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Leaving The Left, My #WalkAway Story
Well, I’m not one to join a movement, but maybe I ought to take a stab at the #walkaway video. Who knows? Maybe I can encourage somebody else to face the slings and arrows and get the hell away from toxic progressives. And hey, it sure beats dancing next to a moving car or dumping ice water over my head. So let’s get into it.
My folks were Republicans, but not really political. I don’t recall a single political discussion in our home when I was growing up. I vaguely remember that they voted for Goldwater and Nixon and Reagan, but they didn’t put signs in the yard or bumper stickers on the station Wagon. Any political ideas I picked up just seeped into me through the culture, mostly music. And they came from the left. Bob Dylan put some into me, John Lennon put some into me, Neil Young did too with his songs Ohio and Southern Man. And anyway, the natural state for a smart rebellious kid is to adopt whatever his parents don’t believe.
I left home in 1973 and followed my older hippie cousin to Hawaii. I lived in a series of places, mostly communally. I picked up some more lefty ideas there, but it was a fairly benign new-agey type of thing. When I drifted back to California it was the late 70s or early 80s, and I wanted to be a singer-songwriter. I got involved with drugs. I hung out with rock bands. I watched as cocaine took hold and Los Angeles descended into moral chaos. But I never really connected that to any debate about values. It’s easy to just ignore politics, and that’s what I did.
I voted Democrat when I bothered to vote, but it wasn’t because I’d really thought a lot about the issues. I had friends who’d gone to college and they were all Democrats. I figured they must know something I didn’t know. Saturday Night Live mocked Reagan as a greedy warmongering, and who was I to question that? Jackson Browne said that nuclear energy was a threat to the planet, and that was good enough for me. Maybe he saw the China Syndrome on the same day I did.
There were a few places along the way where I started to suspect that I was aligned with the wrong people. One was the Clarence Thomas hearings. I watched that circus on TV and my BS meter went off hour after hour. I just knew that this was a witch hunt. The Democrats hated Clarence Thomas. Then it started to dawn on me that the Democrats thought they owned black Americans. He was being punished for escaping the plantation.
Feminism had completely taken over in California. I tiptoed around women like every other guy I knew. But when Clinton was exposed for taking advantage of an unpaid intern – something the feminist would have called rape if a Republican was involved – I saw that the Democrats’ concern for women was as fake as their concern for African Americans. Bill Clinton got a total pass, and to this day Monica Lewinsky is still being slut-shamed.
It dawned on me gradually that the left was a group with no moral center, no values to hold onto. Their core philosophy seemed to be opposing conservatives and destroying anything the conservatives held to be sacred. Progressives were dedicated to dismantling the societal structures by which they themselves had been raised. And oh, how they could hate. I’m talking about the hard left here, not moderate liberals. They hated the Bible Belt, they hated big business, they hated the military, they hated our white male Founders, they hated police, they hated the Constitution, they hated capitalism – even though many of them were trying to get rich and famous.
The drugs finally got me, and I hit rock bottom. So I started painting houses. And now, I saw firsthand what it was like to work for a living, really work. And now I began to meet a lot of conservative people, because they owned the house as I painted. And none of them matched the description of conservatives that I’d formed in my mind. Most were fine people. So I lived in this disconnect: hearing how evil Republicans were, while seeing that most of them were good honest people. And gradually, through thousands of hours of hard sweaty work and becoming a husband and father, I developed a real appreciation for the no-excuses never-give-up people who built this country.
And then suddenly…the internet, and a few years later Facebook. My first several hundred Facebook friends were musicians, mostly singer-songwriters. And this was where I found out just how nasty they can be. The first real argument I had online was about abortion. This was my at the time: “Hey, I’m pro-choice. But if I did believe in my heart that life began at conception and thought that a million children a year were being casually killed, I would have to be against abortion. That would be my only moral choice.” Oh my god, did the shit hit the fan. I had never experienced anything like the gang-beating doled out to me on that day by people who never stop bragging about how compassionate they are. I was unfriended and blocked by a few dozen people for the crime of trying to understand the motivations of people I didn’t even agree with.
I started to poke around and look at the assumptions I’d always held from another angle. I found Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, and learned about the much better shape black Americans had been in before the social engineers of the left “saved” them. They also taught me basic economics, and I started to really understand the virtues of capitalism. But old habits die hard. I was still on Team Blue.
In 2008, I voted for Barack Obama. I even performed in an Obama fundraiser deep in the Hollywood Hills. Talk about your limousine liberals. After Obama won and he accepted a Nobel Prize for nothing, I noticed how conflicted the man was about free enterprise. I watched him squander $800 billion dollars of our money on a stimulus package that did virtually nothing. I saw him forced through a healthcare law that I knew would slap the middle class. And what about that buggy $2 billion dollar website made in Canada? I watched him stiff blue-collar Americans for the shovel-ready jobs he promised, and instead talked millions more kids into student-loan debt and useless degrees. And I realized that he was just performing the role of “First Black President” for which he had been groomed.
At this point, I started stuffing clothes into a backpack and plotting my escape. I had cringed as my lefty friends fell like jackals on Sarah Palin and her family the very day they learned that she existed. I was sickened as Jon Stewart got rich by carefully editing videos to make Republicans look stupid or evil. In 2012, I did the research, and realized that Mitt Romney was no more a vulture capitalist than liberal Saint Warren Buffett. They’re in the same business! I learned that the rich, far from shirking their fair share, pay for virtually all of the social programs in this country and everything else too. When I backed Romney, I came out of the closet as a brand-new conservative. Trust me, in California, that’s a lot tougher than coming out as gay – not that there’s anything wrong with that. It was all over for me on the left, and I got my hiking boots out from under the bed. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Dennis Prager’s radio show in Los Angeles. I spent a lot of hours with the paintbrush in my hand and Dennis in my ears. He started out as a Liberal Democrat too.
Eventually, the musical gigs all dried up, and one by one I realized that – with a few notable and noble exceptions – my lefty friends had lost all use for me, other than as a chew toy at cocktail parties. And so I pulled on the boots, grabbed the backpack, and I walked the hell away. A few stressful years later, with the streets still full of hysterical people in vagina costumes, Jason Siler and I formed Blue Collar Logic on Facebook, and quickly amassed 11 million views and eighty thousand follows for our common sense political videos. We take on all the things that drove me away from the left. The identity politics and victim Olympics, the determination to deny the basics of human nature, the fear-mongering, the virtue-signaling, the manipulation of language to set traps and ruin people, the race-baiting, the silencing of dissent. And since we’re on the topic– due to organized harassment by radical feminists and Zuckerberg’s sneaky reset of both algorithms and our viewers’ own preferences, that channel is all but dead and we’ve moved to YouTube. Let’s hope we get a fair shake here.
So, as you see, I had no choice but to leave the left. Is the right one big hug-fest? Do we all gather beneath the sunset and sing patriotic songs like at the end of a Dinesh D'souza movie? No. There’s a lot of jerks over here too. But at the end of the day, conservatives are trying to hold on to the values that made us great and kept us free. Trying to keep the individual as the basic unit of civilization. Progressives are trying to force us into a massive collective that they will control through the power of government. My choice was clear, and I’m still walking.
