Confessions of a Former Lefty

Hello world. My name is Amy and I am a former registered Democrat. I am new to the world of Substack, so bear with me because I will learn as I go.

My democrat virus began in 1992; I was a senior in high school, and i had an uberfeminist friend who definitely did not lean right. She told me all about Bill Clinton, and if I cared about my rights as a female then I would see how he is the choice for America. These words are not verbatim, but it sums it up nicely. I was several months away from graduation and being flung into the real world against my will, so I thought I had to take up some political views as a means of getting through pending adulthood.

I was also led to believe that a Republican was a big wig money bag that wanted to control us through the government and reap all the spoils, while little people like me had to take what was left (no pun intended). I grew up in a single parent household where my mom worked two jobs, got by on a tight grocery budget, and the idea of a closet full of Guess Jeans and K-Swiss shoes were a pipe dream. It is no surprise that I naively bought into the so-called Republican concept.

I was finally of legal age to vote in the presidential election of 1996. Bill Clinton was running against a Kansas senator named Bob Dole, a man who would eventually do commercials for, ahem, male enhancement pills. I voted for Clinton because, well, I was a devoted and registered Democrat and that is what you do. In the coming years, I would continue on this track. I voted for Al Gore and John Kerry because I though G Dubya was a nitwit; I also voted for Barack Obama because I bought into his bill of goods and promise of a better America.

The 2016 Election hit me like a Whammy from Press Your Luck. Our choices were Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I trusted both of them about as far as I could throw them, so I chose some random independent dude on the ballot whose name I cannot remember and hid in the foxhole to wait for the fallout. The country went into shock over the victory of a businessman who never served a single day in politics. It got ugly for the next four years.

During this time, I bought into the CNN horsehockey when they would tell me over and over again how Trump was a horrible human being and make him out to be some form of Hitler. “He loves the KKK!” “He will start wars!” “He will take away your vanilla soy lattes!” You name it, I bought into it. I sunk into low-key sadness, justified by the fighting in the country unlike anything I had witnessed in my lifetime.

The dumpster fire that was 2020 rolled in with a pandemic, a world shutdown, and an election that had Donald Trump in the red corner and former Vice President Joe Biden in the blue corner. I wore the mask and did the six feet distance the one day of the week I went to the grocery store; my job shut down for three months; and I did the mail-in ballot that had Biden marked as my choice for president. I would find out one day that all of the above ended up being a horrible error.

My husband B had started showing me videos of Biden in 2023 that made me question if he had actually had a stroke and if a real-life version of the movie Dave was playing out before my very eyes. The ball of yarn began to roll downhill from that point for me: I became very aware of the cost of gas and groceries, and my now adult children were telling me that they could not afford a living on their paychecks. The more conversations I had with Hubby B, the more aware I became of what was going on around me. I realized that the legacy media was full of horse poop and I had been drinking the Kool-Aid for 30 years.

I paid closer attention th what was going on in the political arena. The world saw Joe Biden flub a last-minute debate and be ousted by his own party. Kamala Harris was put in his place without even so much as a high school student council election. A man-child took pop shots at Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which he survived by millimeters, and we still have no clear answers on what happened that day. There was an abortion van outside of the Democratic National Convention like it was a taco truck. I felt caught in some Orwellian tale playing out in real time.

There was debate on boys using girls bathrooms and trans girls playing on girls sport teams. Hubby B was suddenly the white devil, and I was now all the phobes one could create. My brain could barely comprehend how half the world was slowly trying to create some sort of socialist ideology. Why could the real men not be themselves without the backlash? Why did we praise criminals and condemn people who pray? Seriously, what in Sam Hill is going on here y’all?

Common sense reigns in my world, so I felt it was time to clean out the political litter box. It involved conversations; it involved reading some articles from outlets such as The Daily Wire and PJ Media; I watched truthful, informative shows on Real America’s Voice (shout out to the Studio 6B guys!); and I started listening to this cat from Detroit on the radio named Kevin Downey Jr.

I do not have some fancy degree from a poison ivy league school or any other so-called educational institution; hard to even call them educational since they have been indoctrinating minds since the sixties. I am, however, checking out free courses from an untainted school called Hillsdale College that offer truthful and informative classes such as The Federalist Papers and the U.S. Constitution. I have access to the public libarary close to home that offer plenty of resources and books. I am making like Charlie Kirk and becoming an autodidact.

I appreciate you joining me on my journey. I will do it with integrity, somewhat brutal truth, and hopefully with the sense of humor like the great Kevin Downey Jr.