after his election. In reality, Trump is the progressive’s baby. Will they ever realize it, understand it, and own it?