Young Turk Ana Katarian why she left the left…

[MelWest]

https://kasparian.substack.com/p/independent-and-unaligned.

You're right, I've changed.

After Trump came onto the political scene, and especially after he was elected in 2016, the us-vs-them mentality immediately took shape. Anyone who refused to “resist Trump” was seen as a threat to the country, and I was fully on board with that mindset.

It all felt righteous at first. But eventually, the tactics deployed to fight Trump became repetitive, boring and ultimately fruitless. Polling shows that he has increased his support among Black and Latino voters despite wall-to-wall coverage on his unsavory, racist or bigoted remarks. Several years of media raising alarm over Trump’s threat to democracy has only resulted in a tight presidential race between himself and Kamala Harris.

I can’t help but acknowledge that the only thing that was accomplished by resisting Trump was less understanding and more division among Americans. I personally became reluctant to challenge my “side” or engage with voters who disagreed with me. In turn, I became less knowledgeable about the people and world around me. I saw Republican voters as an evil monolith and that was a big mistake.

My evolution started in 2022 when I was sexually assaulted by a homeless man in my neighborhood as I was walking my dog. That horrible experience alone didn’t change me politically, but the treatment I received from the far left and some progressives after sharing the story did.

I was told that by publicly sharing what had happened to me, I was stigmatizing my “unhoused neighbors.” Others accused me of feeding into racist tropes because they assumed that my attacker was black. But I had never even disclosed the man’s race.

He was white.

Not only did I suddenly see the flawed thinking of some on the left, I also witnessed their cruelty and hypocrisy in real time. These terrible traits that I had associated solely with my political opponents were obviously not exclusive to their tribe. I was stupid for ever thinking that was the case.

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Then there was the insane reaction to one of my tweets in March 2023:

All hell broke loose after I posted those words. Most “friends” in left-wing media didn’t bother reaching out privately to discuss their disagreement with my personal preference. Instead, many self-described socialists took it upon themselves to profit from conflict by publicly attacking me with monetized videos.

A smaller leftist YouTube show put out five separate videos skewering me about the tweet, while conveniently erasing the advocacy I had done on behalf of the transgender community throughout my career. They even went as far as drawing a link between my tweet and trans suicides, which sadly wasn’t the most unhinged outcome of the debacle.

TYT’s volunteer YouTube chat moderators quit over the tweet, and someone reported me to Human Resources. An on-air transgender contributor even resigned from the company after being urged by online mobs and leftist shows to do so. Curious that not one of those shows hired her after she took their advice.

I never apologized for the tweet and I never will.

That whole experience forced me to come to terms with the intolerance on the left and it allowed me to publicly reject the ideological shackles that kept my world small and less informed.

Today I’m less certain and more curious than I was four years ago. I’ve made humiliating mistakes while covering political news because I was previously unwilling to consider or understand the perspective of Americans who vote

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