And How I escaped the Left
sashastone.substack.com
I mostly keep my distance from people on the Left now as much as possible. I don’t try to mix it up with them on Twitter. I stay off of Facebook. I mostly keep to myself if I have to do a work event. That’s mainly due to my inability to have a conversation with them about almost anything. Sooner or later, it gets back to Trump.
And I want you to know, I now know what it’s like to stand on the other side of the Left. I know what it’s like to have people talk to you like you’re human garbage, what it must be like to see every single movie or ad reflecting only one ideology. I’ve been in the bubble and now I’m out of it. I can tell you, it’s much better on the outside. Freedom of the mind at last.
I just got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take the unfiltered rage coming from my side all aimed at one guy, Trump, along with his family and his supporters. It’s gross. It’s weird and it makes me very uncomfortable.
The weird part is, I didn’t vote for Trump and I don’t consider myself a “Trump supporter.” I just can’t listen to people talk about Trump or his supporters because they are talking about a person and people who do not actually exist. They have created exaggerated versions of a whole group of people to justify their hatred, their rage, their helplessness, and their hysteria.
Because I know they’re fighting against people who do not exist it’s hard for me to talk about it with them. I don’t want to argue about it and I can’t change their minds. There is no point. The few times I have tried I get the exact same reaction back from people who have a very limited experience of people they pretend to know.
What will be worse is watching Hollywood try to tell the story of Trump’s movement, January 6th, and their endless chase to purge him and his supporters from American life. No one will get it right. They will always position themselves as the good guys, the honorable side, and the Trump supporters as the bad things, the pollution to their otherwise pristine utopia.
They have decided it’s okay to smear people with “election deniers,” “extremists,” “White supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” “Domestic terrorists,” “racists,” “anti-vaxxers,” etc. Watching them do this every day makes me feel sick. But the forces in media and in the news are too powerful. There is no fighting it. They would have to do what I did, which is to spend a lot of time on the othe side, getting to know them, seeing things from their point of view and respecting their beliefs.