I’d worked in politics nearly half my life, starting out as an intern on Barack Obama’s campaign when I was only seventeen years old, then as a field organizer for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Before Obama won the primary in 2008, I was an alternate delegate for Hillary in Kansas’ third congressional district, one of the youngest ever in the state of Kansas.

After a series of disappointments with the establishment, I eventually found my way to the Bernie side of the party …

So she’s established her Democrat bona fides and even her leftist bona fides. However, something happened to her on the way to the 2024 election, and that something can be summarized as Kamala Harris (although certainly not just Kamala Harris):

A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.

I wouldn’t agree that Kamala had zero policies or platform, but although she certainly seemed unable to discuss her platform coherently, the platform she did have was IMHO pernicious. That doesn’t appear to have been Barker’s problem with Harris, because even though Barker technically qualifies as a changer she’s certainly not on the political right even now.

Nevertheless, she’s been shunned for having been unwilling to vote for the empty Kamala:

In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

Now that we are more than half a year into a second Trump presidency, I’ve been asked numerous times if I regret my decision to ditch the Dems, or if I’d publicly say sorry for what I did.

The answer is NEVER.

In fact, more Democrats should’ve had the courage to speak out about Kamala’s candidacy, and the direction of the party in general. …

If the Democrats want to become a winning party again, they need to recognize that policy, and not messaging has led them to defeat. This means they need to stop only defining themselves against Trump, and decide what they are going to stand for. The days of mealy mouthed corporate speak are over. What the public craves more than anything is authenticity.

Besides this, Democrats need to come to terms with accepting more heterodoxy within their own party. Throw the purity tests in the trash can. It isn’t a moral failing to have a different opinion when it comes to immigration, gender ideology, or identity politics. If the Dems want to truly be the party of diversity, then diversity of thought must be included.

Good luck with that, Evan. Those days are gone. Will they ever come back? Can they ever come back? I doubt it, although of course I could be wrong. I certainly don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I don’t even think it will happen in Evan’s lifetime, and she’s pretty young.

Nevertheless, Democrats might win the presidency and/or Congress (and certainly the House) again, and rather soon. Someone such as Evan is still in the minority in her party, and many Democrats are still very energized to vote against the GOP.

The post Another political changer shunned by friends appeared first on The New Neo.

My friend’s note was merely one car in an endless freight train of similar emails rolling and rumbling into my inbox each day. In them, one can discern empirical regularities. Trump-et Blasts are never offered as hypotheses, opinions, or topics for discussion. Rather, they are always stated as Euclidean postulates—self-evident Truths that we surely agree upon and which warrant no discussion. Recipients of Trump-et Blasts have five possible Supreme Court-like responses: affirm, ignore, concur, dissent, or defer.

I’ve noticed these Trump-et blasts more in conversation than in emails to me, probably because almost everyone I know is aware of my politics and doesn’t bother with the random snipes in emails. It’s in casual talking that it comes out, especially if I’m part of a group. In a group, even if people know I disagree, they’re not catering to me. And why should they, actually? Often, it’s a group bonding experience, a sharing of what is considered tautological and the mark of their agreed-on virtue. I’m grandfathered into the group, as it were.

And that is why – as Graboyes describes – the critique of Trump is not really up for discussion on the merits. It’s an article of faith, and/or a thesis they believe has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt or perhaps beyond any doubt.

I wrote on a similar topic back in January of 2005, when I was rather new to the blogging game. It’s called “The fine art of insulting half your audience,” and can be found here. An excerpt:

It happens nearly every time. I’ll be reading a short story, let’s say, enjoying myself, lost in the experience—when suddenly, there it is: the gratuitous and mean-spirited and out-of-context slap at Bush, or at those who support him. It’s not as though the story is even tangentially about politics, either; it can be about anything at all, it doesn’t really matter.

The Bush-dissing will be thrown in when you least expect it, just to let the reader know—well, to let the reader know what, exactly? To let the reader know that the author is hip, kindly, intelligent, moral—oh, just about everything a person ought to be. And that the reader must of course be a member of the club, too—not one of those Others, the warmongers, the selfish and stupid and demonized people who happen to have voted for Bush.

Back when I was one of the gang, too, back when I was in with the in crowd (“if it’s square, we ain’t there”), did I notice when authors dragged in their political credentials from left field? Or perhaps it wasn’t quite as commonplace back then for them to do so?

At any rate, now it seems positively obligatory. I’m reading along, sunk deep within the story, bonding with the characters—and then, suddenly, it’s as though the author has reached a hand out of the pages of the magazine (OK, I’ll confess, sometimes it’s the New Yorker—yes, I still read it for the fiction, just as some people claim they read Playboy for the interviews) and slapped me across the face.

Authors, do you really want to do this? Because, with a single sentence, you’ve managed to alienate and offend (not to mention insult) up to half your audience.

More at the link.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The post Those emails with Trump-ets appeared first on The New Neo.

I clicked on it and was immediately taken with his accent. Love it! But I kept listening because he was describing the process of political change and especially how it feels, emotionally, to be on the other side of that Rubicon. So I’m posting it here:

The post Another political change story appeared first on The New Neo.

Prior to the 2008 election I pretty much knew that Obama would win. It was hard to accept, and I also knew he would be very destructive. His pretense of being moderate and of being a racial uniter had already been revealed by his campaign as phony. In 2012 I was even more worried because now I knew how dangerous his administration had been in setting us on a leftist path, including the enabling of Iranian power and a very subtle way of undermining race relations while feigning being a lofty healer.

In 2016 I disliked both candidates, and although I knew I detested Hillary Clinton and worried about what I saw as a possible continuation of Obama’s terrible policies and approaches if she were to be elected, I also worried that Trump was a loose cannon who would be in way over his head and would cause chaos. It took me a few months after Trump’s inauguration to realize that wasn’t the case, and to relax. But then the 2020 election – after COVID and riots had reduced Trump’s chances of winning, and with the always-mediocre yet now cognitively-challenged Biden as a possible winner – represented a nail-biter. And the 2020 experience of going to bed thinking Trump had won and waking up seeing that he hadn’t was deeply disturbing.

And then of course there was the 2022 red wave that turned into a tiny trickle.

But none of those elections can compare to what I feel now. I perceive Kamala Harris as representing the worst of all those worlds: the duplicity and dislikability of Hillary, the leftist policies of Obama on steroids, the cluelessness and uniformly poor decisions of Biden as well as her own seeming cognitive (or purposefully vague?) way of not making sense when she speaks. Couple that with the further leftward movement of the Democrats, and knowing how radical their legislative agenda is, plus a lack of faith in voting security and the strong sense that they wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever they they can to win and then to consolidate power that will last indefinitely, has got me in a tizzy. I alternatively reassure myself that Kamala won’t win, and then fear that she will. Back and forth and back and forth.

So, why would so many people vote for Kamala – including almost everyone I know? Don’t they see and hear the vacuous meaningless statements, the relentless lies, the strange affect? Don’t they know her extreme leftist history? I actually think that the majority of Democrats I know have not watched her interviews and do not see and hear – or at any rate, that what they do see and hear is processed differently from the way a person on the right sees it. They either pay little attention and vote in a reflexive way for the Democrat – and a woman! and a black woman! and Republicans will take away your birth control! – or they have only seen Harris debate with Trump and her speech at the DNC, and in both of those appearances she probably seemed fine to them. And, even more importantly and decisively, they truly believe that Trump is all the horrible things the left says about him and their fear of him is real.

And no, they are not dumb. The ones I know are for the most part very smart indeed in most areas of their lives. But they continue to swallow propaganda without even realizing that’s what it is.

Now, you might say, as commenter “Chris B” does here:

The thing is, it is so easy to learn the truth nowadays if one really wants to. Even with biased search engines, anyone can google “did Trump really say…” and find out that what they are being told is a lie. I believe that in reality they don’t want to know the truth. The intense hatred they have for Trump they find intoxicating. The last thing they want is to to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.

I spend many hours a day trying to “learn the truth” as best I can, and I really want to, as well. And yet I would never call it “easy” to do so, much less “so easy.” For example, the search engines are more than somewhat biased; they are constructed so that a person ordinarily has to scroll through reams and reams of suggestions that seem to validate all the bad things said about Trump and all the good things said about Harris before finding anything that differs.

So a person has to be committed to finding differing opinions and reading them, and to take some time in the process, while meanwhile all the anti-Trump propaganda is constantly reinforced by the search. When someone on the right does a search like that, the person knows it will be a quite a hunt, and he or she is aware of the need to be patient and to persevere. Plus, the person on the right is at least somewhat impervious to the propaganda; a mind is a difficult thing to change.

But there is no particular reason for the Democrat to be so patient, and that person probably is not already aware of the bias in the search results. That person will almost certainly see result after result that doesn’t challenge the propaganda but instead extends it and solidifies it. Why would that person keep going and going in the face of all that? And then, even if that person does keep going and finally finds a pro-Trump article, it’s from Fox or some other source on the right that the person has been told for decades is biased towards the right. Yes, every now and then a fact-check site defends Trump, but that’s often difficult to find as well unless one is willing to dig deep.

What’s more, why would a person start such a quest in the first place? To do so, the person would have to have a reason for challenging his or her own very solid and long-held belief system. Such a motive is rare on the left, but it’s actually rare on either side of the political spectrum. Political change is something I’ve written about at length, and most people will not ever be motivated to seek it.

And after all, as Chris B notes, not only does hatred have its own satisfactions, but righteous hatred can be a bonding experience: “the last thing they want is to lose the high they get from expressing their righteous hatred with like minded friends.” Indeed. I’m aware, for example, that my own presence in a group somewhat inhibits the people from a nice satisfying anti-right rant, and therefore including me in a group puts a damper on the fun even if I don’t say anything in opposition.

Why would Democrats be curious to learn whether the bad things they think about Trump are false? There aren’t many people in the world on any side of any issue who are eager to discredit their own belief system. All of most Democrats’ long-trusted media sources, and often all their friends, and all the professors and lawyers and smart people and oh-so-erudite NeverTrumpers agree: Republicans bad, and Trump just about the worst of all. To search for alternative points of view would require something that has engendered doubt about that proposition, and although that sometimes happens it’s easy enough to shake it off if it’s just an occasional flicker of hesitation.

For example, the very idea that Trump wasn’t referring to Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville as “fine people” would have to enter a person’s mind in order for the person to be motivated enough to look it up and check it out. And why would most Democrats ever do that? Why would it even occur to them? They’re not hearing it on the news they watch or read, and for those who live in blue cities their friends aren’t saying it either. The thought that it’s not true is in the nature of an unknown unknown – nearly unthinkable. And to at some point accept that it’s not true would require not only initially entertaining the thought that it isn’t true, but a much bigger shock: the knowledge that one’s political worldview, erected over a lifetime, might be a house of cards.

Don’t underestimate how threatening and difficult it is to even entertain that notion, much less believe it. It’s a long process and a shattering one, as I can report from personal experience.

And what’s the result? Why, you get to be a pariah to a lot of people you trusted and loved. Not all of them, of course; some will stand by you, and those are pearls of great price. But you are risking a lot. And it’s a facile response to say to that person, “Oh, if they desert you or grow cooler to you they weren’t ever your real friends.” Because you have a history that says they were friends, and especially if you’re older it is very difficult to replace those friends. In fact, you can’t, and you can’t replace family. Political change can even break marriage bonds and cause tragic outcomes for children.

So I have no problem whatsoever imagining why most people don’t pursue a course of challenging their own deeply-held belief system on politics. I never set out to do it myself, either – or not exactly. Although I actually always have been one to challenge a belief or a fact I think is true, changing my politics as a whole was something I never saw coming over twenty years ago when the whole thing started for me. I just followed this link and that, with a certain amount of naivete about the social consequences for me – in fact, with complete and utter naivete.

And yet once you cross that Rubicon there’s usually no turning back. I’ve gained a great deal from following where the quest led, but I’ve lost things too, and I don’t make light of why so many people would be deeply reluctant to even entertain a thought that might take them to that sort of upheaval.

[ADDENDUM: Please also see this relevant post that I wrote not long after the 2020 election].

The post Anxiety about the election: plus, why would people vote for Kamala? appeared first on The New Neo.

“The Young Turks” co-host Ana Kasparian explained what drove her to ditch the Democratic Party while on Jillian Michaels’ “Keeping It Real” podcast on Monday.

The progressive media host described feeling “politically homeless” over the past few years, as she started seeing an intolerance to debate and the free exchange of ideas as well as an embrace of soft-on-crime policies by the left that she believed were detrimental to society.

She ripped efforts to “demonize and even dehumanize the other side” while admitting she used to be a person who believed you could not be friends with conservatives or someone who supported former President Trump. …

Kasparian said a turning point for her was when she was scolded by liberals after confessing she was fearful to leave her house after being sexually assaulted by a homeless man while walking her dog in Los Angeles in 2022.

I want to pause here and point out what grabbed my attention. The first thing is that, although I’m not familiar with her work as a “media host,” if she was on “The Young Turks” she was definitely to the left. So for someone such as that – who is publicly affiliated with that wing of the party and whose livelihood depends on it – to go through a political change experience, the incident that sparks it would ordinarily be fairly dramatic as well as something that hits in a very personal way. After all, the left has had a “strong intolerance to debate” as well as “soft-on-crime policies” for many years. And yet Kasparian only began her change journey after her 2022 experience.

That’s not a criticism by me, by the way. I applaud her for waking up to the situation rather than denying it, however late her change occurred. She goes on:

“Before I knew it, I started getting these messages, and it’s really, really harsh stuff, about how, ‘You are painting a picture of the homeless community. How could you be like this? These are your unhoused neighbors and they need help,’” she said of the negative messages she received.

“A few people accused me of being racist, even though I had never disclosed the race of the individuals who did this to me. And in fact, they were white,” Kasparian continued.

Does any of that ring a bell for you? It immediately reminded me of the story Barack Obama told in 2008 about his own grandmother, that “typical white person” who raised him and whom he casually threw under the bus in his effort to give a lofty speech about race in America. To refresh your memory, I wrote this at the time:

And along the way [Obama] managed to make what I felt was one of the single most revoltingly self-serving statements I’ve ever heard in a speech. …:

“I can no more disown [pastor Wright] than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

In addition, I wrote this around the same time:

And please read what actually happened to Obama’s grandmother as he previously related the story in his book. Turns out she was nearly mugged, and her allegedly racist comment was made not in front of Obama but reported secondhand by his grandfather. Obama’s grandmother appears to have mentioned to the grandfather that the aggressive panhandler who bothered her was black, and the grandfather told Obama that was the real reason she was afraid.

I’m sure you can see the parallels here, and the way Obama’s example of what counts as racist remarks set an example for the sort of reactions Kasparian got. Of course, it’s not just due to Obama. But I strongly believe that this sort of reaction became more common during his candidacy and presidency: that one cannot speak ill of a person from a leftist-protected group – be it a black person or an “unhoused” person or an “undocumented” person or whatever – even though that person has obviously acted in such a way that it is appropriate to speak critically of him or her.

So that’s what Kasparian ran into. It’s astounding that she was shocked by the reaction she got, but apparently she was. I think it’s because, until it happened to her, it was easy for her to just tell herself that other people – people on the right who said similar things – were bigots because that’s just how they were already defined. She knew she wasn’t a bigot, plus of course she also knew her assailant wasn’t even black and that it was merely an assumption of her holier-than-thou critics that he was. But they were treating her the way Obama spoke of his “typical white person” of a grandmother.

Here’s more of Kasparian’s story, which ends this way for now:

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 differently from me.

That’s quite an admission, and I admire her for it. Few people are capable of it. What’s more:

The point of this new project is the pursuit of intellectual freedom and open mindedness. I want to nurture curiosity without fear of offending the sensibilities of loyal partisans. I reject arguments about the evils of platforming people who are considered too naughty to converse with. I want to facilitate dialogue.

I don’t know what my political identity or label is, and I’m not even sure I want to be pigeonholed. This is my effort in pursuing extreme honesty and humility in the quest for common ground and truth without the constraints of a tribal identity.

Last night I happened upon this video, which is relevant. The topic is the difficulty of changing one’s mind, and the ways in which people deny evidence that would cause them to do so:

The post Ana Kasparian: another change story appeared first on The New Neo.

[From] JFM > “These are educated people who always take the news at face value. I can’t understand this. It drives me crazy.”

When they only see the news from one side, in which so much that we know about is omitted, distorted, or flat out invented, their opinions become understandable.

Not correct, but understandable.

Sadly, rectifying their erroneous impressions is time-consuming and requires background that they just don’t have.
I access probably ten times as much political and social news as most of my Democrat-voting family and friends, since I’m a Poli-Sci addict, and there is no way I can get a long enough hearing from them to convey all that information.

Change stories are interesting: so many are like Neo’s, where the sudden, unexpected, discovery that their news sources have lied about something important motivates an investigation that reveals many, many more lies.

It’s hard to know what that tipping point might be, for any individual.

The other problem is that they really don’t even want to know — literally; a recent group email from my family made that clear, in a rather off-hand fashion.

I won’t disturb their delusions, because there isn’t time in the day.

And even though they are all very nice, moral, generous, kind, productive, hard-working, intelligent, and educated (when that word had meaning), they are totally dependent on the Regime Media for their information.

And they believe the propaganda.

I would say that’s a correct depiction of 95% – perhaps even 100% – of my Democrat family and friends. In addition, some of it is a description of 20th century me – except for the part about not really wanting to know.

Perhaps the “want to know” versus “don’t want to know” dimension is the one that ultimately decides whether a person is open to political change or not. I will add that I believe that, for most of the people I’m talking about here, the “don’t want to know” crowd is usually intellectually curious about other things and open to taking in information. It’s just that politics taps into a much more emotional area of the psyche, in many instances the same one occupied (or not occupied, depending on the person) by religion. And then there’s the added dimension of the high social cost of leaving the fold. It’s huge, and when I went through my change it’s something of which I was naively unaware, which made the change easier for me.

When the media is lying – and lying in unison – and the vast majority of the people a person knows read the same sources and get the same information, an edifice of belief is built up. Much of it is based on distortions, omissions, and lies. But most of the time the person doesn’t know that or even suspect it. Sources on the right have been so demonized – for example, “Faux News” – that it usually precludes watching them. And if someone comes along to challenge the person’s point of view, unless the listener is highly motivated to sit and listen for hours, the challenge can easily dismissed by the listener as error or ignorance on the part of the challenger. That’s because part of the narrative the listener has taken in is that the other side is listening to lies all the time and basing their opinions on lies.

As I’ve described in my change story, there were some special circumstances for me that meant I was able to keep an open mind. I was so naive at the time the process began, post 9/11, that when I started reading many media sources online instead of the few print sources as I’d read before (consisting mostly of the Times, the Boston Globe, and The New Yorker), I was unaware of the political orientation of the authors of my new online sources. I was instead evaluating their logic and veracity in three main ways. The first was whether the authors were making logical points, the second was whether their predictions about future events were mostly accurate, and the third was whether they quoted public figures correctly when I checked against the transcript of a speech or interview. I found that some sources were consistently much better than others at doing those things. And after a year or two of this sort of close reading, I discovered to my surprise – I might even say to my shock – that those more reliable sources were all on the right.

One of the reasons I was able to do this was because I had recently separated from my husband and was very lonely, and therefore had a great deal of time on my hands. I had moved to a new place where I only had a friend or two. My son was now grown up and living several hours away. I was getting my news online for the first time in my life because I didn’t want the hassle of disposing of stacks of old newspapers. And so, without even realizing it, I was also reading conservative sources for the first time in my life, as well as the usual liberal sources I had always read without even thinking they were biased. I discovered that they were.

It’s not that sources on the right were free of bias. It’s just that they fulfilled those three criteria far better than media on the left did. That was really a huge turning point for me.

And then I discovered Thomas Sowell’s books, and that was another watershed. He brought it all together in a framework and provided structure for what I was already noticing and thinking in a far more disorganized way. After that, there was no turning back.

And so here I am.

The post Commenter “AesopFan” explains my own position vis à vis liberal Democrat friends and family, for the most part appeared first on The New Neo.

On the other hand, one of the themes of the convention has been such mind-changing. That was the point of the speech given by Amber Rose, a model I’d never heard of before but who gave an interesting “changer” speech the other day:

The message is clear: do your own research on Trump and you’ll find that much of what you thought you knew – and hated – about the man is a lie.

It’s a clever approach – although because a mind is a difficult thing to change, it probably won’t work with most people. But it’s intriguing, and I can identify because although I was never a NeverTrumper I was extremely Trump-skeptical during the 2016 campaign. Trump won me over pretty quickly by his performance as president, but that’s because I kept an open mind to begin with.

The post Changing one’s mind about Trump appeared first on The New Neo.

Fake News once again.

– Add the "Unified Reich Hoax" to the list of anti-Trump hoaxes.
– Newsmax did a great job breaking down the facts on this "Outrage" the media has been going after for the past 24 hours.#fakenews @NEWSMAX #antitrump @realDonaldTrump #unifiedreichhoax… pic.twitter.com/QswgvHAY8u

— The Jewish Voice (@TJVNEWS) May 23, 2024

Here’s a piece on it.

When I – or you – hear someone claim that Trump is praising Nazis and plans to start a Reich, I know from previous experience that this is some sort of distortion (otherwise known as a lie). All I have to do is check it out and that will become clear.

But I also know that many many people are already convinced that Trump is a Hitlerian white-supremacist megalomaniac, and it therefore doesn’t occur to them to check it out. Why would they want to waste their time, when they already know it’s the case? The fact that their perception of Trump as Hitler is based on a series of such lies is unknown to them, and toppling that edifice would require going through the lies one by one and proving each one to be a lie.

At a certain point, it might or might not dawn on the person that the entire perception is incorrect and needs radical revision. But at what point? Who is going to undertake the task of refuting the lies one by one, and how many people would be patient enough to listen? How much proof does it take? And of course some people will never change, no matter what facts are brought to bear.

Time and again it has been brought home to me that this is the situation with most of my friends. No, they are not evil, nor are they stupid. They simply are steeped in lies that are fed them in order to influence them politically, and they are surrounded by like-minded people so the lies are rarely if ever challenged. They are busy with their lives. They would have to actively seek out and read the press on the right to ever hear counter-arguments, and there is little motivation for that because (a) they’ve been told over and over again that the press on the right lies constantly (and it does lie sometimes, although with nothing like the frequency of the left); and (b) it is difficult and rather frightening to change one’s political viewpoint, and risks alienating friends and family.

When I have written in the past about my own experience of political change, I’ve emphasized that it was under some special circumstances: I was reading online and unaware of the right vs. left sources of my information, so I was judging it only on how logical it was and what sense it made to me. It was only about a year later that I discovered that the sources I found most reliable were on the right. This was a shock at the time, but I could not deny it and anyway it had already happened. I also had no idea that moving to the right on my part would cause much of a rift or even discomfort socially. At the time, I wasn’t in the habit of having political discussions with friends or family and was naive about the social polarization that could occur.

Both of these things facilited my change, but very few people are naive about either thing these days.

The post The Trump “Unified Reich” hoax appeared first on The New Neo.

I think they might have had a point if the interests of Israel and of the US were at odds here. They are not, however. Dershowitz also made that plain when he wrote that it’s a “terrible decision both for us and for Israel.” He might even have added, “and for the Western world.” Because that is also true. And also, “for humanity.”

That’s what has caused such a powerful reaction for Dershowitz and so many others, including many non-Jews who previously had been moderate Democrats.

What’s more, Dershowitz has written extensively and strongly in recent years against what Democrats and Biden have been doing on a host of other topics. He also defended Trump in his impeachment trial in Congress, at great personal cost.

The “dual loyalty” or “higher loyalty” charge is an old one against Jews. In this case it is especially inappropriate.

Dershowitz has opined on a myriad of questions and issues over the years that support conservative positions. I’ve written about many but certainly not all of them; you can see the list here. No, he’s not a conservative or even a Republican and doesn’t support the position of the right down the line. But he’s been more courageous in defending positions that are essentially conservative than a lot of Republicans have, and the majority of those positions have had nothing to do with Israel. He is strongest on anything that has to do with liberty and law.

One glaring exception, however, is when Dershowitz defended a cause that was anti-liberty: his statement that vaccine mandates are okay in certain circumstances. Dershowtiz said that there is no inherent legal right to refuse a vaccine if the government required it in order to protect others in situations of grave danger, but he later said he was not in favor of such mandates for the COVID vaccine, especially once it was proven that it didn’t protect against transmission.

Dershowitz has been one of the most prolific and thoughtful writers in the US for many decades on a host of issues. But until now he’s also been a Democrat, something that puzzles a great many people on the right and seems contradictory. However, I’ve noticed for many years that he’s been edging closer and closer to repudiating his Democrat affiliation and making a clean break. He hasn’t done it quite yet, though – not even over the UN abstention concerning a ceasefire – although he’s been tantalizingly close. What holds him back from making the full break? I believe it is mostly what I discussed in this post, and is summarized by my oft-stated observation that “A mind is a difficult thing to change” – particular in terms of long-term political affiliation.

I assume you’re familiar with the saying “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” When I was very young, I misunderstood it and thought it refered to the sort of “straw” with which I was most familiar: a drinking straw made of paper. I pictured such a straw on a camel, and why it would break the beast’s back was completely puzzling to me. A few years later I learned it was about a straw of the haylike variety, which made even less sense rather than more.

And then I finally learned what the saying really meant, which was that a huge pile of straws can be placed on that camel’s back and then at a certain point a single straw more will be too much. It will be the last straw, the final straw. For Dershowitz, there obviously has been a long line of disillusionments, disappointments, and disagreements with Democrats, and at some point he might actually say “enough!” and his Democrat affiliation will be broken

Dershowitz lives in a state where his defection from the Democrats wouldn’t really matter in terms of the vote: Massachusetts is thoroughly blue. That’s not the issue, of course. It’s more a question of conscience. I recall hearing him say some years ago (can’t find it now) that he stays in the Democratic Party in order to try to reform it from within. I think that may have been true for a while, but I believe part of what he’s wrestling with now is that he’s given up on having much effect on a party that’s been spinning ever leftward and more and more distant from the principles Dershowitz holds dear.

Here is what Dershowitz said a while back about voting for Obama’s second term. Note that back then the alternative to Obama was Romney and not Trump. Romney was an easier alternative for Dershowitz to contemplate:

Why am I focusing on Dershowitz so much? I do so because I think he’s emblematic of the struggle many people go through in wrestling with political change. His struggle is just more public. I don’t think most people are politically all one thing or another. There are hundreds (or maybe thousands) of elements that combine to make up a political position, and how we vote ends up being a result of which side weighs heavier in the balance scale. But early and habitual political affiliation, as well as the environments in which we live, also play a role.

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[Mansour] was born in Cairo and raised in a traditional Arab Muslim family. But by the age of 11, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour became radicalized and aspired to jihadism. Hear the unusual story of one man’s journey from innocence to hate to political prisoner and ultimately, to life in America and steadfast support for Israel.

Now, that seemed to be a change story worth telling. And here it is. I found his tale absolutely riveting. The interview is at the site, and I strongly suggest you listen. An excerpt:

[The process of change] was slow and painful because everything I thought about reality was being uprooted, including my own identity structure … I realized that I knew nothing, which is a terrifying idea. What was even more terrifying was that I realized that the adults around me – they also knew nothing.

There’s something that was happening [to me] that I could not stop … It’s kind of discovering that … I don’t know anything; I have to find out.”

A really intelligent and fascinating man.

Mansour has also written a memoir, which you can find here.

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