Reasons for the Turn

~ Clarissa

The people I know who effectuated a rightward political turn recently did it for the following reasons:

– public school closures during COVID;

– lies during COVID;

– gender activism (the teaching of ‘genderbread person’ and ‘sex assigned at birth’) in schools;

– Kavanaugh (like me);

– being called “racist” at work.

I don’t know anybody who turned leftwards but that’s only because everybody I know is already on the Left.

If you changed your political beliefs in any direction in recent years, please share the reason in the comments.

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Published by Clarissa

51 thoughts on “Reasons for the Turn”

  1. All of the above. It was a slow process for me, the DEI stuff was already getting to be annoying but the final straw was watching the dem establishment fuck over Bernie in favor of Hillary in 2016.

    Only for Bernie to abandon his 2016 platform (where he literally called open borders a Koch brothers’ dream scenario) in 2020, hire a bunch of millennial woke retards for his campaign, raise half a billion dollars from blue collar workers, get cucked by BLMers, and enthusiastically campaign for Biden. Made me realize that his job was literally to shepherd the ‘rebel’ youth vote back into the dem establishment fold.

    By the time Trump won in 2016, I was already flirting with the right, but by 2018/2019 I was solidly right.

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    1. So I went from attacking poster Dreidel from the left back in the day to disagreeing with him because he isn’t right-wing enough. :) 

      I still despise the chamber of commerce wing of the GOP. It’s MAGA or bust!

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      1. I deeply respect people who can change their minds when new evidence comes in. And I despise wounded egos who are obsessed with proving that they believed the exact same thing for 30 years as if it were a mark of anything other than intellectual impotence.

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        1. I’ve apologized to Dreidel and Cliff in the comments for my previous lefty outbursts against them. I was so wrong about so many things. 🙂

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          1. You and me both, my friend. I was very duped and I do feel like an idiot for allowing myself to be duped. But at least I stopped being an idiot. That’s what matters.

            And I’m grateful to everybody of all ideological stripes who have been patient with me throughout this process.

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    2. I was so attached to that comment Bernie made about open borders because it was the only little crumb that I was getting from the Dems in the 2016 election. That should have told me that something wasn’t right. But I was so desperate like one of those sad people in a dying relationship who hang on to every tiny crumb of affection to persuade themselves that it isn’t over.

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  2. I screenshotted this tweet when I first saw it. To this day it remains the best explanation of why I left the left.

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    1. I was already right-wing by the time COVID struck but if I hadn’t switched by then, I would have. The sheer volume and shamelessness of the lies inevitably lead one to ask, what else is a lie?

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  6. It was a very slow process for me. I used to be an LGBT activist and a member of Italy’s Radical Party, which has a platform ranging from extremely libertarian views on social issues (in favour of abortion, LGBTQ issues, medically assisted dying and euthanasia, surrogacy and so on) as well as very liberal positions on the economy (free-marketeers, laissez-faire policies, pro-immigration, border-free Europe).

    It all started in 2013, when I began to question abortion as a “human right” issue, which was the party line, as well as the wisdom of centring my identity on my sexuality. At that time I was also a very vociferous atheist Jew. These three issues converged for me: at one and the same time I understood that abortion was a form of homicide, I started to explore the beauty and depth of the Holy Orthodox Church, and I liberated myself from the yoke of my same-sex based identity.

    By the time of Brexit (I am a British citizen by birth), the Clinton-Trump election, BLM, the trans-gender craze enveloping both Britain and the USA, and finally the Covid crisis, I was all set for a breathtaking turnaround.

    It’s been a long journey, very hard at times, but profoundly liberating. I have lost all of my friends from the Party, all of my gay friends when I rejected LGBTQ dogmas, and most of the remaining ones once I was baptised in 2021. It is a price worth paying though: I have gained a life in the Faith, and an exhilarating feeling of freedom that comes from being able to speak up for the truth without fear.

    I am off to the Paschal Vigil: Happy Pascha to all fellow Orthodox believers!

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    2. One of the greatest gains of my right turn is that I no longer have to massage reality into the Procrustean bed of ideology. I can observe and name reality and be faithful to what’s real instead of a fantasy. It’s an incredible feeling. I have allowed myself to notice, and it feels good.

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  7. Libertarian –> Nationalist. A blessed and joy-filled Paschal feast day to all our Orthodox brothers and sisters.

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  8. “If you changed your political beliefs in any direction in recent years”

    I don’t know if I changed especially…. I’ve always been kind of a centrist, more liberal on social issues and more moderate on economic ones.

    If there’s a pattern… I tend to react against which side is crazier than the other at any given time.

    I remember the aftermath of 911 and the rise of warblogging and right wing people thinking they were going to solve the middle East by nation building in Iraq (which I always knew was a doomed project).

    I really didn’t like the whole W period….

    At present the left is definitely the crazier side by a very large margin but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go full right wing either. I think “doctors” conducting “trans affirming” procedures on minors need to be in jail… but I realize that gender and sexual non-conformists do exist and I think society is better when they can contribute as themselves. I don’t think those born male should be competing in womens sports (but I think womens sports are in herently valuable unlike a lot of those on the right).

    I’m pro-choice and think that discussions about abortion aren’t helped by either extreme (and think the further along the pregnancy the more restrictions there should be).

    etc etc etc….

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    1. I will never stop detesting Dubya. His is the kind of conservatism that I have no use for. Back in that era libs did look better by comparison. They cared about economic issues. It wasn’t all identity crap.

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      1. I do think I want to read about the positives of W sometime, but first I’ll try to convince myself to like Reagan. I don’t expect I’ll end up loving either but it can be fun to challenge your own personal biases in this way (I’ve already gone from seeing Reagan as Satan to seeing the negatives of his presidency as not particularly unique to him.)

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      2. Dubya was the first presidential election I ever voted in. I was so excited. I voted for W, in Florida even.

        Revoked my republican party registration after the whole 9/11 Patriot Act business. Have been independent ever since.

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        1. Remember that grand Presidential speech that The Shrub gave around October 2001?

          I figured that there was no better time to go on a long drive around America than that, doing my best to avoid falling into the mould of Stephen Wright’s “Going Native” or Jack Kerouac’s crypto “stations of the cross” that was “On The Road”.

          The Shrub singlehandedly crashed the US domestic “hospitality” industry, and in the years after it would be reconfigured around overpriced hotels near major motorways.

          The back roads I stayed around would not let me do the same today.

          My main arterials across the US in the beginning weren’t I-95 and I-10, they were US 1, FL A1A, US 98, and US 90/290.

          Then I had little choice but to suck up the suck of the motorway across west Texas out to California where I made it out to CA 1/101.

          Small world among global travellers: I’m in an Aussie shop on the West Coast buying a Violet Crumble when my translator friend from Jakarta who I hadn’t seen in years just happens to wander in, trying out her new California accent (and still getting it slightly wrong).

          Bill Bryson was out on the road around then after having made a tour of Australia, and I recall sharing some notes on paths not taken.

          Things were different then, but they weren’t going to stay that kind of different.

          And now that was a supposedly fun thing that I’ll never do again!

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            1. Succeeded in scaring enough people away from travelling, even US domestic travel, that hotels were at fire sale pricing with the expected implosion to follow.

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          2. Don’t remember the speech– didn’t have a TV at the time. Still don’t. Just remember being so pleased that “my guy” won, and then… slow-mo horrified at everything he did in office. PatAct, bailouts, etc. That was where I started to realize the whole Dem/Rep thing just… didn’t actually matter. It was rich people vs. the rest of us.

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              1. Ha! I don’t self-identify as a billionaire.

                But I do self-identify as the kind of person to put billionaires on trial!

                (cf. history of the Nuremberg Tribunal justices, BTW)

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              3. “Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.”

                This is the best thing I’ve read lately. Class war in action.

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              6. ” Class war in action.”

                I think this has been obvious for a long time, to anybody not living on a college campus. It puzzles me that it’s not pointed out more often.

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              7. Wow. Someone at the Free Press must have had fun writing this correction:

                CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that James Carlson’s townhome is worth $3.4 million. Carlson purchased his townhome for $2.3 million. His parents’ home, also in Brooklyn, is worth $3.4 million. The Free Press regrets the error.

                🙂

                (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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              8. You laugh but the dude is practically a pauper. $2.3 million! That’s one step away from being unhoused. And genocided.

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          3. …but I do fondly remember taking 98 down to St. Pete every Christmas. My parents had janky cars and preferred the slower, calmer, more scenic drive along the coast. Sometimes we’d stop off at the beach in Carabelle for a bit– they have a much nicer, less crowded beach with lots of big shells. Important to start out road trips with the floorboards totally full of sand, right?

            Once in SFL, we’d unload Christmas presents, and then fill the trunk with grapefruits from my auntie’s tree, for the return trip.

            I am not a fan of driving that route, myself. It’s the prettiest, but too many rows of palm trees, mathematically spaced between the road and the water: hit it at the wrong time of day and the strobe effect is really something. Puking on the roadside is not fun, and for that reason alone… I prefer the inland roads. Yea, even the interstates.

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  9. Hello Clarissa! I’ve always been conservative (although all of the above issues affirmed me in that), but I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you a joyous Pascha. The Lord is truly risen! Alleluia!

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  10. There was no turn.

    I’d already avoided the British Union of Fascists, with its no-nonsense appeal to violent nonsense in order to form a More(‘s) Utopian World.

    So when the Left came clicking past in that most common of cadences, there was no temptation to join, only to study at a distance.

    And I found the most amusing form of my pushing back in the form of Frank Zappa, who made fun of the Left belief if they avoid bad habits, think only the right things, consume only the most appropriate consumables, then they could perhaps live forever, but most importantly (especially to themselves) that they could endure past their shelf lives without blame.

    Whereas I prefer the everyday acceptance of the inevitable, which for Zappa was like this when consuming coffee and a cigarette: “This black water, this cigarette … for me, these are FOOD.”

    The most detestable of Left attitudes is the one in which if you are not somehow identically joined at the hip ideologically and philosophically, you are to be “Othered”.

    So of course this is the one I reflect back to these people, the ones who believe genuinely that they can somehow be “less wrong” rather than similarly wrong along a different axis.

    So to me the Left was always to be distrusted, being a player of sound bites and manipulative tactics along a Marxist revolutionary axis, along with their friends the Neo-Conservatives.

    Fortunes change, and what I expect for these miraculous “conversions” to the Right is a tacit recognition that luxury belief systems that grow from bubbles won’t last long outside them.

    I believe the main reason I especially single out the “Less Wrong” losers and their chief cult figure is that I’ve seen Constructivist Neo-Revolutionary Design Principles before and that nobody deserves to be suckered into a Techno-Utopian version of them.

    Instead, I plan on embracing More Wrong principles in the future, on the basis that most people won’t fight until they are left with little choice.

    If this were Nick Land, this would then be followed with praise for Worst-Outcome Accelerationism.

    Instead, I’ll quote Public Image Limited: “This is what you want, this is what you get.” 🙂

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  11. I was actually woke many years ago, though perhaps out of step with the movement even at the time. I became dissatisfied after just a few years, feeling that the scene was toxic and that the “activism” of navel gazing and talking about privilege was useless and accomplished nothing, and dropped out of politics for a while. But I didn’t seriously question my beliefs at first, just socially detached.

    I may have gotten into the anti-woke stuff before this and not be remembering it, but a real turning point to me was 2016. Suddenly all the woke people on my facebook were not supporting Bernie, but rabidly denouncing anyone who supported Hillary as evil and racist. I used to be assume these people were much more knowledgeable about politics than me, but at this moment I realized they were huge morons.

    Around this time I started reading deconstructions of wokeness and realizing there’s other more productive frameworks for thinking about race. I was still a firm Democrat and would remain so for a few more years, but I became gradually very disillusioned with the party as I saw that the interests and opinions of normal working class Midwesterners were no longer of concern to the party. The party decided to go all in on the college educated. I also felt I specifically was not particularly welcome in the party because of my views on immigration and being broadly socially moderate. I was reading a lot of “anti-woke” publications like Quillette at this time, as well as a few conservative ones (Rod Dreher comes to mind.) I began embracing many right wing ideas at this time, though I just thought of my ideology as anti-neoliberal.

    By the time the 2020 primaries were over, my plan was to not vote for president. The first time I considered voting for Trump was when he made a speech at Mount Rushmore and I found myself agreeing with everything he said. I firmly decided to vote for him due to Biden’s stances on COVID related issues. COVID is absolutely what did it for me in 2020, but I know many people on “Team Reality” who never left the left, so I don’t consider that inevitable. But I continued moving right and changing my mind on things. It’s only recently that I feel relatively “settled,” though I hardly think I’m done thoughtfully changing my mind on things.

    Funnily enough I didn’t care about Kavanaugh at all. I also didn’t care about the “hypocrisy” of doing lockdown and then making excuses for large BLM rallies. I don’t think it’s wrong to have strong feelings about these things, they just didn’t move me at all for whatever reason.

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    2. My big turnaround specifically on Trump came with the Russia collusion narrative. I know the region very well and the story was simply ludicrous. And I thought, “Is everything else they are saying about him true?” I started looking into it, and it was all lies. Edited footage, stupid ridiculous lies. Mocked a journalist, said Mexicans are rapists, didn’t denounce white supremacists, confessed to rape. All bloody lies. I felt like a total dupe.

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      1. Hey, you’re one of the lucky few who can admit they’ve been snookered. Plenty of folks will cling to the lie long after it’s expired and gone rancid, just to avoid the embarrassment of being taken in.

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          1. It’s very hard to translate but in my culture we’d say that Tucker’s been reduced to fucking hamsters because nobody else would have him. We express it in 3 words but in English it’s a whole paragraph.

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    3. “a real turning point to me was 2016”

      For me 2008 was kind of a turning point… I was never…. entusiastic about Hillary but I thought she’d make an acceptable caretaker until someone better showed up (and I had no doubt she’d bomb the crap out of anyone threatening to make her look bad).

      But then, the liberal political pundit class (thrice cursed by the gods themselves!) suddenly went all in on Obama (who I thought was nowhere close to being able to handle a job like president) on some really stupid grounds (Hillary had voted for the Iraqi invasion a meaningless calculated decison of the type that politicians have to make all the time).

      It was just a staggeringly out of touch turn and they just kept doubling down on it…. and refused to believe that Obama wasn’t all that long after there was no doubt….

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  12. I grew up following the news, so when the cartoon crisis hit Denmark I devoured everything I could about it. The liberal (freedom loving) parties defended free speech and the rights of the cartoonists, the left kept talking about the hurt feelings of muslims (and the implied racism of the newspaper that showed them). I sided with free speech and it’s been a fundamental part of my understanding of what it means to be human ever since.

    Following that I considered my self a libertarian all through high school, but moving out and having a life crisis disabused me of that notion.

    I followed your blog for many years and around the 2015 refugee crisis, you actually gave me quite another insight. I had been pretty much “open borders are cool, people should just magically respect each other and live peacefully”, so I had never really considered that migration might have very negative consequences for both the receiving country and the sending country. Or that the migrants themselves might not be all that enlightened to what life in a welfare state like Denmark might be like.

    The idea that the boat migration was manufactured for the pleasure of the rich Europeans was something I first met here, but it was the only thing that explained what was happening, so thank you for that!To this day I’m so very glad I did my own research about the migration routes, what Africans pay the smugglers to travel and how long it takes them to reach Libya. I have never seen it discussed in any Danish or English media, they treat it as if the refugees magically appear in boats near the Italian and Greek coastlines. It amazes me that still, nearly ten years after the crisis began, there’s still no discussion about it.

    I’m now a reluctant social democrat. My party is hardline on immigration, quite supportive of workers rights, and for welfare. However alliances and political issues of the day change quickly, so I change my allegiance just as quickly. I’m not a member of the Danish Socialdemocrats, but I do vote for them. I guess I would be a “midtervælger” a “middle-voter” – someone who changes their votes based on issues from election to election.

    I’m active in union work, so respect for the work of the hand is another of my core values along with freedom of speech and a duty of care towards those cannot fend for themselves.

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  13. Funny anecdote from my woke era: I stopped reading this blog for a few years partially because I found some of your viewpoints offensive (also because I was just occupied with other things.) I specifically recall being offended by something you said about Muslims. I found my way back eventually.

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    1. It’s great to have you back! I don’t know how people find the patience and the tolerance to stick with my intense evolution for years. I’m in awe of everybody who does because I don’t have the same virtues.

      But at least I’m not repeating the same thing for a decade, so it’s not boring. 🙂

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      1. I still disagree with things you say plenty, I just have a much higher tolerance for disagreement than I did when I was 20. It also helps that I no longer put you on a strange pedestal (I never commented here when I was younger because I didn’t feel intellectually worthy; to be fair, I actually didn’t have much of value to say at the time.)

        Your evolution is my evolution. We’ve changed right alongside each other, and speaking for myself, by each other. I think you were the first person to call me a conservative (I still considered myself to be on the left, though not for much longer.)

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