a leftie sees the light

Good article by a former leftie.

Headline:

How I stopped hating guns — and embraced self-reliance

See, I’m a former leftist. I drank the Kool-Aid of progressivism (and served a lot of it too) from the time I was a teenager. There wasn’t a welfare program I didn’t want expanded nor an “oppressed minority” I didn’t think needed special support from the state. My views were the typical politics of resentment. Like millions of other leftists, my orientation to the world was simple: “The government should take care of that for me."

Of course I wanted gun control. Everyone knows that guns kill people, right? It sounds stupid to me now, but as someone who spent his life exclusively around other leftists until the age of 41, I believed a lot of very stupid things for a very long time.

Most leftists won’t even listen to a conservative point of view. Or more accurately, perhaps, they can't. Confrontation with anything they perceive as “right-wing” provokes an almost involuntary emotional reaction, a kind of contamination-disgust reflex. I know it well because I often reacted the same way.

Until I didn't. A crisis that unmasked the mental and moral illness in my family was the first event that started to open my eyes to the real world. What I’d been taught at home — men are inherently dangerous and toxic, the government should regulate and tax everything so that single mothers can get bigger benefits checks — had disturbed my moral compass until middle age.

And then came COVID. I had already begun to let go of my leftist beliefs and turn to the right, but nothing pushed me farther or faster than watching the government trample the constitutional rights of citizens. It was unbelievable how many people obeyed extra-legal orders to stay home, wear masks, take jabs, and tell on their families and neighbors who didn’t obey Big Sister (it’s definitely “sister” in the 21st century).

The extraordinary nationalization of rental properties by the Centers for Disease Control infuriated me. As a landlord, I could not believe that some “health”-based federal agency thought it had the right to tell my tenants they could just stop paying rent and that I had to suck it up. I count this turn of events as a blessing, as it cured me of the remnants of my allegiance to, well, communist views. Because that’s what leftism is today.

Back to guns. I can’t explain why I believed what I did. Over the years, more sensible people patiently explained to me that criminals don’t obey gun control laws. They pointed out that when you have bad guys with guns that good guys can’t get, you end up with bad guys in charge and good guys in coffins. This is so glaringly obvious that a 4-year-old could understand it, and yet I didn’t. Never underestimate the average leftist's capacity for self-delusion.

Actually, I can explain why I believed what I did and why millions of leftists believe the same. No actual thinking is taking place, only feeling. I had emotions about guns, but no thoughts. To be a leftist is to be ruled by fear, disgust, and the projection of one’s own negative motivations onto other people.

I can’t live that way any more. Not after the real world slapped me in the face — and slapped some sense into me. Being a small business owner educated me about the plain thievery of our taxation system. Being excommunicated from my job, my friends, and my social circle over my refusal to take a dangerous vaccine — and worse, my persistence in talking about it loudly and publicly — taught me the difference between friends and “friends.”