When you first become a “Republican” after your stint of years as a shiny-eyed liberal, a calm moderate, or an apolitical outsider – your head is filled with the idea from every corner of the social media conservative movement that it is “so hard and difficult to be a Republican.”
You are told that Republicans are constantly ostracized by the radical Left, and that everyone hates you for your political persuasion. You are told that you will be treated differently because of who you vote for, and that because of your newfound political party you will lose opportunities and be forced to scrounge off scraps like a rat because you decided to “go against the grain” and align yourself with the so-called evil terrorists that are the Republican party.
You are told it is scary to be a Republican, and that everywhere you go you need to watch your back at the impending terror that lurks around every left-wing corner.
All of this could not be further from the truth.
Being a “Republican” in 2023 America is as easy as logging onto Twitter and retweeting the latest right-wing political talking points. Sure, loonie lefties do hate many people just because they are Republican, but this is a small margin of people, yet it is amplified by the Republican party to make you feel like you are an outsider – a sentiment that is very attractive to people.
Imagining yourself as the lone ranger rebel who breaks free from the shackles of society because you support the latest GOP orthodoxy is surely an intoxicating and dreamy visage, but it is just that. A visage. It is ethereal, and not real. It is not tethered in reality. Envisioning yourself as Django because you voted with the R’s is a fable concocted in your mind by the very people creating the political landscape we exist in today.
Republicans and Democrats both have billions of dollars. Both get donations from the world’s largest corporate interests to do their bidding. Both have millions upon millions of people aligned with their message. And both are exactly the same, except for when it comes to strategy.
The Democrats tell impressionable and insecure people that their value with being a Democrat is becoming a “savior,” a hero among the marginalized and the oppressed where you can become Moses and free the weak from bondage.
The Republican strategy is convincing those same impressionable and insecure people that they are the outsider, but to embrace that world, shunned by the outside, because they have “facts” on their side – while Democrats only have emotions. And how do you embrace being an outsider? By donating your money to the GOP of course, who will surely one day “make you the outsider no more!”
There is nothing brave about being a Republican or a Democrat. I am not trying to shame individuals, I am trying to shame those at the top who would seek to have your allegiance by giving you nothing but a faux sense of self and identity in return.
Bravery comes from sacrifice. Bravery comes from telling the truth when no one else will. If your ideology of “truth” and “sacrifice” hinges on the Republican Party, a group who takes millions of dollars from Big Pharma and Big Tech, who starts wars in foreign lands to pay off the defense companies that fund them, who have sold your jobs overseas, who have corrupted and destroyed your money supply, who have allowed the beauty of your country to be ravaged with illegal aliens, crime and hideous suburbia, and who indeed care nothing about you – then how can you say you are within the ranks of the “brave” or an “outsider” fighting for what is right?
The truth is, America balances on the edge of a knife. In a time that Nietzsche would call “Last Men” – with millions of people with no purpose or meaning – politics and the games those at the top play with our lives unbeknownst to us are incredibly seductive games to keep us entertained and distracted.
The real heroes and brave individuals are the ones who have been really destroyed. The ones who did not do what they did for social media views and money. They are the ones you probably have never even heard about, professing love, real individuality and courageous truth without the opinions of others clouding their judgment. And I can assure you this much, they were not Republicans.
If you want to be an outsider, you will not worry about the opinions of others believing you are an outsider. You will profess truth, irreverent of political ideology or persuasion. You will sacrifice the well-being of yourself and your status because of what is right – not because it is Right.
