I would say this was a post I never thought I'd write...but that would be a lie. I think I've known this day was coming for a long time now, I just didn't want to admit it to myself. I've been a liberal my entire adult life, but with every passing year I find less and less on the left that represents me, or my beliefs.

I've been telling myself since maybe 2012 that the problems on the left were just a minority of crazies...everybody has some crazies, there's crazies on the right too. But year by year, issue by issue, I've watched the rot spread higher up and further out. The climate...which I still believe to be a legitimate issue...has become an excuse for pushing everything from socialism to veganism, everything BUT an actual will to take megacorp megapolluters to task. Abortion has somehow become a feminist merit badge, with the "cluster of cells" argument being applied to viable fetuses that could be delivered alive...even to hear that Northam wacko tell it, to babies that have already been born. Gun control has somehow become a demand for the retroactive confiscation of property people already own. Nevermind the second amendment, what happened to the FOURTH?

I've watched my party go insane, the extremism that started with identity politics and a well-meaning desire not to partake in bigotry has spread to every issue the left has a stake in, and from weird internet blogs and fringe university departments to the highest levels of government. Maybe it's always been that way and I've just slowly woken up to it, but I really feel like it's gotten worse. I can remember a time when I could turn on the television and watch a STORY, an original idea, maybe influenced in some way by the beliefs of the writer but not just 24/7 spewing their hatred of some sitting politician. Now it's nothing but virtue signalling, race and gender grievance porn, and orange man bad. Sure, an election is topical, you expect it to be reflected in pop culture, but FFS it's been FOUR YEARS, GET OVER IT!

I hoped they'd learn. I hoped they'd nominate someone reasonable, someone who'd turn the Democratic party back into a big tent, a party for workers, for average Joes...and it looked like maybe that was happening, candidates running on identity politics were flopping left and right, even with blue voters. But no, they formed fucking Joe Biden Voltron and gave us a guy who has no clear positions or even complete sentences besides promising to appoint people based on their genitals and skin color. A guy who's clearly laying the groundwork to step aside for whatever diversity hire he picks as VP.

And I still might have voted for him. Lesser evil, right? It took a double-whammy of a global pandemic and the most glaring hypocrisy I've ever seen to give me the moral courage to admit to myself openly what some part of me had known for a long time: that Donald Trump is not the "greater evil", he's the guy actually fighting for me. Sure, he might have all the tact of a spiked baseball bat, but he's SANE, and he sees the same problems I do, and he's DOING something about them. And if I were called a Manchurian candidate for years with no evidence, impeached for total nonsense, and treated like Hitler every day by the same press that praises a mayor literally threatening to round up Jews, I'd probably be in a bad mood too.

While the media sold us the biblical apocalypse and governors locked us all in our houses, Trump said this thing wasn't as bad as we were hearing. And yet again he was right, every time we test for antibodies we find the mortality rate is about 1/10th of what they claim. We're all in a lockdown that's doing nothing, to conserve hospital resources that aren't being overwhelmed, for a virus we're not allowed to name based on its place of origin, according to a media, and a party, who are relentlessly pushing for us to forgive and jump right back into bed with the people who unleashed it! The goalposts keep moving, governors seem more concerned with reminding protesters they're in charge than saving their economies, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced the whole thing is being used to get people used to depending on government checks! The idea of five, six figure numbers of our people dying is...horrific, it'll never not be horrific, but those deaths...are unavoidable. There's no containing this, there's no stopping it from running its course through the population, we're too big a country, and it was here months before China even admitted it existed. Herd immunity is the only way past this...that number of people WILL die, we can't stop it, it can happen faster or slower depending on what we do but it'll happen. And if medical resources aren't overwhelmed, there's no reason to keep slowing it at the cost of destroying our economy and trampling our rights...people die of poverty too, people die of losing their physical and mental health due to long term isolation too. Those deaths we CAN prevent. And I see which politician is trying to prevent them.

And while all of this goes on, Joe Biden gets accused of actually doing the pussy-grabbing Trump was vilified for speaking of hypothetically. I dismissed it at first, an obvious political stunt from a Sanders supporter, but the evidence is mounting...there's markedly MORE reason to believe Biden did what he's accused of than that Kavanaugh did. I believe both men, and all people accused of serious misdeeds in the court of public opinion, should be given the benefit of the doubt absent hard proof of their guilt, but when it was Kavanaugh, all women must be instantly believed and even the accusation was disqualifying. And now that it's Biden, she's a liar and a Russian operative (just like Trump, Tulsi, Bernie, Stein, and random online Star Wars critics), and it doesn't matter if he did it, he's still better because he's not the orange man. I've never seen a more blatant, more glaring instance of bad faith in my life, and kudos to you guys, you all fucking predicted it.

So I apologize for unburdening years of frustration in this wall of text, but I get it now, I finally fucking see it. This ex-Democrat is voting for TRUMP, and I am here to MAGA!