A Note to Readers & Perspective Shift

For the 2,000 or so who have subscribed to this Medium profile I thought I would give you a heads up about how and why my perspective has changed so dramatically in the past year. While my political beliefs have not changed much, I have left the Democratic Party and am now a registered independent.

On Twitter, on my website and on my Substack, and certainly on Facebook (which I no longer use) people have come to know me since these platforms began. (Other than on my own site, which predates social media and has been online since 1999) most of my readers in the past few years know me as a fairly standard, fairly outspoken Hillary/Biden supporter. That was my tribe. I probably gained more followers defending and fighting for Hillary Clinton than I ever have covering the Oscar race.

I am not a Trump supporter, nor am I a Conservative, but I can no longer abide dehumanizing them, as I see happening so much on my side of things. Worse, I feel as though the left becoming dangerously close to a fundamentalist religion. That means we have a strict code of conduct, even our own language and doctrine that demands compliance and conformity. While this is surely not true out there in the real world, it is most definitely becoming more and more true in the feedback loop of social media, mainstream media and now, our politicians.

We are coming from a place of fear, paranoia and hysteria, I believe, and are behaving in such a way that recalls the Salem Witch Trials or the Red Scare. People are found guilty with no due process, cancelled and deplatformed with Big Tech using their unlimited power to decide whose message deserves to get out and whose doesn’t.

We did not elect these folks who run these massive websites we entrusted with our data, our attention, our personal information and our privacy. They do not seem to have the basic principles of being an American citizen in mind.

I was looking for any Democrat in government or in media to push back against the capitalist authoritarianism we’re seeing now. But only people on the right seem willing to do this.

I mention this because I will be writing more open minded pieces, even criticizing the left. You might be unprepared for this and wondered why you subscribed. But I hope that this explains it.