The Burn of Blue Gaslight

a few reflections on the eve of the eve of the election

In 2020 I started noticing a distinct political trend.

I’d seen hints of it prior to that upheaval year of pandemic lockdowns, racial reckoning riots, and the extraordinary mail-in election that ousted Donald Trump from the White House. But in 2020 the ground shifted. Despite the Democrats’ electoral success . . . or perhaps because of it . . . something cracked in Blue America. The previous trickle I’d seen, online, of people expressing disillusionment with their party and exiting to the Right increased to a steady stream. Over the next four years I watched the numbers widen into a river that seems to be flowing only faster and stronger as we approach this election. This new flood plane has likely altered the political landscape, so on this almost-eve of a probable Trump victory (judging by the betting markets), I’ll share what I’ve observed of this consequential leak from the Democrat voter base and how it focused my own outlook.

While individual stories of course differ in the details, I noticed they share a very clear and singular theme. Universally, these people describe their experience of leaving the Left as “waking up.” Not in the sense of a sudden epiphany. More like a painful journey of dawning disillusionment which necessitates hard choices, even risks relationships. Quite often they recount the disorienting unraveling of the corporate media narratives they had so long trusted, that had shaped and permeated their understanding of the world and their own place in it. The notion of being red-pilled is nearly ubiquitous—that bewildering awakening to a wider reality outside the blue bubble in which they’d existed. Indeed, pretty much every story of defection involves this startling journey of discovery, their emergence into an inviting world filled with grounded reasoning and surprising kindness, which had lain utterly obscured behind the surround-sound screens of Leftist projections, prejudice, and propaganda.

Another notable similarity is that most defectors’ stories begin from a jarring encounter with the unforgiving edges of Leftist orthodoxy. The outline is generally the same: they were a True Believer, loyal to the causes and comfortably ensconced within the tribe, perhaps even a flag-waving foot soldier on the activist front. Certainly a defender of the disempowered and marginalized—a proud “lifelong Democrat.”

But then some unexpected event or experience, usually deeply personal, put them at odds with their people. They found themselves floundering in a sea of questions, contradictions, that no one would discuss.

Perhaps it was doubt about the logic of lockdowns,

Or the “science” that sanctioned some political protests but condemned others.

Or maybe they questioned the sudden discarding of natural immunity,

Or their need for the novel, warp-speed Covid shot,

Or wondered at the implausibility of its “safe and effective” designation,

Or objected to its enforced mandate,

Or knew someone injured by mRNA who was being denied recognition and treatment.

Or perhaps they questioned the divisive postulates or real world value of their mandatory D.E.I. training.

Or they refused to profess that humans can change sex,

Or opposed educators introducing kids to queer culture or teaching them that sex is a spectrum.

Or they discovered their child’s name and pronouns were covertly changed by their school.

Or they opposed adults encouraging children to keep secrets from their parents.

Maybe they didn’t want their daughters required to share bathrooms or changing rooms with males,

Or forced to compete against them in sports.

Or perhaps they objected to opening women’s domestic violence shelters to men, or women’s prisons to convicted sex offenders.

Or they were aghast by the eruption within the Left of support for a massacre of innocents and the ardent defense of the butchers.

The list goes on.

But the common thread I’ve seen running through the myriad stories is that some personal experience of disconnect with an article of the Blue faith caused these accidental apostates to hit the wall of pretension enclosing their tribe. It jarred them into consciousness of the glaring gaps in logic, the confounding twists of language designed to soothe their conscience, numb their instincts, condition their compliance, and their silence. So they found themselves confronting the Party’s final, most essential command: reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Those who broke with that protocol and spoke up anyway learned, quickly, painfully, that questions and critiques are auto-coded Red, slapped with warning labels ending in -ist or -phobe, and dismissed. Quashed. Verboten. The options were narrow: pretend and belong, or choose truth over tribe.

So they opted out, or were cast out.

Whichever the case, they found themselves wandering outside the perimeter of their homeland in an enemy territory that shockingly, reassuringly, proved to be grounded in material reality. It was an open and welcoming space where truth has boundaries, justice values her blindfold, and facts aren’t sacrificed on the altar of feelings. By the strangest twist of fate—or the invisible hand of Providence—they found themselves living freely in a stable world of clarifying sunlight rather than in the distorting blue glow of combustible gaslight. They found themselves unexpectedly at home inside the much maligned, formerly feared Territory of MAGA. (Cue the horror soundtrack intro.)

Photo by Henning Wiekhorst on Unsplash

Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

What’s become clear to me, through the endless tales of awakening that are so similar they’re nearly cliché, is that gaslighting as a strategy for ruling only works well in an established dictatorship; America’s Uniparty got ahead of itself.

It seems our political class, with the assistance of their handmaids in our captured institutions, convinced themselves they could manage our reality—and manipulate our behavior—by speaking through their corporate media megaphone as a trusted Big Brother. They expected to deflect scrutiny and criticism by projecting onto the opposition their own reliance on disinformation and doublespeak, their own aspirations for ruling unchecked and into perpetuity. When Donald Trump’s 2016 primary upset knocked a hole in a load-bearing wall of the Uniparty’s fortress, they ramped into high-gear. DEFCON-10 damage control mode. The Orange Enemy of All Things Good and Reasonable became their instant hourly target for fifty-Two Minutes of Hate, and the basis for their narrative demonizing as stupid, crazy, or dangerous any and everyone who abstained or objected. And their campaign now seems stuck in acceleration mode even as the bubble of their audience continues to shrink. To defect.

More than anything, the last few years have awakened me to how inescapably individual each person’s walk through life is. We all know it’s brutally easy to sink into impatience and alarm when we see people promoting ideas or values we regard as destructive. Frustration can become our default, a feeling of How stupid can they be?! How dare they risk our society?! Our future?! They have to WAKE UP NOW!!! But my witness of these storytellers—their journeys out of the propaganda-fueled gaslight that colored their reality—gives me faith that the truth really will out, one individual at a time. And there’s no rushing anyone on their path, no forcing awareness. Every one of us comes into our understandings in our own time. We never know what we don’t know, and our personal awakenings will always happen when we’re ready. Our timeline is sacredly our own.

But the gate holding open our paths of discovery will always be our access to knowledge. To the extent we remain a society in which people are free to seek and share information, to trade ideas and opinions, to debate facts and what they mean uninhibited by authorities or elites behind curtains, the sunlight illuminating our landscapes—be they political, cultural, scientific, or personal—will continue to do its work of diminishing shadows, exposing lies. The key for us individually, if we truly want to champion a world in which disagreement is allowed and individual thought valued, is to cultivate curiosity towards those we regard as wrong rather than holding them in contempt for failing to know what we know, for not being sufficiently aligned with our own (unperfected) outlook.

Because in the end, we always reap what we sow, individually and collectively. Being the change we want to see is not just a rational and honest strategy for our lives, it’s good for our karma, our fellow humans, and our souls.