Who Killed the Democratic Party?

After my story Who Killed the Oscars was published in Tablet, I received this letter:

Indeed, I didn’t explain why I voted for Trump in the Tablet piece. It was already too long. No doubt many reading it thought, who cares what she thinks? She voted for Trump. I’m sure there was a time when I would have thought the same thing. I used to be a faithful, loyal Democrat. I used to be a cheerleader for Hollywood. I thought I would do anything for love. But I found out that there was one thing I couldn’t do.

But know this: it’s never been a story about what happened to me. It’s always been a story about what happened to the Left.

So let’s do a Part Two of the Tablet Piece and call it:

Who Killed the Democratic Party?

The first time I remember voting for the Democrats was back in the 1980s. I wore a Dukakis button as a Women's Only Health Spa receptionist. A customer saw my pin and said, “Why are you voting for Du-Tax-us?” I looked at her, confused. I didn’t know why I was voting for him. “Never mind,” she said to me. “You probably never even went to college.”

I knew enough back then that we were different from the Republicans. That political divide had lasted since Nixon's days. They were uncool and had all of the power. We were cool but had no power. We were the subversive side, the Blue Velvet to their Top Gun.

That customer’s words tumbled around in my head long enough to motivate me to go to college and finally graduate from UCLA at 29, the first person in my family to do so. While a student there, I saw Bill Clinton speak. All of that charisma suckered me in, and now I knew why I was a Democrat. It wasn’t complicated. I’ll have what he’s having.

After I dropped out of graduate film school to chase some loser dude back to Los Angeles, my life came apart so spectacularly that I escaped to migrate online, where I would work and live for the next 30 years.

The internet changed everything. It gave so many of us a voice and a platform. Anyone could have a website online. Anyone could generate news. The question of who would control it was never asked because it was obvious. The Democrats did. We colonized it—the New Frontier in Cyberspace.

Obama was as wedded to Silicon Valley as he was to Hollywood. I was in the right place at the right time, a Good Soldier for the Left as a member of a newly mobilized army on Twitter, rallying behind our leader, the nation’s first Black president.

We were more connected than ever before at a time when more people were alive than ever before. On the “inside,” things always felt so big, so monumental. On the “outside,” life went on as normal among “The Proles.” We were in the early stages of 1984 if Whole Foods catered it.

It was an alignment of power not seen since the utopian days of post-war 1950s America when government and culture aligned to snuff out the Communist threat. With an iPhone in my pocket and high-speed internet, I did my duty every day as a Good Liberal fighting the good fight.

It wasn’t until Obama’s re-election bid in 2012 that I understood I was part of a hive mind that could manipulate the media narrative and thus create the reality we wanted. We could stretch the truth—or lie—about, say, Mitt Romney and the “Binders of women,” and it worked. The legacy press would print our headlines. Clickbait would do the rest. Eventually, it trickled down into the homes of ordinary Americans.

It wasn’t just politics. It went much deeper than that. We were different people now, better people, good people doing things, something the Left never was throughout my entire life as a child of the counterculture 60s and 70s. But to be that good, we need to target people who were that bad. We needed a receptacle for our collective sins.

Whatever threatened Obama’s power became what threatened us. We took any criticisms of him, even in the wake of the bank bailouts in 2008, and decided it had to be racism. Obama was perfect. How could it be anything else?

It was a low-frequency hum that would only get louder. The Tea Party was a threat. The Freedom Caucus was a threat. Donald Trump was most definitely a threat because of the “birther” conspiracy theory.

This video by Reason is from 2010:

In 2016, it was like the Devil riding into Salem in 1692. Trump was the living embodiment of our collective sins - white, hetero, cis-gendered, unapologetic, masculine male - and had just been voted leader of our utopia. We didn’t hang people, but we lost our minds all the same. It was one mass hysteria episode after another, driven largely by the Twitter algorithms in our reality-making machine.

It makes more sense to think of Twitter as a battleground like Gettysburg. Trump was a formidable Twitter force with his own online army, which began our Virtual Civil War, one we’re still fighting today. The first Civil War defined America as we expanded westward. Our Civil War is more about what America will be as we expand virtually—who will control the algorithms, commerce, censorship, information, and AI?

Elon Musk didn’t buy Twitter and put his entire life on the line because, as the Left falsely believes, he’s a power-craven “Nazi” and a “Fascist.” No, none of that really matters to him. He did it for love.

The Woke Mind Virus

Like the good liberal I was, I’d raised my daughter in all of the progressive public schools in Los Angeles. We were children of the “Me Generation” spat out godless and empty. We gravitated to self-help and therapy culture. Thus began our epic journey toward self-improvement. Our perfect selves would build a perfect world and raise perfect children.

Critical Race Theory began creeping into our public schools and universities to fix the problem that this country, its culture, its institutions, and its corporations were infested with racism and “white supremacy.”

But it was the young coming of age online who turned our good intentions into a strident new fundamentalism that would become a big problem for the Democrats. You were categorized and measured by your skin color and your gender. The more vulnerable and marginalized you were, the higher your status online.

Benjamin Boyce’s series on what happened at Evergreen College well documented the results of our utopia gone wrong.

It wasn’t until 2020, during lockdowns, that most parents became aware of the madness they were teaching our children in public schools. But it was too late by then. The fanatics took to the streets in the Summer, using Black Lives Matter to push their cult-like fanaticism on the rest of us. Evergreen was now our new normal.

By the end, everyone was afraid to speak their minds. We were at the mercy of a tyrannical, strident, puritanical mob that decided who got to stay and who had to go. The list went on and on, from statues to pancake syrup labels to monuments to Dr. Seuss.

Most oppressed, most victims became our society’s heroes. American culture had to reflect this reversed hierarchy that denied reality. The wheel of oppression had to cycle through women with Me Too, then Black Lives Matter, and eventually, it landed on the LGBTQIA+ movement, specifically transgender people.

It became especially useful for wealthy white liberals in California and movie stars. How better to absolve themselves of their sins of wealth and privilege than to transition and transcend?

It was accuse lest ye be accused. As long as you were pointing the finger at someone else, helping to purge the racists, the transphobes, the bigots, the fascists, you were still on the side of good.

It was never pure enough, never clean enough, because Donald Trump was still the president. Even when we used all of our power to push him out of office in 2020, and Joe Biden became the president, it still wasn’t enough.

What is a Woman?

While it’s true that there have been rare cases of children who believe they were born in the wrong body, it’s become something much bigger to the Left. It is the cornerstone of their entire movement. It is the highest form of status because it is the most marginalized. It’s also the most well-funded. Trans people are seen as sacred symbols. Their parents are treated like they delivered these precious symbols as sacrifices to the cause.

Children would have no way out of it if public elementary schools were to fly the Pride flag alongside the US flag. Their teachers, their parents, and their culture are telling them that they might not be their “assigned” gender. Transcend, transcend, and leave your earthly selves behind. This isn’t fringe. It is the dominant ideology of the Democratic Party.

It has become a suicide cult with parents, doctors, and teachers too afraid that their sacred chosen ones will end their lives if they can’t get puberty blockers, have their breasts amputated, or have their testicles removed.

They wake up as adults with unexpected consequences. Male-pattern baldness, deeper voices, organs twisted up and mangled inside so they can never have normal sex or reproduce. Their bones are weakened, and they’ll be at the mercy of doctors their entire lives.

How did it ever come to this?

I researched when the New York Times first mentioned the idea of a “transgender child.”

.

Back they were at least allowed to discuss it as a mental health disorder that needed treatment and even allowed that there might be a chemical component when they wrote at the bottom, “Many researchers suspect it is linked with hormone exposure in the developing fetus.”

But even then, common sense shined through, as a Times reader sent in a letter to say:

It isn’t the idea that trans people exist that’s the problem. It’s the denial of reality and truth that is the problem. The “trans women are women” lie. No, they aren’t. They are transgender people choosing to live their lives presenting as women. That’s the truth. That’s the reality.

Listen to Whoopi Goldberg just recently deny the biological reality of males and females on The View.

So we don’t need people who gently dance in the right direction to gently wake people up. No, we need fighters. We need warriors. Like Megyn Kelly:

Like Erin Friday:

Like Riley Gaines:

Like Jamie Reed:

The stories of destransitioners haunt and infuriate me.

You want to talk about regrets? I am disgusted that I ever helped build this utopia that has sent children into the lion’s den. But since I can’t burn down buildings, smash windows, and scream in the faces of these psychos. I have to do the only thing I can do: vote them out and keep them out until they get a grip.

And the one person with the right stuff and the courage to stand up to them is Donald Trump and the Republican Party standing behind him.

It isn’t only this issue. It is also censorship and lawfare, evidence of a political party with way too much power, and the false notion that this country’s government, culture, and institutions belong only to them.

But if you want me to regret my vote, you’ll have to do a lot better than pearl-clutching whatever CNN is on about today.

There are so many things I regret in life. I regret not spending more time offline with my daughter while she was growing up. Instead, I focused on investing my time in an industry that would turn on me and a political movement that has become a dangerous cult.

I regret believing in the feminist lie that abortions were no big deal and that those faces you will never meet won’t haunt you later in life. I can’t turn back time. I can’t erase who I was and what I once believed. But I can do now what I couldn’t do then. I can put everything I have on the line to protect kids.

I’ll never vote for a Democrat again as long as I live. They’re cowards and conformists. They deserve to be out of power for a generation.

The Cry of the Eagle

Tens of thousands of us gather around the YouTube channel that trains a camera on a nest high upon a treetop in Big Bear, California, to observe Jackie and Shadow's newly hatched eaglets.

Jackie is a fierce fighter and protector. When she feels threatened by owls, ravens, or flying squirrels, she slaps them back with her wings. They would not dare cross her. Not through me, she says.

When I hear Jackie's cry, I hear the desperation of a mother who would do anything to protect her young because she was born that way. She doesn’t know anything else. She summons her mate, Shadow, with her cry. He doesn’t think twice about it either. He flies in to stand in the breach—not through me, he says.

Voting for Trump, who is tough enough and strong enough to simply say no, we’re not doing that, is the easiest thing I’ve ever done and no, I don’t regret it. I’d do it all over again, no matter the cost. It was my way of saying, not through me.

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