I talked about this before because this transformation was unsought, painful, and unpleasant and it took me a long time to come to terms with it. I described this process as it happened here on the blog but I do want to answer the question because you see things differently after the first, most painful stages of the process are behind you.

I’m an immigrant. I didn’t know anything when I came, so I took what was said to me at face value. And what I was told – in academia, on TV, in the press – was very left-wing. I didn’t know it was left-wing, of course. I thought it was what everybody believed. I thought that it was the truth. I accepted completely at face value that Americans are extremely racist, that everything was bad because Christian fundamentalists controlled everything, that women were terribly oppressed and at risk of being raped at any moment, that black people in jail were overwhelmingly innocent, that “the white flight” was caused by racism, that there were 11 million illegal immigrants in the country and that figure had not changed in a decade, that all illegal migrants were planning to leave of their own free will, that anybody who disagreed with any of this was filled with hatred, and so on. I even believed that men could be women, or at least, tried very hard to convince myself I believed it.

I thought that any alternative explanation of history and society was based on extreme bigotry. I shared before that when I decided to read my very first conservative book at the age of almost 40, I had to prepare myself to read it because I was sure it would be filled with horrific racist and sexist insults. I honestly believed that.

The reason why I picked up that very first conservative book is because I was starting to get vaguely suspicious. The things I was hearing around me weren’t making sense. A terrible, terrible suspicion visited me that maybe there was another story. Another explanation of how things were and why they were. I knew that following my instinct would bring great loneliness. I tried to ignore my doubts but finally, in complete secret from everybody, I got that first conservative book and opened it with shaking fingers. It had been so drummed into my head that only disgusting, horrible people read such stuff that I felt vile just for being curious. I now know what gay people in extremely oppressive societies feel when they first allow themselves to think, “hey, what if, just if, it’s not as evil as everybody says?”

So I started reading the book and… absolutely shockingly it was making sense. It was making a lot more sense than the system of beliefs that I had been told to consider the only acceptable one. The conservative book didn’t ask me to deny the evidence of my “lying eyes.” It didn’t ask me to break the laws of logic and contort my brain into weird shapes. I thought I was losing my mind.

I read 10, 15, 20 more books. Every variety of conservatism. History, politics, society, journalism, everything. There was a whole world there, and it was making sense. The weight of loneliness, of unwillingness to accept that I now have an unforgivable secret, that I’m now a pariah convinced me not to come out. I was going to stay in the closet.

But then the Kavanaugh hearing happened. Like a gay man who sees a gay bashing right in front of him, I couldn’t stay silent. I’m very grateful to the readers of this blog who stuck by after my big ideological change. It takes an exceptional degree of true tolerance, and I appreciate that. You are good people, you truly are.

This happens to immigrants a lot, by the way. We hear one side only and out of a desire to belong and not knowing where to look for an alternative, we accept it as gospel truth. It takes a high degree of tolerance for social exclusion and a very active brain to step outside the circle. In my everyday life, I’m in contact with people who use the word “conservative” only as an insult. Even the few people I came out to in person forget or repress the terrible knowledge and keep doing it.

To our favorite discussion about rights:

Do you have the right not to hire people with a criminal record?

The answer is that if criminal record checks have a disparate impact – meaning they weed out more people of one race than another – then you don’t have that right.

Please note that nobody is even trying to allege that the company acted based on racist reasons:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

But disparate impact is illegal irrespective of your motives. If, for example, more black students than white fail your course, that’s disparate impact and you have violated the Civil Rights Act. Do you have the right to maintain academic standards in your courses? No, you don’t if there’s disparate impact. The right of people not to be disparately impacted trumps your right to grade based on the principle of equality. We had a university lawyer explain this to us. Any rights you imagine you have are a fiction if there’s no legal entity that defends them.

This began in 1964 but in the past decade or so it’s been mushrooming like never before. Everybody should become familiar with disparate impact because it’s much more useful than abstract prattling about rights.

Gay men are finally joining the fight against the new gay conversion therapy of genderism. A new book by Gareth Roberts titled Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia is out this week, and those who already read it say it’s funny and on point. Here’s a little snippet I saw on social media:

Lesbians have been in the fight for years but gay men were silent, not as individuals but as a public voice and a political force. But it’s finally changing, and that’s great. We need their talent, humor, and rage to bring us all back to sanity.

From the anti-Semitic fury that has engulfed the Left to the explosion of Hitler worship on the Right, it is clear that chthonic horror has chosen this moment to come close and peek at us through cracks in the civilized order.