Why I’m done with him

I originally wrote this super-long post between 4–7 March 2013, a few months after I finally pulled the plug on my dead-end, dysfunctional relationship, and then let it sit in the drafts folder unfinished. Let’s finally move it out already!

Warning: This post is going to be a bit of a rant and more personal than usual.

I would much rather be single for the rest of my life and eventually become a single mom by choice, through the sperm bank, than marry into a dysfunctional family and have a walking DSM (with some other disorders thrown in too) for a husband. I put up with this for over 4 years, twice the time I wanted to be with someone before marriage. I personally don’t agree with this modern movement towards just indefinitely dating for 5+ years and then getting married almost as an afterthought. Many people in the old days married far too soon just to live together and have sex without scandal, but at least they knew early on if their intentions were marriage or just a good time.

When you really love someone and know s/he’s the one, you freaking marry that person. You don’t wait until you think everything is absolutely perfect the way you define perfect. People have been getting married with only a dollar in their pockets and no concrete future plans for years. When you love someone, you get married, and you make it work. Perhaps it’s not the best of circumstances, but at least you’re married and with your own home.

It is complete BS to claim that dysfunctional families, overgrown mama’s boys, and disrespectful, shrill, henpecking wives are part of “Russian culture.” I’ve been a Russophile for 28 years now, and have read plenty of Russian literature and watched plenty of Russian films. I’ve also known other Russians. His family’s dysfunctions do not define “Russian culture.” And like attracts like, so of course he’s known a few other Russians and former Soviets from dysfunctional families. This is akin to claiming that all Southerners fit the stereotype of toothless inbred hicks, just because you came from a very backwoods family or town. Not true by a long shot.

Where I’m originally from, Southwestern Pennsylvania, we have a term, Ridger. Ridgers live on the ridge of the Laurel Mountains, and are known for having awful manners. I never thought I’d encounter Belarusian Ridgers living in Upstate New York. Ridgers do things like throw wet towels on the floor, rarely or never clean the house, don’t wash dishes properly, don’t put dishes away, sneeze into an open pot of food, loudly burp without excusing themselves, you get the idea.

I come from deep working-class roots. I know you don’t have to have a lot of money or a big house to create a beautiful home. No respectable proletarian woman I’ve ever known would let guests come over when dirty dishes are in the sink, a bed is unmade, curtains are wide open with no light on when it’s dark, or never put her dishes away. You’re supposed to be proud of your home, and give the best impression to visitors. When you have pots and pans stacked up all over the stove, dirty dishes in the sink, and black bananas gathering flies, that sends a message that you don’t care about your home or how you look to outsiders.

I’ve seen dried food and old beverage stains on their utensils, plates, and cups too many times to count. They think you’re supposed to wash dishes with some dish soap, a paper towel, and a cold, slow stream of water. Makes me want to vomit. If you’re going to ignore the dishwasher, at least use very hot water, real dishwashing soap, a basin so the dishes can soak, and a dish cloth! Then you put the dishes away when they’re all dry. I didn’t realize this was a foreign concept to anyone.

They do jack with their so-called Judaism. I honestly don’t even consider them Jewish, only through an accident of birth. Their Jewish line is not going to continue, because they’ve made zero effort to establish even a marginally Jewish home, and they’ve actively discouraged their kids from Yiddishkeit. I need a religious husband, no matter what denomination or background he has. This is non-negotiable. It’s too confusing for kids, and difficult for the one religious parent. I’ve reached the point where I strongly desire a husband with a beard, who covers his head and wears tallit katan, someone I can study and go to shul with.

They’ve been in America over 20 years and still can’t speak proper English. Gone are the days when many immigrants had the attitude of, “We’re in America now, we have to speak English.” It’s admirable to preserve one’s native language, but not to use it so much you’re still making basic English mistakes 20+ years later. It’s like a cross between Yoda and Chico Marx. And of course, they continued babbling away in Russian when I was over, like it didn’t matter that I didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying. Way to be polite, inclusive hosts!

The mother was such a henpecking, buffaloing Harpy. Constantly screech-yodeling at her husband, “EEEEEEE-gaaaaarrrrr! Eeeeeee-GAAAAARRRRRR! Eeeeeee-GAAAAARRRRRR! Eeeeeee-GAAAAARRRRRR! Eeeeeee-GAAAAARRRRRR!” like a damn broken record, 15-20 times a day. And for her son, it was, “Ssssseeeerrrrrrr-YYYYYOOOO-zhaaaaaaaa!” The father screeched their names all around the house too. Totally obnoxious behavior. You can call someone’s name once, then wait for them to come or respond. You don’t continue screeching their name or have an entire conversation 5 rooms away!

As a Sagittarian, I’m the traveler of the Zodaic. I love traveling, and don’t really feel homesick. I love other cultures and languages. It’s ridiculous to expect a married woman to always travel alone, esp. after she’s got kids. What kid wants to go on summer vacation without Daddy every single year? Couples and families are supposed to travel together, unless there’s a true extenuating circumstance, like a business trip that takes precedence.

I’d kind of really like to have kids the normal way, if I’m married. I’m too old to just sit around waiting for a husband to eventually ejaculate during partnersex, like a normal man. Fertility treatments are a great option, but they should be a last resort after at least several years of trying, not something you immediately, automatically rush into. [Sergey has an extremely severe delayed ejaculation due to atypical masturbation, and thus no associations between normal sexual stimulation and orgasm.]

I don’t want a domineering, controlling mother-in-law I’m afraid of, who thinks I’m disrespecting her by refusing to kiss her ass and validate her controlling, dysfunctional personality. I don’t want my children to have that as their other grandma. I can just picture her screeching at Samuel like she does to her son and husband, screaming that he’d better come to the table because her freaking soup is getting cold after all of 10 seconds.

I’d kind of really like a man who knows how to kiss properly, who does it often, who does it as part of sex, and who does it before any other physical contact. Hell, I’d appreciate a man who knows how to give me passionate, spontaneous sex. He did not understand the concept of foreplay as building towards sex.

His behavior at my boss’s funeral was just atrocious. A few months into our relationship, my boss died shortly before his 91st birthday. This guy didn’t understand why I had to go to the funeral, and tried to show up as late as possible because HE wasn’t interested in going. (The shul is like 5 minutes from his parents’ house.) He wore a T-shirt and knee-length denim jeans, pulled away from me when I tried to take his arm as we were walking into the sanctuary, drank an iced tea during the service, and went to the bathroom while my boss’s son (one of my co-workers) was giving a eulogy. He claimed he didn’t know how to dress or behave since he’d never been to a funeral before.

His family thinks they know so much better than I do about American customs and normal behavior. I’m not the one who lives in a self-imposed bubble, avoiding contact with native-born Americans as much as possible, refusing to speak the national language unless it’s absolutely necessary. In their eyes, I’m this disrespectful bitch because I act like a normal American instead of kowtowing to their dysfunctions and ridiculous ideas about how to behave.

I want a man who knows how to cook, do laundry, and make the bed properly. It’s freaking embarrassing that anyone in his thirties wouldn’t have all these skills when he’s able-bodied.

He stayed in frequent contact with his psychotic drama queen ex in spite of my repeated pleas to stop talking to her and being so friendly. It was all about his feelings, not mine. He even let this psycho stay over at the house during a snowstorm, instead of pointing her to a hotel or AAA or something.

He’s afraid of standing up to his parents and asserting himself as a capable adult for fear of starting a fight and hurting their feelings. He couldn’t even tell them about our alleged engagement for these very reasons. If you truly don’t know how to talk to your own parents about important subjects, or even talk to them period, maybe you should seriously consider moving out and even ending that relationship. A toxic relationship isn’t worth it, even if the people are your blood.

I had to buy my own “engagement ring,” and it was hidden in his parents’ house for like 11 months before he finally anticlimactically just freaking gave it to me.

A year before, I’d asked him to marry me with a male ring I’d bought in Jerusalem, in a nice golden bag, at the track fields at his old high school, on Tu B’Av. I’d wanted a local park, but of course, he had to eat his mommy’s freaking food before he did anything, and he thought it was too late by the time we headed out. He said nothing, grabbed the ring, jammed it onto his finger, and said, “It’s stuck. I’m very upset.” That was an extremely humiliating, crushing experience.

He had over 4 years to make some basic changes and compromise, meet me even halfway, and he did almost nothing. It was always about trying to look for external factors causing his myriad of mental, psychological, and sexual disorders, not tackling the hard work of changing the internal factors. He had no motivation to change, and was convinced he’d have a panic attack if he tried any of these techniques.

He let his mommy call him constantly when she was out shopping for him. He often even got the phone while we were doing sexual stuff.

His family thinks nothing of just showing up uninvited. That would never fly at my house. You don’t just randomly show up and expect to be invited in. You schedule a date and time to get together in advance. Even lifelong friends and neighbors usually call in advance! I’d never be able to relax, knowing these dysfunctional people might show up at any time, during meals, sex, showers, putting children to bed, cooking, dressing, trying to relax.

They’re the type of people who have to be right all the time, and anyone who even deigns to contradict them or offer another opinion is yelled at and treated as disrespectful.

They’re hoarders. I eventually stopped buying food and putting it in their refrigerator because it just got pushed to the back of that endless vortex, and often molded. Most disgusting nightmare ever. You should not have to remove 20 items blocking the way just to try to find something! His dad even laughed when he’d open the fridge and food would come flying out, since it’s literally stuffed stem to stern. The freezer is even more packed. And downstairs, they’ve got like 20 bottles of detergent.

They don’t even cook real entrees. Their dinner consists of a bunch of appetizers, never a main course. Not how I was raised to eat.

They don’t know how to preserve freshness. They let bread, biscuits, cookies, cakes, brownies, etc. get hard as a rock, sitting around uncovered for days. And speaking of dessert, they almost never even have dessert.

May 2021 addendum:

I could’ve missed my February 2010 trip to Israel because Sergey misplaced my car key the night before. My rabbi seemed annoyed with me when I finally got on the bus.

He never stood up for me when his family and friends insulted me and made offensive presumptions about me, like when I was annoyed at his doctor friend from Uzbekistan for touching my computer without permission or knowledge, and when the same guy phoned me by mistake while I was driving and claimed to Sergey that I’d dropped a few F-bombs on him. I’ve never said the F-word in my life!

He refused to understand why I felt so uncomfortable with his parents, esp. his mother, even after I explained it yet again.

When he was teaching at a high school for emotionally disturbed boys, I did almost all of his work behind the scenes. I gave up every single Sunday for over a year to drive over to his parents’ house, even in bad weather, and spend the entire day there. I even gave up a fun trip to Monsey I’d been looking forward to so I could do this lazy loser’s work for him!

Even people who just met me immediately knew Sergey was using me and no good. I’m still angry at him for letting his second ex use me to blackmail him for $2,000, which put me into credit card debt for some time.

I bought him expensive gifts all the time, as well as writing him big checks to help with his eBay business and general bank account. Many of these gifts went right into the closet, like colognes, or were never or rarely used, like a GPS for his car.

I spent over $70 on a Lego set of a dwarves’ mine and had a lot of fun building it. Sergey later took it apart and sold it by sections on eBay, and couldn’t understand why that hurt and angered me so.

He upgraded his massage, when we had a couples’ massage our first Valentine’s Day, without asking if that were cool with me. Naturally, I also paid for that!

He traded in the iPod I gave him, with an engraving noting our first V-Day together. You guessed it, he couldn’t grasp why that hurt me!

While I was showing my mother and her parents the pictures from my 2010 trip to Israel on my computer, Sergey called, and I told him he was on speaker. During the conversation, he suggested we might have sex next time I visited. I yelled at him that I told him he was on speaker, that my mother and grandparents were there, and how dare he before I hung up.

It must’ve taken about two years before I finally dragged the first “I love you” out of him. I feel cheated out of a first proper hearing and saying of those words.

When he unwrapped the last birthday gift I ever got him, a Lego sticker book (I know!), the first words out of his mouth were, “Oh, NO! You got me the wrong one! I hate this book!” He also insulted and refused other gifts I got him.

Sergey is a total loser, and I’m glad I didn’t make the mistake of marrying him.

Some thoughts on my political homelessness, Part IV (Critical theories)

Another prime reason I’m now politically homeless is because of how so many people on my purported side of the aisle have enthusiastically, unthinkingly embraced postmodernism and its various critical theories. All of a sudden, everyone is falling all over themselves to mindlessly virtue-signal and deliver creepy, ritualistic mea culpas.

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’ve been a passionate Native American ally since I was 5-6 years old. Native American rights, representation, and education are causes near and dear to my heart. Yet it’s never occurred to me to constantly prattle on about this or overstep my bounds as an ally who’s not actually Native American and wasn’t socialized in that community. To do so would be cheap, insincere virtue-signalling.

Before everyone rushed to make their social media profile pictures black squares in June, add the BLM hashtag, and start constantly talking about things like their support for Black-owned businesses, there was nary a whiff most of them felt so strongly about these issues! I’m far from the only one who suspects they just mindlessly hopped on a bandwagon because they saw everyone else doing it.

I’d take them more seriously if they’d demonstrated a longtime, consistent commitment to such issues, not only after they burst into the national spotlight and became a trendy cause du jour. In previous generations, people embraced environmentalism, anti-harpooning, and feeding starving African kids with the same short-lived burst of insincere intensity, and quickly moved on to the next big trend without a single backwards glance.

Critical theories have long since moved beyond the purview of out of touch academics in ivory towers. Even preschools are now adding mandatory training units and indoctrinating little kids with reified racial stereotypes. Many schools also have mandatory indoctrination sessions on the nebulous, pseudoscientific concept of gender, and since it’s bundled with anti-bullying awareness, parents are unable to opt their kids out of it.

I’m gobsmacked at how so many people on my supposed side of the aisle see nothing at all creepy about little boy drag queens, drag queen story hours at libraries, or the Q***r Kid Stuff YouTube channel geared towards toddlers. Would they also cheer on strippers and porn stars in full fetish gear reading to little kids or JonBenét-style beauty pageants for little girls?

This shouldn’t even be a right vs. left thing! This should be about plain common sense and understanding basic concepts of child psychology and cognitive development. It’s unreal that many people who’ve been solidly left-wing their entire lives are now called far-right conservatives for objecting to this.

You need to give your head a shake if you approach every single thing you ever do or say with the question “How does this help/hurt my xyz privilege?” It must be exhausting for such people to get through each day.

Speaking of, critical theory offensively claims the only reason people in a majority group ever help people in a minority group is to be paternalistic or advance their own privilege. What a giant middle finger to all the Righteous Gentiles who risked their lives or were killed on account of saving Jews from the Nazis, to white lawyers and judges who helped to end Jim Crow, to white allies who were beaten, arrested, or killed for their Civil Rights activism, to men in government who finally did the right thing and passed hard-won legislation granting women the vote.

After all that beautiful bridge-building and all those decades of progress, society is now more deeply divided than ever. The worst racism, misogyny, and homophobia in years have been rebranded as woke and progressive. It’s now acceptable to demonise anyone who objects to the new groupthink. This has been a huge boon for real bigots, people who no longer have to hide their true feelings and can now freely express them under the guise of being good neoliberals.

They’re creating a boy crying wolf effect, making legit concepts into sneeringly-dismissed jokes due to constantly flinging these words and phrases about, and preventing serious dialogues about important issues.

My core political values haven’t changed, but the current mainstream woke groupthink ideology of the various leftist parties no longer represents who and what I am. Some things are too significant to agree to disagree about. I care about real issues which impact the poor and proletariat, not freaking pronouns and “microaggressions.”

Some thoughts on my political homelessness, Part III (Lockdown lunacy)

Another big reason I no longer have a political party to call home is because of my purported side’s views on this apparently permanent lockdown. Who are these people cheering on the end of normal life and snitching on anyone who hasn’t happily been locked at home for ten months and counting?

Yet again, this is an issue of class privilege and shining example of how the current public face of the Left is profoundly out of touch with our historic proletarian demographic. It’s easy for them to giggle about how it’s totes no big deal to work and go to school from home, only leave to buy essential groceries, and have no contact with anyone outside the house when they have lots of money in the bank, several computers, jobs with remote options, and huge McMansions with big yards.

How many poor and working-class people have regular, guaranteed access to computers or even smartphones? Some people have had to do college classes from their phones in parking lots, because they have no WiFi or computers. And forget about working remotely when your industry requires in-person work. How can people in mill towns or working retail perform those tasks from a damn computer?

Many of my K–12 classmates came from poor and working-class homes. Thus, their parents had far greater priorities than enriching educational experiences outside of school. When you live paycheck to paycheck and are exhausted by the weekend, you can’t take your kids to a museum or Ren Faire. Having a computer is a luxury. Many of my classmates went right into the working world after graduation, or attended local colleges with low tuition.

These weren’t people with the luxury of deciding between Harvard, Yale, NYU, and Bryn Mawr, or spending over a decade in academia studying Medieval French music. Being out of physical school for almost a year has taken such a toll on kids who aren’t from comfortably bourgeois families. How can we pretend Zoom school is exactly the same as bricks and mortar school?

Also, there’s a reason we rarely, if ever, see poor and working-class families homeschooling or unschooling their kids. That kind of requires at least one parent able to stay home all day, and that’s not possible when they need two salaries to stay afloat. Unlike bourgeois women, working-class women have always worked, even after marriage and kids.

My mother still regrets not working harder to find a way to afford to send me to a private girls’ school after sixth grade. I was certainly smart enough for a scholarship, and the worst of my Aspie issues were resolved by then. Instead I continued in the crappy public school system, which, despite some awesome teachers, wasn’t exactly the best place for intelligent students who wanted more out of school than the basics.

Anyway, so many self-identified U.S. leftists made no bones about supporting indefinite lockdown because “Hurr, durr, Orange Man bad!,” and thus they had to always do the exact opposite. If “Orange Man” was against total lockdown, then, by Jove!, they had to get busy promoting and instituting the most draconian of measures!

Anyone who dares object to such strict lockdown for any reason has been called spoilt, selfish, anti-science, a conspiracy theorist, a right-wing ideologue, and someone who wants to kill Granny. I’m none of those things, but I am deeply concerned about the effects, both short-term and longterm, this is having on the economy and people’s lives.

And how about the heartbreakingly higher rates of women and children being murdered by domestic abusers while in lockdown and unable to leave? Or mental health issues being exacerbated? People unable to pay basic living expenses? Loneliness and isolation, esp. among seniors? Necessary surgeries being postponed and sometimes leading to preventable deaths?

Scientific evidence is starting to come in proving the endless lockdowns in the U.S. and U.K. haven’t had the benefits they were touted as having. Indeed, it’s only made everything worse.

Normal life has to resume sometime. We can’t exist forever in an isolated virtual world, and lockdown hurts the poor and working-class most of all. Yet DNC and Labour Party brass have totally sold out this core demographic to look woke and appeal to blue-haired clowns.

Some thoughts on my political homelessness, Part II (Idpol and wokery)

A major factor alienating me from my purported side of the political aisle and giving me no party to call home anymore is the explosion of idpol (identity politics), SJWs, virtue-signalling, and wokery over the last four years. These clowns need to grow up if they truly believe anyone to the right of Antifa is a Nazi!

I’m really angry that these loons have made themselves the public face of the modern Left, despite being the antithesis of traditional leftist politics, and many of them admitting when pressed that they’ve never read any foundational books or writers from the various movements they self-identity into. Yet this loud, fringe faction has burrowed into government, schools, businesses, charities!

If only this were confined to hippie colleges and scattered weird businesses or organizations. No. Instead, this loud minority has managed to impose their cult groupthink on major schools, formerly respected organizations and professional businesses, serious newspapers and magazines, big-name writers, you name it.

This post would be thousands of words long if I listed every single person or thing they’ve managed to cancel, or went after with flaming pitchforks and are still ranting against for refusing to obediently roll over and tearfully thank Big Brother for stopping the beatings. All while believing they’re the moral ones on the right side of history, and nothing like Nazi book-burners.

Find me one pre-21st century person whose views, speech, thoughts, actions, and writings 100% conformed to contemporary values. Even the most radical people stayed within certain parameters, and may have had some views which were considered progressive in their era but are widely disavowed today. E.g., eugenics and Social Darwinism were quite popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, and twilight sleep birth was initially hailed as wonderfully liberating for women.

These constant mea culpas from people renaming buildings, book awards, and scholarships make my ass sick, as my late paternal grandpap would say. Was anyone pretending people like Woodrow Wilson had modern views and never did or said anything legitimately problematic, or lauding him for his racism? It doesn’t change their historical importance, no matter how many tantrums these blue-haired babies throw. Removing their names and images from the public eye suggests there’s something shameful, sinful, evil about them.

It really angers and frustrates me how these wokesters have thrown around certain buzzwords and catchphrases so often, almost always misusing them, that they’re now considered jokes and not taken seriously. E.g., triggers are certainly real to people with PTSD and traumatic experiences. Actual transphobia does happen. People can have internalized racism, misogyny, and homophobia. Privilege legitimately exists. Things can be truly problematic. Toxic masculinity refers to how rigid, socially-enforced stereotypes hurt men, as evidenced in their higher suicide rates and being less likely than women to get help for things like depression and anxiety.

But to trot these words and phrases out at every little thing that rubs easily-offended wokesters the wrong way? They’ve created a boy crying wolf effect and prevented serious, important conversations about bona-fide issues. Despite how loudly they scream, they do NOT represent the majority of real leftists!

We should all be positive ambassadors for whichever group(s) we represent. If the only leftists, conservatives, Catholics, Orthodox Jews, Evangelical Christians, Muslims, Hindus, homesteaders, vegans, environmentalists, etc., you know or know of are loud fanatics who make everyone look crazy, now’s as good of a time as any to cross the aisle in good faith and get to know a wider range of people in that group.

Most people just want to quietly live their lives without making waves. Normal, everyday people aren’t newsworthy. You only get attention if you’re very out of the ordinary.

Everyone should make an attempt to follow or befriend people with radically different views. We needn’t agree with them or be converted, just learn where they’re coming from. It’s not healthy to exist in an airtight echo chamber where you’re never challenged.

Real leftists care about issues like a living wage, universal healthcare, educational reform, free or cheap college, and women’s sex-based rights, not navel-gazing bollocks like pronouns, made-up identities like skoliosexual and greyromantic, defending morbid obesity as totally healthy, denying the existence of biological sex, promoting prostitution as a fun career, and pretending random “people” give birth, menstruate, and have cervical cancer.

These blue-haired clowns need to GTFO with their woke groupthink and struggle sessions. I would say they have a mental age of twelve, but that would insult 12-year-olds.

Some thoughts on my political homelessness, Part I

Warning: Any nasty comments personally attacking me will be deleted and the commenters blacklisted.

This is roughly where I’ve consistently measured on the political spectrum since I was a teenager. Probably the only thing keeping me from being all the way to the Left is that I support the death penalty. However, despite my core political views remaining consistent, I’ve felt increasingly politically homeless over the last few years, and my alienation from my purported side of the aisle grows more and more each day. Many other lefties I know feel the same way.

I voted Libertarian in the 2020 presidential election, though I’ve always voted for the Democratic candidate my entire voting life, no matter how milquetoast and same as the old boss. I know a number of other alienated lefties who went Republican for the first time in their lives as a protest vote and/or because at least Republicans aren’t trying to legally replace biological sex with the nebulous concept of gender.

It happened on Biden’s first day, just as he promised for months. He signed an executive order allowing the disastrous, toxic self-identification policy several other countries now have, and which was thankfully soundly defeated in the U.K. recently. Goodbye to women’s sports, scholarships, homeless shelters, rape crisis centres, political shortlists, locker rooms, single-sex swimming pools, everything our foremothers fought so hard to secure.

No, this is absolutely NOT what real feminists ever fought for! We never wanted things like co-ed sports and changing rooms. And for those who, like clockwork, ask, “Hurr, durr, where are all the feminists?,” we’ve been fighting against this and raising awareness of these issues for YEARS! Many of us have been doxxed, no-platformed, fired, stalked, kicked off social media, threatened, you name it.

I’ll be getting into this issue in much greater detail when I resume my Gender-Industrial Complex series! So much has happened on that front since I did that 12-part series in 2016.

Because of the U.S. duopoly, many Americans, through no fault of their own, aren’t aware of the full political spectrum and all the various iterations of left-wing and right-wing beliefs. E.g., Bernie Sanders is considered a centrist in Europe, since things like universal healthcare and a living wage are just matter-of-fact social welfare policies which are proven to dramatically improve quality of life.

Some people are able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make a success of themselves without free or cheap college education and at least $15 an hour, but that’s unfortunately not possible for most people. How can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps when you haven’t any boots?

The loons in Antifa also are NOT even remotely representative of what real leftists are all about, just as people who bomb abortion clinics don’t represent most conservatives. People on both sides need to quit painting one another with such broad brushstrokes and assuming the loudest, most fringe elements speak for everyone.

I wish more liberals and conservatives both would engage in good-faith dialogue with one another, and actually LISTEN when someone explains why s/he came to have such political values, instead of just hearing and immediately reacting. It doesn’t mean you have to agree with their views or convert to their way of thinking, but at least make an attempt to understand that POV.

I’d be more than happy to explain how growing up poor and working-class led me to my views. Were my life circumstances different, I may very well have ended up conservative, centrist, or only moderately left-wing.

I agree with the theory that there’s been a soft coup in the Democratic and Labour Parties over the last few years, and an overall sea change over the last few decades. The party brass now speaks with such disdain about the proletariat, who traditionally formed their core demographic. These blue-haired fools need to get out of their cushy little bourgeois suburbs and ivory towers and see how we truly live.

I dare them to go to a mill town and announce their pronouns, demand people check their privilege, say they’re lithromantic greysexual moongender, call everyone bigots for understanding biological sex is grounded in material reality, and defend prostitution as an exciting career choice no different than any other job.

This is no longer the party of FDR, Harry Truman, and JFK. It’s been hijacked by clowns who don’t live in the real world. Until they kick out the loud woke contingent, I’ll remain politically homeless.