Why This California Liberal is Voting for Donald Trump
For many of us, 2020 was like Devil s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all had the same idea all at once, but we didn t understand it. We might have come from everywhere, but we all ended up in the same place.
For some, it was the government s authoritarian crackdown on masks and lockdowns. For others, it was the lies about COVID. But for me, it was suddenly seeing that unseen hands were manipulating us as a form of social control.
It sounds paranoid. I ll grant you that. I don t know how else to explain it. I was very much inside the insular feedback loop of the Left. I genuinely believed everything they said on CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.
They turned on a dime from COVID hysteria to systemic racism, which allowed millions to pour into the streets – the largest protest in American history – amid a global pandemic that had closed schools, churches, and businesses. What was going on?
None of us knew. They wouldn t tell us anything they did not think we needed to know. As I was crying out on Twitter about how crazy things were getting on the Left, Neera Tanden DM d me. You ve changed, she said.
Well, I can imagine. It must be hard. Poor woman. But Covid put the zap on my brain as well, as Captain Willard said in Apocalypse Now. I realized that I was wrong about what country I lived in and had been living in my whole life. The lying was a big part of it. My brother getting cancer and dying under mysterious circumstances was another part. Sure, cancer is always a mystery, but his hitting him so hard after his awful case of Covid really made me, and him, wonder. The was also the behavior of some of my colleagues. The hits taken by the First Amendment. The mass censorship. I was already a libertarian, but gosh, I mean, going after parents who object to trans- policies for kids as domestic terrorists? Really? I mean, I could see that happening in Canada, and maybe Oregon, but here in Californeyeay?
Anyway, you know all this. You’ve heard all this before. Then there was getting the Red Guard treatment at my university for using a crude term to describe the behavior of the CCP. You’re allowed to say rude things about the Chinese communists I thought. You know they cut out their subjects’ livers and kidneys and sell them for profits, don’t you? But it turns out you can’t say this sort of thing when they are paying big bucks for tuition. But this is America, isn’t it? Evidently America is not the place I thought it was, unless you can get a top notch lawyer (I did) and get lucky too (which I also did).
We learned, to my horror at least, that a lot of things we took for granted are actually bullshit, to use the technical term. It was like being told when your cabinets aren’t fitting right that the ruler you’ve been using to build them was all wrong all along. An inch is not an inch, you fool — you knew that, didn’t you? Well, I didn’t in fact. I felt like the Italian peasant who was called with his fellows before the village priest, who said “It turns out there is no God. But do not worry! I am still your priest!” I don’t know how I would have faced my students. All this law stuff is just a suggestion? There is no law! But don’t worry! I am still your Professor of Law!
The UFO types have a term for this feeling. They call it “ontological shock” — and that’s a pretty good phrase. It’s that feeling when you realize, like really realize because the evidence is slapping you in the face, that we are in fact animals in a galactic zoo or whatever. Of course I knew there were plenty of people who paid no attention to the law and some of them were even lawyers — but I thought they were few and losing. I didn’t realize they are many, and many in government and they’re winning, and they were probably right, at least in the sense of might making right, or “right” anyway.
One of my boys says I’d like Mexico. For a little bit of money you can live well, and everybody knows the government is the enemy. He might be right.
It’s not just on the left that things are crazy.