Just 15 years ago, the story about Big Pharma pushing a largely untested, completely new technology onto the entire population turning them into lifelong patients under manufactured pretenses and a left-wing journalist getting censored and prevented from sharing her report about this by companies that bankrolled the current presidency would raise every leftist hackle in existence.

But today the only person who will report it is Tucker Carlson.

I’m not the one who changed.

I started keeping a list of every book I read when I was 19. And I still keep it. I put down the author, the title, the date read, my personal rating, and a brief description. I read so much that I often need to consult the list to see if I already read something by this author. Especially since I have a horrid memory for names and titles.

At the end of each year, I reread my list of books for that year and remember how I read them and what was happening in my life then. Recently, I reread my list for 2009, the year I started working at my current school and got married. The list brought everything back so vividly! It’s like having a diary of your intellectual and emotional life.

Strangely, even though I never remember the plots or the characters of the book I read, I have a prodigious memory for stuff I read for work. Earlier this week I needed a critical source that I used for my Master’s dissertation in 2003. I immediately remembered what it said, how I quoted it, and where it was in my files.

Do you keep a record of what you read?

JJ and his sister were murdered by their mother. It’s a horrid tragedy. And how disgusting is it to use the story of this poor murdered child to spread some lie about trans people being killed en masse for being trans?

Using a child’s death to advance some inane agenda, what can be lower?

Naomi Wolf (a very well-known journalist) tried to publish an investigative report on the m-RNA “vaccines.” The report was immediately removed by censors from every platform. Her FB page was cancelled with no explanation. She was removed from YouTube and Vimeo. It was a well-coordinated simultaneous attack.

But I’m sure this “vaccine” is a completely harmless, benign technology. We are being protected from knowing how it works for our own good.

Wow, I discovered a leftist QAnon group. They think that the shape of the stage at CPAC is sending out secret neo-Nazi signs.

Come to think of it, the entire left is a QAnon-type group.

Once you move to the other side, it gets very lonely and scary. Eventually, you find new friends and make new connections. But the first months are very sad because you now lead a double life. You have to fake and pretend to be who you no longer are. And as much as you want to preserve the relationships you had before the change, they crack and break under the pressure of unfairness and resentment. If one person in a relationship can express her opinions freely and the other one can’t without putting her career at risk, the result is a dishonest, tortured quasi-friendship that will eventually fizzle out.

And yes, these were not true friends, blah blah. The true friends are all reading this blog and know everything, so of course I don’t mean true friends. The true friends are by now completely resigned to my very protean nature. The poor long-suffering true friends.

But there are also the people I see every day. It’s not easy to feel constantly like an impostor, a person with a huge, dark, scary secret. Every conversation these days starts and ends with COVID. It just does. And if you aren’t crazy enthusiastic about masks and vaccines, everybody knows how you vote. My strategy is to pretend I need to visit the bathroom whenever a dangerous subject crops up. It got so, a colleague offered the number of her gastroenterologist.

I remember being terrified that other kids would find out I have a Jewish father. This feels similar.

I met my new friend for lunch today, and talking to her made me remember how I stopped being a liberal.

Those first moments of opening a book by a conservative author, my hands shaking because I was so sure I was going to find some terrible bigotry there. Turning on Fox News for the first time and feeling deep shame that I was about to hear some horrid racist, anti-semitic, bigoted garbage. I actually locked the door to my room in a house where I was alone because I was so scared of what I was doing. Twenty years of conditioning and one-sided propaganda weighing on me and making me fear that I was doing something akin to visiting a get-together of the Klan.

And then the confusion and the befuddlement of not hearing or reading any bigotry. And instead finding calm, reasonable arguments that – oh, the horror of horrors – actually made sense.

I had begun this journey to prop up the faith in the liberal dogmas that were taking a beating every day from observing the cancel culture, the growing fanaticism on the left, and the barrage of obvious lies in the media. I had this hope that “the other side” would prove to be so unapologetically horrid that I could justify continuing to be on the left.

I went farther and farther in, seeking authors I knew – because everybody around me always said so – were the scum of the Earth. I wanted reassurance that they were, indeed, horrid scum. And the more I read and heard, the clearer it became to me that “the other side’s” narrative was more grounded in reason and logic. A lot more.

It was a feeling akin to finding out that the family you grew up in wasn’t your real family and had actually kidnapped you in infancy and lied to you your whole life. It was one of the most profound intellectual and emotional experiences I ever had. And the worst part was that I was completely alone. There wasn’t a single person I could talk about this.

Yes, I told this story here before but I still haven’t fully processed what happened. I now have completely new friends and a very different sense of self, which is hard to embrace when you are past forty. But I think the value of my story is that it shows what an impenetrable bubble exists in intellectual circles. In twenty years in different parts of the continent, different schools, continents, age groups, etc I never heard even a hint of a possibility that you can vote Republican and not be a hateful person that wants people to die. Or that the concept of “a conservative intellectual” isn’t an oxymoron. That should be very disturbing to everyone.