#WalkAway
You may have heard of the #WalkAway movement. That’s a Twitter hashtag for a group that’s right up my alley: people who recently have switched from liberal to—well, if not conservative, at least to non-liberal, or have become non-Democrats.
It’s unclear how big or important the movement may be. A group of a few thousand people may not make much of a difference unless it grows significantly. Remember the PUMAs of 2008, disgruntled Hillary supporters who supposedly were turning on Obama and might end up handing the election to the GOP? Hardly anyone else remembers them, either, because as a force that were much smaller than the hype.
But perhaps #WalkAway is something more. They are vocal, and they seem to be reaching a lot of other people. Time will tell. My impression is that these people are predominantly young but it’s not limited to the young. Their change seems to have begun as something non-ideological for the most part. It’s more of an emotional revulsion at the level of vitriol doled out by the Democrats these days, the emphasis on division and specially favored groups and the dissing of white men in particular, although quite a few of the #WalkAway spokespeople are black people or women or members of other groups that have traditionally been firmly in the Democrats’ camp.
Here’s more about the movement. It also reminds me somewhat of the “red pill” group, people who (like the #WalkAways) have made a great many YouTube videos (see this and this).
The #WalkAways also seem like somewhat of a variant on the famous old saw, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. if you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” Perhaps this is just a normal evolution for the people in question, something that would have happened anyway even without Trump and the rabid left.
But all I can say is that it feels a bit different than that, and people are reporting that it is fueled by the hate campaign on the left. It makes sense, too, that if a person was initially attracted to the left because he or she thought it was peace/love, that person’s got another think coming on seeing so much hate directed at people who just happen to think differently from the left.
Here are some quotes from the movement’s originator, gay man and would-be actor Brandon Straka:
“I was afraid of losing all my friends. As I began posting about these things on social media, people started attacking me and unfriending me.
“But I thought, ‘You know what, this is too important.’ Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a gay man and I’ve already been through this—people making up lies about what it means to be gay and trying to shame me. I was like, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not doing this twice.’
“The more resentment I received, the stronger I got. Finally, I thought, ‘To hell with it. I’m just going to blow the lid off this whole thing and make this video.’”
The video has garnered 1.3 million views on his Facebook page and has been shared on many other popular pages. It is estimated to have reached some 5 million viewers so far.
There are some 27,000 followers of the Facebook group, with new people posting both video and text testimonials every day. Straka calls them “the patriots.”
“Initially, my focus was on the gay community because I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized],” Straka said. “Then I thought, why should I limit it to just us? They’re doing the same thing to black people. And Hispanic people. And frankly, they’re doing the same thing to everybody in one way or another.
Brave man.
I wish them all luck—welcome to the club!
” I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized],”
The PC always believe they are victims of oppression and persecution. Look at the feminists who claim they are always being oppressed by the evil males.
Who is the “They”?
It is always “They” who are against us. Makes no difference about whatever side one is on, on any issue. It is They who are always bad!
I have spent way too much time reading them on Facebook where the numbers have climbed to over 42,000 members with their testimony and many videos. Take a look. I don’t follow on twitter but there are supposedly many there also.
Ray and Cicero:
If you go to the source, you’ll see he’s actually saying the LEFT is stirring up terror and fear about the right (and about Trump) in order to make people (minorities, gay people, etc.) believe false things about the right, for the left’s own political advantage and to bind those people to the left on false pretenses.
I’ve been watching #walkaway with great interest. In fact, just the other day, I saw this.
https://twitter.com/Stonekettle/status/1013480703906938881
The left is very interested in making #walkaway look like something it’s not. They know perfectly well that if minorities of all varieties stop voting for them in the current proportions, it’s going to be a disaster.
Also, people who take the time to watch the left freaking over all sorts of things, vs what Trump actually says and does must feel like they’re in an alternate universe. Sort of like I felt when I read this. (not what me and Cathy said, but what Jeffrey said)
https://twitter.com/shefails2follow/status/1013501406530195456
If you’re not paying constant attention to the insane rantings of the media, it’s pretty obvious that things are running relatively smoothly. (i tried to embed the tweets, but got a preview error – if you can fix this for me, that would be great. – No big deal if not, people can just click through.)
I want to believe but call me skeptical. I’ve talked to too many people over the years that rail against various left wing policies involving environmentalism, stupid tax increases, immigration, etc. Yet they very rarely switch to the right they just complain about Democrats before they vote for them.
Maybe this time will be different but I’m not so sure.
I went from 132 to 131 FB friends mysteriously.
I exposed the FAKE TIME cover.
I walked away in 1991.
Just wanted to share Jordan Peterson’s new diet. He lost 50 pounds and his snoring is gone and his mood is better and he wakes up easier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLF29w6YqXs
Victim-hood is the easiest and fastest path to power so it is to the benefit of those out of power to claim that everyone in their party is a victim and everyone in power is an evil oppressor.
Remember, if you’re a victim then even arguing with you makes the person arguing with you an evil oppressor. Everyone knows the only way to stop evil oppressors is to oppose them in every way possible.
Every way possible means you’re allowed to do evil yourself because your heart is pure, you’re fighting a more powerful oppressor, and once you’re in power you’ll quit doing evil.
Remember almost every bit of evil in the world was justified because the end justified the means. That is the mantra of all tyrants.
Stalin had to kill those opposed to his benevolent rule. Hitler had to get rid of the Jews, Gypsies, and every other minority so he could take Germany to the glory they deserved. Mao had to purge non-believers so he could take China to the future which would be better for everyone. Progressives have to silence those opposed to them for the protection of the sensibilities of the victims. (If you think they’re crazy now just wait until they get into power.)
It’s the same song 1,000th verse.
Many of us here know the struggle to “walk away” quite well. When I was left of center, I was always very much that: center-left. I did not consider myself a “progressive” and certainly not a “social democrat”. I was a liberal; passionate about free speech, and cultural toleration, certainly in favor of a robust welfare state, but always inclined toward only “piecemeal social engineering” (to use Popper’s phrase). I was skeptical of the free-market, but not hostile to it. I understood corporations could be quite nefarious, but so could government agencies. And I strenuously questioned overly idealistic politicians, activists and intellectuals.
Partly due to my environs (always living in deep blue enclaves), almost all of the criticism I received for my beliefs came from the left. And some of it was quite vitriolic indeed. Disagreement on even one issue was enough to send some of my leftist friends into histrionics. In my case, I supported school choice and was very skeptical of affirmative action. The amount of rage my positions generated on just those two matters (even though I was in line with mainstream liberalism on most other issues) was jarring. I saw similar hatred spewed at liberal Democrats who were pro life, against gay marriage, strongly supportive of the Second Amendment, etc. Dissent, even on just one issue, was intolerable.
And all of this was before social media, or when it was in its infancy. I have no doubt the climate is 50fold more outrageous today.
Straka is very brave. I hope he understands what he is likely to endure for the foreseeable future (he and any family, friends or colleagues who defend him).
it is baffling to me that Democrats are suddenly so concerned about families being separated today. They have been in the business of separating babies from the wombs of mothers for ages.
Dave,
Actually PP has been mostly interested in murdering black and brown babies in the womb. Racist from the founding. Sanger was a eugenics queen.
I don’t know what impact this movement will have, but I do know that such things are our last best hope for avoiding the oncoming train of civil conflict. Whatever form it takes, the message has got to get through to the left that inviting civil war is not a wise or winning strategy.
Judging from my Facebook feed and reading comments from young people on various websites and YouTube channels, there’s a long, long way to go on that score.
The youth have been so effectively brainwashed that I barely recognize them as speaking the same language as me. For example, it is part of the logic of their lexicon now to call anyone with anything remotely critical to say about homosexuality – be it the Catholic view that gay sex is immoral, or the not necessarily religious view that gay marriage is a bad idea – a homophobe. And we all know the same “standard” has been at work for years with respect to Islam (Islamophobia), illegal immigrants (xenophobia), anti-feminism (misogyny), and the million-plus commonplaces that get you branded a “racist.”
It’s not that I’m unaware that such ways of thinking have been around for some time; rather, it’s the casual, matter-of-fact way in which mere 10-13 year-olds exhibit them that stuns (and appalls) me.
Back home in Florida, I sometimes overhear high school kids talking among themselves and can’t believe my ears. It sounds like they’re repeating slogans and memes they’d just learned in a college orientation. To be blunt, they sound like robots. It’s creepy.
What I’m saying is that it seems, largely via public education and pop culture, that the equation of being non-leftist, non-SJW – and particularly of being right-of-center – with deep irrationality, moral evil, and primitive emotionalism is close to being *baked into* our language, our common modes of speech, and thus right into our thoughts.
That’s an extremely dangerous place to be.
My hope for movements like the one under discussion is that they continue to flower simply on the strength of innate human revulsion for malicious hatred combined with old-fashioned American decency.
I want to add that perhaps the left’s most sinister ploy is to pretend that the spigot of hatred spits from the right. On the individual level, how many of us, and how many of the people we know who are non-SJW or right-wing, started off by being aggressive toward lefties, as opposed to being driven into it by lefties’ refusal to leave them in peace?
Lefties tend to phrase the rationales for their aggression much in the way that Muslims phrase their rationales for Jihad. Conservatives, when they get nasty, tend to phrase their rationales in reactive terms. (Though again, in public, and when expedient, the left will use reactive language as well.)
For my own part, I was more than happy to be genteel and fair to my lefty friends for a long time, until one-by-one they began calling me evil, Hitlerian, etc., to my face. No space was “safe.” A dinner with family. A casual party. A classroom. Coffee at some cafe. Then the movies came with the preaching, and the media, and the TV shows, and the sportscasters – and there was nothing left to do but either cower and hide or refuse to put up with it.
We have a most astonishing situation. The language is baked with SJW ingredients, leading to thinking (so to speak) that is directly at odds with reality. Thus, the left can call for violence and lifelong harassment of GOP officials and sell it as moral and *defensive* – a just war defense, as it were.
Where have we seen that phenomenon before? What do you do when the totalitarians, communists, and fascists, bury the language beneath the axiom that they are the freedom fighters?
Walk Away – yes. Away from the axiom. But not from the aggression of its boosters.
Scott Adams thinks #Walkaway is real since it’s based on emotion and not some policy difference.
http://blog.dilbert.com/2018/06/29/episode-122-civil-war-walkaway-the-weed-poison-pill-mike-lee-eliminating-ice/
I had a similar awakening in 1992 when I gave up on the Dems. I couldn’t fathom how a major party could tolerate two criminals like the Cintons. If I’d behaved like Bill Clinton, my wife would have divorced me for infidelity and I’d have gone to prison for all the accusations of sexual assault and rape. (Please don’t lawyer up and say they were just allegations. I’ve never in my life encountered a man with even one such allegation. He’s guilty as hell). The two of them together were deeply involved with a bunch of scummy people who went to prison for their business deals. She’s a crook too and it was in-your-face obvious 25 years ago. Yet the Democratic Party persisted and defended the indefensible. Just as Scott Adams points out, my switch had nothing to do with policy.
Mentioned the “walk away” movement to a family member who is very liberal, and from a solidly Democrat family, who revealed that they had, in essence, “walked away” from the Democratic party due, especially, to their recent hateful rhetoric.
Knowing how devoted to the Democrat party and its policies this person was, I was very shocked, indeed.
If this is any indication of just how badly their current ultra-Leftist tactics and increasingly violent rhetoric have played, the Democrats are really in trouble.
The #WalkAways also seem like somewhat of a variant on the famous old saw, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. if you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.”
Of course, in that famous old saw, “liberal” means what we Americans refer to as “conservative”, and “conservative” means what the leftists have trained us to call “ultra-right-wing”.
kolnai:
I feel a great sense of disorientation and dislocation when I read so much of what the left writes and hear young people parrot it back as though these are self-evidence truths.
See this, this, this, as well as this, to see how long this sort of thing (or its roots) has been in operation.
Neo, you are shaming me. Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind is on my bookshelf, thus far only skimmed. But I have read the reviews. 🙂
Thing is, even if a lot of these people don’t significantly change their orientation, that’s not the worst thing. A level of reasonable discourse between political polarities is good for dialog, and should be good for the republic in total.
This last 2 years has not been reasonable discourse at all, just insane ranting. Anything that sanity checks it at all seems positive.
What I’m saying is that it seems, largely via public education and pop culture, that the equation of being non-leftist, non-SJW – and particularly of being right-of-center – with deep irrationality, moral evil, and primitive emotionalism is close to being *baked into* our language, our common modes of speech, and thus right into our thoughts.
Yep. But even if we were somehow able to remove/lessen leftist influence in public education, what to do about pop culture? To my way of thinking that’s now the main culprit, especially with how it influences the very young.
I’m with you, steve.c. I don’t want a one-party system or a one-viewpoint society – I want an environment in which at least two sides are always challenging one another, keeping one another honest (more or less), and keeping moving the project of protecting the greatest possible amount of personal liberty for the largest possible number of people.
I’m cheering the #walkaway folks. I just read a WaPo piece today about how (paraphrasing) there is no evidence that this movement represents a large-scale defection from D to R – but it doesn’t have to. All it has to do, for me, is to restore some moderation to the left side of the spectrum, so that the right side doesn’t get complacent or triumphalist.
Ruth H Says:
July 3rd, 2018 at 4:28 pm
I have spent way too much time reading them on Facebook where the numbers have climbed to over 42,000 members with their testimony and many videos. Take a look. I don’t follow on twitter but there are supposedly many there also.
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I am totally surprised that Twitter and Facebook haven’t closed him down over some “hate speech” crimes.
Even the Declaration of Independence got trashed.
https://reason.com/blog/2018/07/03/facebook-algorithm-flags-removes-declara
However, to the point — here is another article from Coleman Hughes, who was “featured” in a few posts earlier this summer as another “switcher” to reality.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-only-schools-16000.html
“The neo-integrationists believe that helping blacks and Hispanics means changing the system until it rewards whatever level of effort blacks and Hispanics are already putting in. But this is like training for a marathon by redefining “marathon” to mean however many miles you can already run—it might seem rewarding in the short-term, but it removes the incentive to improve. And the track record of social engineers should make us profoundly skeptical that a top-down effort to determine where millions of individuals educate themselves would go off without a hitch or an unintended consequence. The neo-integrationist agenda offers fake help that would lead to even faker progress, and blacks and Hispanics should reject it roundly.”
Coleman Hughes is a writer and philosophy student at Columbia University. His writing has been featured in Quillette and the Spectator.
Can it be? Is there really a decent middle? A “silent or perhaps vocal (but adamant) sonority”?
(Gosh, I sure hope so….)
Amazing. Wonder if CNN or the NYT will report on it (heh….).
More importantly, in honor of this phenomenon (no matter how large or small it may be), I’m reposting repost a pair of neoneocon’s truly “greatest hits” (though there are, indeed, so very many):
http://www.neoneocon.com/2015/03/21/the-band-that-just-walked-away-renee-part-i-the-song/
http://www.neoneocon.com/2015/04/03/the-band-that-just-walked-away-renee-part-ii-the-lyrics/
Those who discovered the ‘right’ way late in life seem sometimes to yearn for the comfort of the ‘wrong’ way. Born and schooled on the right way, the way of individual freedom and owning the consequences of your actions, I am free. I am not perfect, sometimes I (emotionally) wound others, and I accept that. But those I may wound need to be tough or realize they are cry babbies.
If I actually want to wound you, you will be dead and have nothing to complain about.
Dershowitz chimes in. (Although I doubt he’ll “walk away”, he’s certainly not giving in to the madness.)
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/07/04/dershowitz-unloads-on-ny-socialist-dem-marthas-vineyard-liberals.html
While we are comparing conversion stories I have to say mine is a bit different, but perhaps worth retelling. I’m the son of an FDR liberal and Keynesian economist who moved to Australia in the 70s. Australians still remembered WW2 and had an overall positive view of Americans. There was the term ‘septic’ for Americans (ie rhyming slang – Yank rhymes with septic tank.) But then the left got going and, unlike the American left had no problem blaming America for all that was wrong in the world. No pretence of loving America like the US left tries to effect. Julian Assange is a pretty good example of an Aussie lefty. Anyhow, I slowly learned to stifle myself, like Edith Bunker. Then I came back to the US on business and found myself making long road trips. There was morning Edition on NPR and later in the day there was All Things Considered. In between there was Rush who was saying all the things my inner Edith Bunker was thinking but not daring to say. It was hashtag drive away at 70 mph in a Dodge pickup way back in ’88. And now the Trumpster is trashtalking them 24/7 on Twitter. Hallelujah brothers and sisters.
If you go to the source, you’ll see he’s actually saying the LEFT is stirring up terror and fear about the right (and about Trump) in order to make people (minorities, gay people, etc.) believe false things about the right, for the left’s own political advantage and to bind those people to the left on false pretenses.
“They” in cultural Othering works for fake liberals as well as conservatives. Humans do not have immunity merely because they want to claim a party or philosophy.
It is why people react negatively irregardless of which side of this Blue vs Red fight they are on, so long as they perceive some Other as threatening them.
As for youtube, people are going to have to move away from it given who owns and controls it. So far, most content creators are on youtube so the migration will need a good alternative competitor. Then a word of mouth campaign which should not be a problem given social media.
Patreon or Twitch is the most popular alternatives so far, but they don’t really do the same thing as Youtube.
Joe Walsh and “Walk Away”
https://www.google.com/search?q=Joe%20Walsh%20Walk%20Away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_4iQDYDVNo
This will bring out intersectionalism ver. 2. “Special” people, black women or gay men who espouse the wrong messages will be singled out extreme villainization. Soon the punditocracy will be placing the KKK hat on his head.
Barry Meislin Says:
July 4th, 2018 at 3:38 am
… I’m reposting repost a pair of neoneocon’s truly “greatest hits” (though there are, indeed, so very many):
http://www.neoneocon.com/2015/03/21/the-band-that-just-walked-away-renee-part-i-the-song/
http://www.neoneocon.com/2015/04/03/the-band-that-just-walked-away-renee-part-ii-the-lyrics/
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Family, fireworks, and a walk down memory lane – doesn’t get any better than that.
Happy Fourth of July to everyone.
I’m just testing if you’ve taken my advice.
I do like the Quote Investigator (I monitor his blog), and he points out that the quote neither crosses time nor borders well by his examples. The words simply do not mean the same things across those two. If the quote justifies American Conservatism then it justifies French Republicanism, or the conservative world of Benjamin Disraeli. The small ‘c’ conservative is not American conservatism
Further, what is liberal and what is conservative? From what I see from both sides, the words are just parodies of the reality of both, cuz they interlap. You did strike a moment of cogence by adding “far left”. How about the understanding that liberal Republicans and Democrats are more alike, share more values, than the far-right, add descriptive terms, and the far-left, more descriptive terms (I’m better versed in the latter from my time as a Republican, so that would be Progressives, SJW, and the Marxists, but not exclusive).
Now what did I mean by liberal Republicans and Democrats? People that believe in the Rule of Law and it’s basis, people that do not idolatrize any branch of government nor excuse any branch when it breaks the Rule of Law, people that believe in equality under the law but not equal outcomes through law, and people that can see that when our cultural beliefs and laws break our foundational political philosophy those beliefs and laws need to be changed.
“That’s a Twitter hashtag for a group that’s right up my alley: people who recently have switched from liberal to—well, if not conservative, at least to non-liberal, or have become non-Democrats.” Which means what? Non-liberals and C(c)onservatives have been for parsing our Amendment rights out of existence, a non-liberal SCOTUS is more likely to rule for government ‘needs’ and against the Bill of Rights. And Democrats, all Democrats, have been working towards what? Anti-Republicanism? Where the solace except in some false dichotomy? We make so much out of so little.
Frankly, the Europeans are more politically astute than we because they aren’t stuck in our dichotomy.
“…more politically astute…”
That’s an interesting way to put it…
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-suicide-of-europe/
The left seems very concerned about #walkaway
https://arcdigital.media/pro-trump-russian-linked-twitter-accounts-are-posing-as-ex-democrats-in-new-astroturfed-movement-20359c1906d3
ok, we got the new walkaway… how about LeftOverWomen?
just curious…
Melissa Says:
July 5th, 2018 at 1:00 pm
The left seems very concerned about #walkaway
https://arcdigital.media/pro-trump-russian-linked-twitter-accounts-are-posing-as-ex-democrats-in-new-astroturfed-movement-20359c1906d3
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Since I don’t know that writer, I can’t assess her unsupported claims to be able to tell that many (or most) of the #walkaway followers/tweeters/whatevers are fake-bots-Russians!.
However, she lists a LOT of the tweets and the inaugural videos, so maybe this will be a case of feeding the dog that bites you.
Of more interest to me was this article by another writer at Arcdigital, which is almost even-handed, although you can tell he is spinning as hard as he can to make not serving Sanders OK but not serving gay-wedding-cakes NOT-OK.
He also misstates the case somewhat: same-sex marriages were not legal in Colorado at the time, so the baker was not “breaking the law” in that particular regard.
https://arcdigital.media/sarah-huckabee-sanders-gay-wedding-cakes-and-fundamental-questions-about-freedom-c479fbccfea7
Lee Says:
March 22nd, 2015 at 10:23 am
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-musiquarium-featuring-left-banke_27.html?m=1
Couldn’t navigate to Part I of this, but then I am on my phone. Interesting read!
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Found part 1, both were fascinating.
Never heard any of their songs other than “Renee” — have queued up all the songs mentioned in the articles just to see what I missed.