You knew we’d go there. Dig into unfiltered political perspectives.

Politics: Left vs. Right

I wandered the college library, hopelessly trying to occupy my time before my next class. My mind was racing through every plausible scenario in which my life could possibly change. I didn't want to hide my heritage any longer, to keep pretending to be something I wasn’t.

Ever since second grade, I've had people question the validity of my "whiteness." I’ve been outright called a liar. I can thank my one white grandpa that my mom was able to classify me as white—it seemed the appropriate term for a while. Until I was six, my hair was white-blonde, and my skin practically ivory. But as I got older, I became darker, and my features became more "ethnic" like my grandmother. I currently have hair like burnt lumber, slanted, amber-colored eyes, a sharp visage and deep olive skin. Because of the season, my complexion isn't as vibrant as it typically is.

I'd been encumbered with deciding how to tell the truth for over a year, and I finally felt it was time. My experiences brought me into conservatism and led me to support Donald Trump in 2016. People shouldn't be scared to be open about their race or ethnicity, and under President Trump, I've no longer felt abashed. Thoughts swirled around my head—I no longer saw bookshelves, just words racing around, and images of a hopeful future began to appear along with them. Suddenly, I was snapped back; my mind no longer lingered with myriad introspections. My eyes refocused, and I saw my friend Ronnie grinning ear to ear. Her ring felt like it was still embedded in my shoulder, where she had punched.

"There's my favorite Trump supporter!" she remarked with an exceptionally pronounced eye roll.

Although we had different political views, nothing seemed to stop our friendship. We frequently confabulated on a variety of topics, including politics, and our thoughts never had caused either of us to want to distance or outright end our friendship. We were never found pettifogging and always maintained civility.

We moved to a more private expanse of the library so we could talk without being repeatedly hushed. We discussed her new classes, her desire to become a preschool teacher for children with autism, the latest saga in her parents' alleged divorce and her breakup with her latest boyfriend. "What's new with you?" she finally asked.

I spilled everything, laying my heart out. I explained how I had been keeping my heritage a secret. My family's past experiences had created fear in the youngest generation, but I was ready to be open and even embrace my culture publicly. She seemed bewildered but intrigued.

"Well, what are you then?" she exclaimed. My heart raced. I don't know why, but my mouth became sandpaper. I could feel my temperature rising, flushing my face, and reddening my ears. I realized I had never said it out loud, not even in my house. I collected myself and replied, "I'm Romani."

"Oh, that's a cool name,” she quickly responded. “It sounds Italian, but you look more native than anything else. Is that a tribe somewhere?"

"No, it's a South Asian group," I said. I felt awkward, yet excited. My heart continued to race, but I started to sit taller and talked with a confident smile.

"Asia," she teased. "So you're like Chinese?"

"No," I laughed. "Think India or Pakistan."

My Open-Minded Friend Couldn’t Accept My Identity

The tension I had felt earlier was melting away—if anyone could make this conversation fun, it was Ronnie. "Hmm, I don't think I've heard of that," she shifted in her chair, suddenly seeming different. She looked up, her eyes pointed directly at mine, and without a beat, continued, "Is there another name that I might recognize?"

That sentence chilled me to the core. I felt sick, but I reminded myself of who was in front of me. Ronnie was someone I had talked to for years about such controversial topics that this should have been nothing in comparison. I took a deep breath and responded.

“Well, I don't like this term; in fact, my mom hates it when my uncle uses it. However, there is a term that you would recognize, and it's…," I took another breath. "Gypsy".

Complete deafening silence followed, and I could hear my blood flow. "It's not an occupation or a costume; it's actually a race and ethnicity. My whole family is,” I frantically added. I was immediately cut off—not by her voice but by the way she stood out of her chair glaring down at me. She became capricious, raised her hand and slammed her twisted fists onto the table, sending a steady shockwave to the ends of the room. Her face became clenched and sour.

“That's fucking disgusting," she yelled. My heart dropped and fell out of my being. I was paralyzed, seemingly trapped in an emotional chrysalis. She looked as if she had a terrible taste in her mouth that needed to be spat out. "You're a fucking Gyppo cunt, you should be ashamed, you should feel wrong, not for hiding your fucking greedy, lying, dirty heritage but pretending to be a decent fucking person,” she continued. “You should have just kept up your white facade. I can't be your fucking friend anymore. I feel disgusting. I should have known—of course, a gypsy would be a fucking Trump supporter."

She stormed away. Out of all the scenarios, I had never expected her to bedevil me. I didn’t remember the length of time that went by. It could have been hours or minutes. Without realizing it, I had walked to my car and gotten inside. I skipped class and simply tried to process what happened.

Since that experience in 2019, I have decided to move past it and claim my culture. As an artist, I’ve created dozens of paintings about Romani experiences. I have joined groups that advocate for the desegregation of Romani in Europe. I have also begun to write short stories about my family's history, from slavery, racism and familial pressures to Christianity and immigration. In doing this, I have interacted more with liberal-minded activists.

Some left-leaning persons are “fine” with my Romani heritage. But when they find out I support Trump, they act churlish and bombilate with prejudice. Here are real examples:

"Well, you're just a Gypsy—people like you and the Jews shouldn't have the same rights as the rest of us."

“Your mother should have aborted you.”

“The only thing worse than an entitled Jew is a living Gypsy.”

“You guys steal kids, right? Is that pedophilia?”

And my personal favorite, “Gross, fuck Gypsies.”

In a recent conversation, a teacher who knew my heritage assumed I was liberal and voting for Joe Biden like her. When she found out I supported President Trump, she had me stay after class. She asked how I, “a person of color,” could possibly support Trump.

“He has put the focus on minorities,” I told her. “Trump has helped Native Americans who are victims of sexual abuse. His administration has promoted economic growth in impoverished communities. His policies created career opportunity programs to assist minority communities with high unemployment, low incomes, and high crime rates. He increased school choice, promoted legal immigration, and continued large-scale police reform."

Her response was duplicitous. “He is Hitler; he promotes white nationalism."

"Hitler killed hundreds of thousands of my people; he committed atrocities against humanity,” I responded. “Trump has created peace in the Middle East and in East Asia. He has lifted up all communities because he believes in America. He wants all Americans to succeed. I wan—" She cut me off with the most odious sentence I have been told to date.

"Well, if Hitler had killed more Gypsies then I could have been spared listening to your ignorant comments."

The tolerant left has shown me complete intolerance. I have been shown hate, hypocrisy and genuine racism. I've had many great conversations with Democrats and liberals, but the overwhelming number of people on the left who message me with death threats and racist comments is staggering.

I will never judge someone for race, skin, orientation, religion or politics, but I put my foot down on hate. I supported Trump in 2016 because of his policies, and I support Trump in 2020 for his policies. He sees me as an American first. He doesn’t see me as separate or unequal because of my heritage. The left, on the other hand, has shown me they don’t see me past my skin, race and appearance.

Once I came forward about my ethnicity, I learned my liberal friends’ true feelings.

The Left’s Intolerance Has Solidified My Support for Trump

After Trump’s election, I dove into politics, naively assuming that the problems I saw as an outsider were fixable.

Democrats seemed to be operating in a reality that didn’t quite mesh with the one I had observed while working with consumer brands for the past decade. There was a giant gap in the way technology was (or wasn’t) leveraged, and they consistently missed the mark with their messaging. Surely some fresh perspectives could keep Democrats from alienating massive chunks of their audience, right?

Before I got involved, I was optimistic. Now I’m not so sure.

When I consult for clients in other industries, I always focus on a few core themes: Are you building a work environment that will attract and keep the best talent? Are you set up to quickly run experiments, test ideas, learn and improve? Are you making every effort possible to empathize with the people you’re trying to appeal to? Regardless of the size and mission of an organization, this rough template can guide any team towards success. As I began to volunteer for candidates and grab coffee with campaign trail veterans, I was floored to find that the Democratic Party doesn’t provide any centralized guidance or support on how to answer “yes” to these key questions.

How the Democratic Party Sets Itself Up for Failure

Let’s start with attracting a brilliant team—critical for scoring a win. Unfortunately, the way things are structured right now, the pool of candidates for political jobs is incredibly limited.

Even as modern workplaces put serious effort into diversifying talent pipelines, it’s still tricky to uncover open positions in political organizations. Job descriptions get passed around casually, via emails, text, Slack or messages to a private Facebook Group. Nepotism runs rampant. If I hadn’t had access to a few contacts already working in politics, I wouldn’t have had any sense of how to get started, beyond simply sending out cold emails. There’s been an undeniable surge in interest from folks looking for more meaningful work over the past few years, but what happens when there’s no place to register that intent?

It’d be a no-brainer to build a one-stop-shop for people not currently in politics to browse potential causes and campaigns to get involved with, but no such place exists. Discovering these opportunities doesn’t just rely on one’s ability to know what to look for and where to search, but to understand the language of politics as well.

Let’s say you’re an exceptional social media manager with tons of experience engaging online communities. You’d need to know to look for “digital organizer” roles to put your skills to use. Or maybe you’re a logistics wizard that’s produced live events your entire career. Did you try looking up positions on “advance” teams? Of course you didn’t! Why would you? On-ramps into the industry are traditionally hard to find and steep to climb, meaning the same people get hired over and over and over again—even if they aren’t the best candidates for the job.

It’s also tough to find a job in politics that earns a living wage. It’s no secret that Republicans are more well-funded than Dems, but I was still surprised to learn that even big-name progressive politicians don’t pay all staffers the $15 minimum wage they advocate publicly. They, of course, all make the argument that finding purpose-driven work is more important than salary and that working in politics is a selfless act of service. Skills that are highly valued in one industry—running paid digital campaigns, for example—may only pay half as much once you enter politics.

For many folks, this 50 percent pay cut can make it impossible to get involved beyond just part-time volunteering. A norm of low salaries means most positions are held either by people from privileged backgrounds who don’t need to work, recent grads with a severe lack of work (and life) experience, or super-dedicated but stressed-out staffers working long hours and ignoring their own basic needs to make ends meet.

Democratic Campaigns Are Set Up Like Tech Startups and That’s a Problem

Political entities can feel a lot like startups in that there’s very little infrastructure, and resources always seem scarce. We often hear tales of the deep camaraderie forged in the operational chaos of campaigns, but at what cost? Campaign management often falls into the hands of young twentysomethings looking to bolster their resumes, with no frame of reference for basic business functions like balancing budgets, managing employees or upholding codes of conduct. Nearly everything seems reactive to news cycles and mudslinging, rather than simply developing and executing on a strategic plan.

From this starting point, it would take a giant leap to arrive at a place where team members could effectively collaborate across functions, document what they learn and incorporate new insights into next week’s work. With most campaigns dismantling immediately after Election Day, the Democratic Party could be the glue to capture this institutional knowledge and get better over time. As it stands right now, each new campaign starts back at square one, and may only become a well-oiled machine just before it dies.

Regardless of a behind-the-scenes shitshow, some organizations do still look successful on the surface. This perceived success can come from a polished approach to researching, understanding and connecting with their audience in authentic ways. The best politicians have an innate ability to read the room and adapt their style to relate to whoever’s in front of them.

Campaigns as a whole, however, seem to have a much trickier time getting this right. The traditional wisdom in Democratic politics is to default to the message that resonates best with “high propensity voters,” a group of reliable poll-goers that tends to skew older, whiter and wealthier than the general public. Because it’s seen as the safest path forward for a campaign, any research overwhelmingly favors this group’s interests. Messages crafted with this audience in mind wind up getting poorly translated into videos and social posts that seem entirely tone-deaf to a generation of would-be voters. In deprioritizing their understanding of an audience that drives culture and conversation, Dems consistently seem out of touch.

If We Want to Beat Republicans, We Need to Modernize Democratic Campaigns

When I first started inserting myself in these conversations, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I saw potential. There was tons of low-hanging fruit that could easily improve the rates of voter turnout in America and end a cycle of marginalization. Only about 50 percent of eligible voters took part in our last presidential election, not because they’re lazy, but because they’re uninspired. We have an opportunity to rise to the occasion and deliver a better version of politics, but there are still a lot of structural hurdles in the way.

If Democrats want to see better results at the polls, they need to restructure entirely with more inclusive hiring practices, competitive wages, a self-awareness about what they don’t know and a willingness to listen and learn from people outside of their self-imposed bubble. Until they get serious about these basics, it’s hard to take them seriously.

A brand strategist, who has worked on campaigns, sees a dismal future for the Democratic Party.

Inside the War Room: I Thought Democrats Could Get Better but Now I'm Not So Sure

It started when I was 15. I lived in affluent suburbia, raised by feminist parents. As a young white man from a well-off background living in a first-world country, I am incredibly privileged, but I was far too immersed in teenage solipsism at this point to realize it. My experience was fairly typical—I spent a lot of time angry, anxious or bored. I had friends, but not that many. I was academically gifted, but terrified of being seen as nerdy. I tried to “man myself up” with home workouts and martial arts. My teenage years were passing without the adventures and hijinks I’d seen in teen movies, so I sought escapism in fantasy books and video games. Most of all, I would sprawl on the couch and scroll mindlessly through social media—Instagram, Facebook, YouTube—consuming memes and videos.

My first encounter with the far right was a YouTube compilation of British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, sent to me by a friend. In clips taken from TV interviews, panel discussions and Q&As at universities, Yiannopoulos argued with liberals, feminists and “social justice warriors,” each ending with a put-down or retort in his trademark camp, acerbic style. I was glad to find there were more clips like it—thousands, in fact—from different commentators, pundits and provocateurs.

They had punchy clickbait titles, all following a similar formula: “X destroys/eviscerates/humiliates stupid/entitled/angry/uninformed feminist/student/fake-news journalist/protestor with facts/logic.” This was politics as a combat sport, with debates and conversations edited down to a highlight reel of what seemed like intellectual knockout blows. I had been raised on politics of compassion, empathy and respectability. This new approach was combative, unapologetic and politically incorrect; the approach as well as the ideas were excitingly forbidden.

YouTube’s algorithm soon filled my homepage with similar recommended videos. I told myself I was watching them critically to get outside my own liberal bubble. Watching content at home on my phone and laptop allowed me this experimentation with perfect anonymity—I wouldn’t have gone into a store to ask for one of these pundits’ books, for instance, and certainly wouldn’t have read that book on the bus. Soon, I had moved on from highlight compilations to longer debates and podcasts from now notorious figures: Carl Benjamin, Jordan Peterson, Gavin McInnes, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder and Yiannopoulos. These men all had, and continue to have, different political positions—some are unequivocally far-right, others identify as mainstream conservatives and some still attempt, however feebly, to evade the “right-wing” label altogether. Yet they all used similar strategies of persuasion, which I would only recognize later.

Far-Right Pundits Had Begun to Warp My Political Belief System

They all painted a compelling, apocalyptic picture of Western civilization under threat from third-wave feminism, Antifa violence, mass Muslim migration, affirmative action and Marxist infiltration of academia. They all regularly made appeals to traditional, heroic masculinity, which was purportedly under threat. They all identified with rationality, logic and common sense, with some, such as Benjamin and Peterson, claiming to have originally been liberal, but were pushed right by the left’s extremism.

This was often helped by appearances on mainstream television and podcasts. (All of the commentators named earlier have appeared at least once on 

.) Their videos would often focus on one particularly emotive case of false rape allegation or Islamic extremism and claim it reflected the norm. Anti-feminist and anti-social justice memes did this even more reductively, with reactions to screenshots of misguided, provocative or oversensitive tweets and op-eds out of context. These meme accounts would also post warped, misleading, similarly out-of-context headlines from far-right news sites like Breitbart. Finally, they claimed that the mainstream media and political correctness kept these “inconvenient truths” hidden, and prevented them being discussed, which helped explain the lack of evidence for them around me.

By the time I recognized these patterns, my political views had been warped.

I was lying to myself—I hadn’t been watching, viewing and reading this content critically. Instead, I was binging through it as easy entertainment and I had begun to absorb these far-right arguments. A sort of doublethink had started, where I was outwardly, performatively liberal, yet inwardly more and more suspicious of Islam, feminism and the trans lobby.

Publicly, I explored these positions tentatively, asking my teachers loaded questions and experimenting with devil’s advocate perspectives when debating friends. I often argued in terms of “saving” or “reforming” the left from its problems.

In private, I was bolder. My family had always enjoyed political discussions, and I remember frustrating them in an hours-long argument one evening, trying to convince them that Islam was an intolerant religion. I knew they were worried for me, but I felt a need to argue what seemed like an urgent, important truth. In some areas, far-right narratives were supported by my lived experience—a false rumor of assault convinced me that false rape allegations could happen to anyone at any time—but mostly they fed on my ignorance and entitlement. I was a sheltered, middle-class schoolboy, with most of my peers similarly well-off, white and male.

It was easy to convince me that universities were filled with intolerant Marxists, because I’d never attended one. It was easy to convince me that the average trans person was an aggressive caricature, because I’d never met one.

Expanding My Worldview Weakened Their Intolerant Agendas

Several things helped me unlearn far-right propaganda. Firstly, I was growing up. After I hit 16, I was meeting more people and seeing new things—I was less self-righteous and contrarian. I could understand concepts like unconscious bias without defensively rejecting them. I was also happier, less anxious and more sociable. I read more widely on sexism, racism and the (impressively tolerant) history of Islam. I listened to more perspectives outside of my own. Natalie Wynn, a transwoman who offers counterarguments to right-wing talking points, became a favorite Youtuber of mine.

Secondly, I was never a full convert. Far-right propaganda had warped some of my views, but never fully poisoned them. I had always found the genuine alt-right repulsive, and never felt drawn to the political communities on sites like Reddit and 4chan.

As I have said earlier, I recognized the tactics being used by far-right YouTubers to convert young white men. But more importantly, I realized the real ugliness and hatred under their facade of rationality and moderation. Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) gained infamy on national news for tweeting about raping British MP Jess Phillips, using the hashtag #FeminismIsCancer.

This ugliness was just as present in the more mainstream conservative members of the internet right. Steven Crowder’s 2016 Christmas special saw him waterboarded by men in “socialism is for f*gs” t-shirts until he “confessed” to voting Democrat. Ben Shapiro, who turned into a benign internet meme for his catchphrase, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” gave insight into his terrifying worldview with his 2016 thriller, 

. In it his literary heroes include a domestic terrorist who bombs the Environmental Protection Agency and a cop who kills a Black eight-year-old, brainwashed and armed by antiracists. The book finishes with America being invaded by Canada, Communist China and the European Union.

As well as promoting chauvinism and paranoid hate, these men seem to share a sense of inadequacy and insecurity. Defending Western history and traditional masculinity lets them align themselves with pilgrim fathers, frontiersmen and the war heroes of D-Day, all while sitting in an air-conditioned studio. It was the same insecurity that I felt about my comfy, privileged life.

I am now an undergrad at a good university, happy and politically progressive. But I worry that the forces of far-right propaganda are even stronger now, emboldened by four years of Donald Trump. Their views are more normalized, and many will insist they aren’t far right at all. I am scared for all our futures, but I hope my story helps someone find a happier one.

A young man recounts his experience of a deep dive into the alt right movement before an ultimate reversal.