Posted on 02/12/2026 10:47:57 AM PST by TheDon
So, I think a lot of people are under the impression that I've always been, like, far-right, and that's why I'm so, like, strong-minded about being a conservative. And I want to kind of share my walk-away story and the fact that, yes, I was a Democrat, and why I'm not anymore. So, for a little background, yes, I was raised in a conservative household, um, and I had a wonderful childhood.
My parents were amazing people. They were not homophobic or racist or anything. They just believed in smaller government, no taxes, be a modest, good person, don't do drugs, and, like, you're good to go.
It was just a normal, conservative, American household. White picket fence, pool in the yard, a dog. Just normal.
And then I went to high school, and it was a private high school that was therapy-based. It was a therapeutic high school. And not that this has any correlation at all, but it just so happened that it was about 80% LGBTQ.
And it was a small school. I mean, I graduated with probably 35 to 40 other kids. Very, very, very small.
I posted this yesterday, but happy Pride Month, by the way. But anyway, so I went to that high school, and that's when things started to change, because inevitably, in New Jersey, you have a bunch of LGBTQ kids around in a therapy-based high school. Do the math.
Of course, it's going to be a liberal-based high school. Not that the teachers would get involved in politics, which I really respect and still do to this day, but the kids. It was just the way of thinking.
You were basically a liberal the second you walked into that school. And I didn't mind it, because there were actually a lot of things that I agreed with. So I was like, you know what? A lot of these social issues and gender issues and all these, I do lean left.
I agree with these things. So I opened my mind to the democratic way, and what do you know? I felt like it resonated with me more. I made friends with so many amazing kids there that felt like being a Democrat was the way that they felt safe, and I wanted them to feel safe around me.
And I respected them, and I loved them, and I wanted to be a part of that for them, and just for the goodness of humanity. So I went left, really left. And then there was a day, and I'll never forget this day, because it was the day I lost all of my friends that I had spent two years building friendships with.
Birthday parties, going to their house, coming to my house, pool parties, sleepovers. I dated a few of them. I lost all of my friends because of one specific day.
It was an assembly for gun control, and of course, it was about banning guns entirely. And I remember at that time, I could absolutely get behind more regulation, background checks, mental health checks, you know, just regulations, having to keep it locked up, like things like that. Yeah, I could definitely get behind with a good argument, but bans, I couldn't really get there yet.
Not that I was totally close-minded. I was 15, I was a kid, I didn't own a gun, so I was, you know, just experimenting with my thoughts, which I should be able to have the freedom to do, which is where I'm going with this. So I wasn't totally against it.
Of course, I went to the assembly. I wanted to hear, I wanted to learn, and I wanted to maybe think. We go to the assembly, and he's talking about all the reasons that guns should be banned.
And so then he made the mistake, with an Athena in the room, of saying that the assembly is now open to questions or comments. So non-confrontationally, again, I was 15 years old. I am not who I am today, okay? This was a 50-year-old, 45, 50-year-old man.
I was 15. I was not about to get up there and start roasting him, especially when most of what he said, I actually kind of agreed with. I just wanted to learn and learn kind of a rebuttal in case I heard it in the future, and just open my mind to understanding what I'm learning.
So I stand up, I said, thank you for coming. This has been amazing. I just have a question.
My question was, if guns don't kill people, people do, what goes to say we shouldn't ban everything that can hurt someone potentially? And he said, well, because the main purpose of a gun is to shoot people. I said, well, that's not true. A lot of people use guns for hunting.
I said, they hunt to feed their family. They hunt for sport because it's legal. I said, a lot of people that live up in the mountains, yeah, they'll shoot a deer or they'll shoot a rabbit and that's their dinner.
They throw it on the grill, call it a day. I said, some people just leave a gun in their safe their whole life, but just knowing it's in their house is comforting because they have kids down the hallway and they want to be able to protect their home. They have valuables.
Again, a lot of these people, they don't even touch their guns in their life, but just knowing it's in the house makes them feel safer in case of burglary, theft, a break-in. So that's kind of the ramble I went on as a question. And then at the end of my question, I remember being very polite and saying, thanks again for coming here.
This has been awesome. And he goes, well, yes, but the rare 1%, like that worst case scenario group of people take advantage of it and they do bad things with it. So we want to eliminate that risk.
Basically just like the liberal answer he went on and on and on to tell me. And then I said, well, yeah, but the same could be said about cars or knives. I remember this.
I said, most people use cars to drive and they're great drivers, but some people hit families of five. Same with knives. Some people use it to cut garlic.
Others use it to stab people. I asked, are you going to ban everything? Because potentially some loony bins use it to create more danger for those around them rather than the right way. And he told me to sit down and let someone else speak.
He didn't say thank you for your question. He didn't smile. He wasn't friendly.
His entire demeanor from the entire assembly changed in one second. And he told me a 15 year old girl asking him an innocent question to sit down and let someone else talk, pretty much sit down and shut the up because I can't answer you. And you're not thinking the way that I want you to.
And now I'm uncomfortable. And what do you know? All of those friends that I've had for two years, amazing friends. They never spoke to me for one day after that day.
Not one. I had one friend after that day, his name is Jace. And we were friends before that day.
And we were friends after that day. And not because he's a Republican or anything like that, but because he was like, dude, you really didn't do anything wrong. You asked, we were all there.
You asked a question. Like it wasn't that deep. He's a Democrat, but he's not like a, you know, crazy liberal.
You can't disagree with me. But what do you know? The rest of the school was because none of them spoke to me ever again. And then I go to college again, liberal college in New Jersey, Ramapo college of New Jersey.
I dormed, I went to all my classes and I was actually taking political science courses, pre-law courses. I wanted to either be in law enforcement or politics or a lawyer. I didn't know what yet, but I knew I wanted to do something based on law and order.
And this was now in the Trump first term era, right? Cause I graduated in 2015, went to college in the fall of 2015. So now we're in 2016, 2017. And then, and I started to notice the same thing, but now it's professors, the conservative kids.
Cause I knew them. We all kind of talked. We all knew each other in the class.
It was also a small school. The conservative kids would never get called on. It was always the liberal kids.
The conservative kids couldn't ask questions the way that liberal kids can. If a conservative kid, and I swear on my life, this is true to my experience on God, on God's life right now, as a Christian, if a conservative kid interrupted the teacher, the teacher would say, I'm still speaking. You can speak when I'm done.
If it was a liberal kid, the teacher would entertain it. And the rest of the class, just like the professor promised. No, she never called on him.
She never called on them. They never called on them. I would go to ask a question after class because I was never called on to ask my question.
And my political science professors wouldn't know the whole truth about what Trump was doing as president of the United States. In a political science class, the professor, the smartest person in the room wouldn't know what the president had just done the week before. That's when I started to notice, are people getting half truths? Like, because I remember looking this up at home and it's on a government website.
Now I have this professor leaving 60% of it out. And the same thing with my friends there. And I noticed it was the same thing at the high school I went to.
And it's the same thing in the media. It's these half truths, these worst case scenarios that 99% of the time weren't actually happening. That's when I started to wake up and realize, am I being manipulated right now? And what do you know, as soon as I started to heavily do my own research, I found really good stories about Trump from the eighties on of him doing good things, good deeds, random kindness acts, just fighting New York so that homeless people could get into abandoned apartment buildings that he would pay for.
All of the proceeds from his book in 1987 going to charity, paying off a couple's house, their mortgage, simply because they stopped on the side of the road to help him change his tire. Those things that the media buried, I was finding them and I was saying, well, then why are they fighting so hard to make us hate this man when everyone loved him before he ran? He was a good guy. It was the lies.
It was the hypocrisy. It was Trump can't say illegal alien, but Obama can literally get away with murder, like manslaughter at the minimum. Trump can't flirt with women, but Bill Clinton can have an affair and still get elected.
I started to notice this hypocrisy and this hive mind, this like cult behavior of obviously I experienced it firsthand. You can't question us. You could be one of us, but you cannot question what we're doing or else you're done.
You're shunned. You're not one of us. Your intentions are clear.
The second you argue us, what do you mean my intentions? I'm just trying to learn like we're friends. And it's not like those Democrats at 15 years old knew any better because the media was doing it too. And here we are 10 years later.
It's the same tactics. If your mother that you've known for 42 years voted for Trump, you need to cut her off. She's a bad person.
I've known her for 42 years. She's a wonderful person. She just didn't like Kamala.
That's okay. Freedom of thought until it's not our thoughts is the way that the Democrats have been going for the past 15 years now in my experience. And I wanted no part of that.
So no, I'm not a Republican because I suck off Trump. I'm not a Democrat because the Democrats left me.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Read
Most Democrats today are schooled on memes and really don’t understand what they are supposed to support or believe. That’s what makes them angry. If you question them, they just accuse you for watching fOx news. That’s why they hold mass rallies for “No Kings” and then the meme disappears and it’s “No ICE”. They just follow blindly and yell when told.
The man is overthinking his life
“And he told me, a 15 year old girl”
I think it is a female.
I am not saying you have to home school, although the first four years I would highly recommend it. It is not hard and you will end up with a kid who can actually read, write and do sums which will put the child ahead of 60% of the traditionally schooled kids in high school. Which is awesome.
You do not have to do that, but do please find out what the dominate culture is in the school you are sending your kid to. Please. It matters so much.
I have an earlier and more fundamental question:
How do you suppose the human species will survive?
“just so happened that it was about 80% LGBTQ.”
A classic independent thinker. Values critical thinking over pandering to “friends”.
Is he, like, a juvenile?
If guns are responsible for killing people, what about the people who let illegal immigrants go? If the illegal immigrants murder, beat up, steal or rape, are they partially responsible for these acts?
Sugarplum, they were never your friends. They are merely people you know.
“The man is overthinking his life”
And over-writing about it.
He is like, a she.
Liberal-based high school.
First parenting rule teach kids how to think not what to think.
Your head isn’t a hat rack for others to use.
Yeah, it is buried deeply in the, like, text.
I’ll take conversation with AI over someone’s free writing self reflection.
“”Is he, like, a juvenile?”””
Yeah, like, um I think so, like, maybe not sure.
We have some friends that had this happen. They supported Trump in 2020 and everyone they knew disowned them, and were really nasty about it too. It was a real eye-opener for them about how leftists roll.
I, like, noticed that too.
Who is your mentor?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.