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Every so often, a video clip comes across my feed that I can’t ignore. I’m sorry to bring it here, to all of you, but if I put it on Substack or anywhere else, it won’t hit the Google algorithm. If I put it here, it’s harder to ignore. But feel free to move on to the next post if politics bothers you.
Dear Molly McNearey,
In a recent clip, you explain that you grew up in a Conservative home: “I bought my dad a Rush Limbaugh tie!” And how, over the years, you became a hardcore partisan leftist. You said, “My husband is out there every day fighting Trump…”
How in the world did you ever arrive at the place where you think his job is to “fight Trump every day”? What happens when Trump is gone? Then what? Does the fight continue? Is this your forever hatred? And how did you, a millionaire in the ruling class of America, find yourself somehow on the oppressed side?
And yet, I find in your words some hope. You do seem to understand that you are being poisoned by something that is making you “angry all the time.” Yes, that is a manipulative media narrative fed to you every single day and told to you in such a way as to obliterate critical thought or fair analysis.
I, a formerly lifelong Democrat, left the Left in 2020 because I could not be a part of one group dehumanizing another. I was on lockdown. My two great friends had died. One from an overdose of heroin and another from a sudden heart attack. My daughter moved to New York with her boyfriend, and one of my cats died. I was all alone. I would sign on to Twitter, and it was wall-to-wall hate and dehumanization, the most unfiltered, bottom rage I had ever seen in my life.
I participated in it, but at some point, I thought, This isn’t right. It can’t be that this many millions of people are worthy of being treated like human garbage. Is Trump really Hitler? Are his rallies really like Nazi rallies? Thank god for me, I care about the truth.
Although ignorance is bliss. If I’d stayed on your side, Molly, my entire career would not have been destroyed because I decided to vote for Trump in 2024. You’d probably agree with that – obviously you would. If you are willing to give up your family members over politics, then sure, what’s the 26-year career of a “woman-owned” business to you? I’m sure you and your husband would applaud the effort. That’ll teach me, eh? Do not go up against totalitarians or you WILL PAY!
But by 2020, I had already been the subject of that level of hatred and harassment just for speaking my mind and standing out from the crowd, going against “cancel culture,” and standing up for people being bullied. So I did begin to think, if they treated me this way, calling me a racist, a “white supremacist” and a bigot, maybe they’re wrong about Trump and his supporters.
Though it would take me a while to break free from the manipulative media narratives and come out of the bubble and into the real world where I could see people as people, eventually, I would find my humanity. And my empathy. Not empathy for those you believe deserve it, but for all.
I made a conscious effort to deprogram myself. I stopped watching the news on the Left. I stopped reading the New York Times. I didn’t read my own social media feed. This is a feedback loop where the same opinions are enforced, and the same hatred is pushed to like-minded people. Then, I tried to consume only news from the Right. I wanted to see things from their perspective and understand where they’re coming from.
I wanted to see if the feedback loop on the Right would make me feel the same way, and of course, it did. Then, I realized I needed to find a way to navigate between the two worlds. But all I could see on the Left was that same hatred. It never ended, not even when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck. That’s why your husband was so quick to blame the other side for his death and could not absorb that your side is the side that believes what the assassin believed, that Kirk “spread too much hate.”
I was able to see the cartoon version of the Democrats by the Right when I was on the Left. I could see how they dehumanized Obama and Hillary Clinton. But I couldn’t see that we’d done the same thing to Donald Trump and his supporters, not until I left and I began to see who they really were and not the version we all invented, including and especially your husband, Jimmy Kimmel who lies about Trump every single night, feeding his viewers more “two minutes of hate,” Orwell style.
To see the human being behind the cartoon isn’t ever easy. But it isn’t impossible either. Trump is a troll. He says things that upset people. But he isn’t what we all pretend he is. He isn’t the supervillain, Hitler, or Voldemort. It is a mass delusion that has been cycled and perpetuated by the media and social media. But more importantly, the people who vote for him have their “values” too. They might not align with yours, but that doesn’t make them bad people.
The truth is that none of this has ever been about Trump. It’s been a ten-year refusal by the people with all of the power to relinquish that power. It is about a working class that has been abandoned by all of you. And your answer to that, your husband’s answer, Hollywood’s answer was to raise the drawbridge and say, “You are not welcome here.” How disgusting. Somewhere down deep, I know you agree.
Don’t you ever wonder why he won again? After the Democrats had four years to prove to the abandoned America that they were the better side? Why did he win the popular vote? You think all of his supporters are just mindless drones brainwashed by Fox News? The opposite is true, I’m afraid. The drones are on your side. You’ve gotten all the way to the point where you call anyone a Nazi and thus justify their assassination.
The media on the Left is of one mind. They push the same ideas into the churn because dissent is not allowed. It is 1984, although your side has decided even Orwell should be sucked into the propaganda campaign to dehumanize the other half of America. He’s turning in his grave right now, by the way. Dissent is not allowed, nor is critical thought. It is the fascist credo: conform or else. That’s your side, Molly, not the Right.
What you are is a totalitarian. You want everyone to bow to your own way of life, your “values,” to believe what you believe, to want what you want. But what if people don’t? You shun them? You cancel them? You shoot them? You attack them? I am opposed to biological men competing in women’s sports. Your side insists I go along with that OR ELSE. I am opposed to feeding children cross sex hormones and amputating their body parts without their consent (because they can’t consent), and your side tells me I can’t vote for the guy who will end that OR ELSE.
What bothers me is that the media pushes false narratives that travel halfway around the world before anyone gets the story straight. There is never any benefit of the doubt. The lies are pushed out anyway, and people like your husband, Jimmy Kimmel, are first in line to push those lies.
As the ruling elite, you need a fresh crop of oppressed people — like those ICE captures and detains. You know that your side calls “disappearing American citizens off the streets and putting them in concentration camps.”
Obama deported 3 million of them, but there were never cameras around catching those arrests and then pushing them out to everyone and calling ICE the Gestapo. And yet, because you and your husband are wealthy beyond belief, this ideology absolves you of your wealth and privilege. You have the luxury of wanting all that cheap labor, while the working class doesn’t have your millions, and maybe they do care about an open border. That doesn’t make them bad people.
You guys have everything. You have Hollywood. You have the universities. You have the institutions and you have the money. And yet, you cosplay that you are the oppressed side because you stand up for what you believe are oppressed groups. Fine, great, have at it. But the people of this country have a right to representation. They have a right to fight for what they want. Look at yourselves. Look at how you are behaving toward them. It is disgraceful, and one day, you’ll realize that.
Jimmy Kimmel said he spewed unending hatred against Trump every day because he saw Trump as the 1980s high school movie bully. That was rich, I thought. That was exactly what I saw the Left become in their fight against Trump and MAGA. I saw that we weren’t the good guys anymore. We were the bullies. The side with all of the power dehumanizes and attempts to destroy the side with less power.
I know. I lived it. I see how one story on the Left is amplified, and by the end of the day, yet another character smear has taken root. It happens on the Right, too, but they aren’t the side with all of the power, not even with Trump in office. None of you ever accepted him as your president anyway.
So you should deprogram yourself. You should understand this is a big country, and just because people believe things different from you doesn’t make them human garbage. Shame on you and your husband for ever thinking you were superior to millions of Americans who are just struggling to get through the day after people like your husband threw them away like human garbage and chose only to focus on the people he believes matter, those who agree with him.
Someday, when you’re old and you are heading toward the end, you will look back on this time, and you will try hard to justify how it is you could have ever gotten to a point where you shun your own family over politics. You’ll get there, I know you will. Maybe you’ll remember that there was one person out there, whose entire career was destroyed for standing up for what she believed in, who told you the truth.
Or, you could let Dr. Seuss tell it. You know, the guy you all canceled?
I have hope for you, Molly. I think you will find your humanity. I do.
