When Did I Choose to Leave the Left? I Didn't!

Someone asked me the other day what made me abandon the Left and join the Right. That's a tricky question, because frankly, I never did.

My own political positions haven't really changed almost at all since I reached adulthood. I have pretty consistently been: pro free-speech, anti-war, anti-drug-war, pro-LGBT, against large government interference in the form of social engineering, distrustful of large corporations, hugely distrustful of the deep state (anti-CIA, etc), a strong believer in personal liberty, and the equality of all people (and a big admirer of Dr.King's exhortation that we should judge people by content of character, not color of skin). I've been pro-western-values, against the oppression of women, anti-female-genital-mutilation, pro-Israel, deeply opposed to theocratic overtures in politics, and a believer in the power of rational thinking, technological innovation and science as the ways to solve the world's health/environmental/hunger/poverty problems.

For a long time, the vast majority of these positions put me pretty squarely on the Left. Somewhere midway between the center and the far left. For the 20 year old me, it was obvious that opposing censorship (for example) was something that made me somewhere left of center, because the Left strongly opposed censorship while the Right (at that time largely run, in north america at least, by theocrats or authoritarian social conservatives) was quite happy to censor anything it thought of as 'degenerate' or 'decadent' or 'dangerous to our children' (notwithstanding that Tipper Gore was technically a democrat, but she was a Southern Democrat and the push to ban rock-music and RPGs was otherwise largely coming from the right).


But over the course of the last 10 years, at first slowly and then very quickly, it became obvious that most of that list of very same unchanged values put me very squarely on the new Right, while to the left many of those things they previously would have cherished as their own values (anti-censorship, pro-Israel, anti-deep-state, rationality over feelings/faith/dogma, no mollycoddling religious extremists, everyone is equal, even Dr.King's rule - "That son of a bitch believes people should be judged for character, and not for skin color! He's a fucking racist monster!") were now things that defined me as a dangerous 'nazi' who needs to be stopped, certainly in terms of denying me a 'platform', if not in terms of beating me to death with metal pipes like Antifa would like to do.

The left has been taken over by people who have completely rejected not just the fundamental Western values, but the very foundations of western philosophical thinking. Logic itself is "problematic" to them, and everything must go.

I didn't change. I didn't quit the Left. The Left changed; it quit me.

RPGPundit

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