From a former liberal lunatic

Conservatives: I'm a former progressive lunatic and I'd like to help people understand what's going on for people like former-me. You can't change your woke friend's mind with facts, because he's not actually thinking.

He's only feeling.

This is an extrapolation from my personal experience, and I believe it applies to a great many people. Everything I'm about to say is just the kind of thing that old me would have denied with rage, but it's true.

My commitment to leftist/prog/woke politics was 100 percent an emotional commitment. It was zero percent rational. How I got there is typical—abusive childhood, feminist single mother, etc. YMMV.

First home, then society, then the people I chose to spend my time with, taught me to believe that anything and anyone conservative was evil. Anti-human. Wanted me and women and gays and blacks and [whoever] dead.

I believed this, as absurd as it is. The emotional conditioning for some of us goes so deep that we literally lose our ability to be rational. It's not "like" a cult, it is precisely and literally cult indoctrination.

Here are things I fell for and used to believe:

1. Trump was Hitler. I cried when he won the 2016 election. Yes, I was that meme.

2. Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanagh must have raped Christine Blasey Ford, and that woman's alleged recollection of events 40 years ago was believable .

3. That American cops regularly murdered black men in cold blood. I believed every story of the "hands up, don't shoot" variety.

From that, you can extrapolate all the rest of my other lunatic political and moral beliefs.

People like this cannot be trusted. Don't place any personal trust in them; don't rely on them for anything. They're not right in the head. I was not trustworthy (and I don't blame conservatives who still don't trust someone like me today).

Is there any hope for them? It depends. For me, it took a serious, life-altering personal crisis to break my mind open. I had to face seriously psychologically and spiritually dark realities about my family, my life, and myself, to change my thinking. In short, when I figured out that my deranged mother had a Cluster B personality disorder (narcissism), I figured out that the left was running on the same mental programming.

I suspect that most people have to have a frightening dark night of the soul on some front in order to radically change their minds. They need to hit "rock bottom," in other words.

You can't make that happen. But you can watch for it, and if you choose, you can be there when that person emerges and help guide them.

People who hold these political and moral views are in a state of truth-reversal. They see good as bad, black as white, and perpetrators as victims. If you can understand that their moral compass has been pointed 180 degrees in the wrong direction, then you can understand why these beliefs are so tenacious. Such people genuinely believe they are good, and that they are doing good. I believed this of myself.

Most of you reading this know many of the stories of my borderline and narcissistic mother’s abuse. Keeping that in mind, think about how, until I broke with her, I actually thought she was a victim. That’s how deep it goes.