My Political Change

~ Clarissa

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.

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Published by Clarissa

18 thoughts on “My Political Change”

  2. This wasn’t that long ago …

    The idea of you getting “converted” by Ann Coulter … well, I do remember saying something to the effect of not believing such a conversion.

    I’d have expected such a thing with AJ Nock’s “My Enemy, The State”, which for some odd reason gets attributed to Murray Rothbard by some libertarians, but Ann Coulter?

    And of course I still don’t believe it entirely, because what happened was that you accepted the “monstrous possibility” that certain beliefs were cargo cult without going through all of them looking for additional cargo cults, regardless of whether they were “conservative” or not.

    But it’s like getting labelled “fascist” on the basis of what my father’s people may have done, on the basis of defending Léon Krier and his work with the Prince of Wales prior to becoming King, and so on.

    They can’t attack you for your ideas that aren’t part of a cargo cult, so instead they grab on to easy smears.

    Which is why when a certain Lord in the construction business got smeared by some Leftists in journalist positions, I hoped that they wouldn’t be let off with slaps on the wrist.

    I’m inclined to see theft of reputation by these frauds as deserving slaps with swords.

    So, is my sometimes repeated acknowledgment that it’s these behaviours of Leftists that lead to Right-Wing Paramilitary Death Squads(TM) an invitation for them to emerge?

    But of course they’ll play Cassandra when it suits them, arguing for Cautionary Tales and Precautionary Principles, ignoring the fact that this is a very conservative thing to do.

    And so they’ll deserve the finest in partial one-way helicopter transport despite having been warned of that as well.

    They don’t understand that there are people not affected in the slightest by neurotics who try to weaponise social exclusion, but instead enjoy these moments when “the enemy within” becomes revealed.

    2020 and 2021 were a shitshow, but how fun it was to kick those Karens when they were down. :-)

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    1. At that point, I think, anything would have tipped me over. I was living among such monstrous, egregious lies that it was impossible to sustain their edifice any longer.

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  3. “happens to immigrants a lot, by the way. We hear one side only “

    No environment in Poland in early 90s was remotely as ideologically uniform as US universities were at that time (much less now… which has entered the La Chinoise stage of self-isiolation)

    So I heard such wildly conflicting versions of what had happened in the previous 20 or so years and what was likely to happen because of it I realized I’d have to use my own judgement to make any remote sense of anything…

    I mostly tuned out the competing versions of reality and paid attention to what was actually happening… and didn’t try to piece together a coherent version of 1981-1990 until much, much later.

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    1. Yes! I’m still curious too! I’ve never read any of those Ann-Coulter sort of books. Just seemed really redundant. I don’t think of myself as particularly conservative or “right” but everyone else does, so… eh. Don’t feel the need to read those, the same way I don’t go around reading books extolling the benefits of homeschooling. I’m already there. I don’t need convincing. It might be like sitting around listening to Dad expounding on the evils of unregulated borders. Yes, Dad. We know. I think I need to check on the oven…

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      1. Exactly. It’s earth-shattering to those who never heard any alternative, and that was me. But for those who were fortunate to hear something aside from the standard leftist drivel, it’s preaching to the choir.

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          1. That’s my world. 🙂 And it’s also the world of all those people doing climate strikes, BLMing, shutting down highways, and what’s worse, the people running everything in Silicon valley.

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              3. eh. I never liked him. Too loud and yell-ie. Though some of the space-filler bits were quite funny.

                https://www.theknightshift.com/2021/02/youtube-videos-song-parodies-from-rush.html

                It’s just… I was like fourteen, my family life was constantly tense, and I couldn’t get any enjoyment out of listening to people who yelled and sounded angry, no matter what they were talking about. Could’ve been an organic gardening show and if they’d talked like Rush, I’d’ve recoiled. Too stressful.

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  5. To clarify: You believe that Kavanaugh is incorrect, correct? Or at least that there wasn’t enough proof of his guilt to morally justify denying him his SCOTUS appointment?

    As a side note, Yeah, I do get some of what you’re going through. I mean, I quite openly read American Renaissance and a lot of it–not quite all of it, but a lot of it–does make sense to me. It’s supposed to be viewed as a hate magazine by the SPLC, but a lot of what they write, especially on racial questions, still makes sense to me. I also believe that it’s entirely possible that genes are a huge part of the reason as to why exactly different racial and ethnic groups differ on average when it comes to things such as intelligence, criminality, et cetera. And I’m thus wary of Woke explanations for certain groups’ underperformance. I also think that “disparate impact” as a legal doctrine is questionable for reasons that Richard Hanania has previously laid out. But overall I still think that the Left is more likely to be correct than the Right is, just not all of the time. I like the Left in the US on things such as immigration, certainly much more so than the Right and their RAISE Act (which had such demanding entry criteria that apparently not even this bill’s sponsors in the US Senate would have actually qualified under it had they been aspiring immigrants instead of already US citizens). To be sure, though, I am much more of an immigration hawk in a European context, simply because on average Europe gets worse immigrants than the US does. But I still have a lot of faith in the US and in its ability to welcome new people, though I do think that immigrating here legally should be made much easier, especially but not only for smart and talented people.

    I also began consistently supporting the left-wing in my birth country of Israel over the last decade (I have lived in the US since March 2001 and am a dual US-Israeli citizen), especially after 2015, once it became clear that Bibi is not serious about supporting a two-state solution (with the Palestinian Authority, not with Hamas, whom I obviously distrust). The Israeli right’s willingness and eagerness to repeal the Grandchild Clause of Israel’s Law of Return, a personal insult to people such as myself, before the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas caused them to indefinitely shelve this plan of theirs, hopefully for a very long time, was simply the final nail in the coffin in my own political move to the left in an Israeli context. I see absolutely no reason as to why exactly people with a single Jewish grandmother and three gentile grandparents, who never personally identified as Jewish, and both of whose parents never identified as Jewish should be allowed to immigrate to Israel while people with one or even two Jewish grandfathers but no Jewish grandmothers (such as myself, if I wasn’t already an Israeli citizen) should not be able to immigrate to Israel.

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    1. I think that whatever he did or didn’t do as an underage child, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of shockingly irresponsible parents on all sides who allowed this to happen.

      But it’s an outrage that allegations about a drunken teenage party were brought to bear in a hearing 40 years later. There’s not a person living who would be able to defend themselves from accusations of such remote past.

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