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A Traitor To His Woke Class

Letter from gay man in entertainment industry who is deeply closeted -- as a conservative
View Of Boy Hiding In Dark Room

Hello readers, I’ve been driving all day. I have to be at a party shortly — wedding tomorrow, pre-wedding bash tonight — so I’m not going to have time to approve all the day’s comments till later. I do want to add this amazing letter I received from a reader. I know his real name, and have checked him out online — he is who he claims to be. I have omitted some details to protect him. He writes:

I recently saw a video of your talk at the national conservatism conference about communist dissidents in the 20th century and the growing totalitarianism of the pink police state today.

You are one of the few writers I’ve come across who is consistently tracking “persecutorial progressivism” and treating it seriously. I think many conservatives, people of faith, as well as apolitical Americans in general have been dismissive of woke capitalism and snowflakes as just another media fad, or something that is only happening at universities where college kids do what college kids have always done since the 1960s. This dismissiveness is naive.

For me to make the point I am trying to make, it is important to share my biography. I ask that you keep me and personally identifying details anonymous.

My name is [name] and I am a graduate student [details omitted.] I grew up in rural [heartland America], am “white,” and was the first in my family to attend a four-year university.

My father lost his factory job during the recession to outsourcing but was re-hired temporarily to teach the new Chinese workers how to do the job that he just lost. He lived for several consecutive months in China over the course of two years. This experience has profoundly shaped my political worldview, in retrospect.

I was a Christian, and a Republican, until I came out of the closet when I was 21. Like many who have just left the closet, I took a hard left. For most of my 20’s I identified as “progressive,” and I even worked on a statewide Democratic campaign for [deleted].

I am now 30-years-old, I just moved to [deleted].

Near the end of 2014, at [an elite East Coast university], I started noticing people speaking disparagingly about rural people, conservative Christians, and college-uneducated whites (sometimes all three at the same time). These comments would make me bristle when I first heard them. Now these comments are in every social and professional setting I find myself in (I don’t mean to sound like this is all that people talk about, but I haven’t been to a social event or in an academic setting in the past 6 years where this two-minutes-hate doesn’t come up where two or more are gathered).

This phenomenon of socially-sanctioned and celebrated classism made me want to start screenwriting. I originally wanted to make tv series and movies about the people I grew up with in the midwest in a similar way that Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner wrote about the south. Today I don’t see a realistic way forward for me professionally or creatively, in the current media landscape.

Unfortunately it has moved beyond the regular two-minutes-hate against “the deplorables” at social events. Now, at least in academia and the media, anyone who doesn’t preach the entire orthodoxy of progressivism is seen as toxic, complicit in the evils of whiteness and the patriarchy, and on the wrong side of history.

This has real professional and social consequences.

I started noticing this shift towards totalitarianism amongst my friends and colleagues in 2016, and it terrified me. At first it was a few vocal “woke” rogues who were de-platforming or “cancelling” people, but now it is ubiquitous. I’m not talking about twitter, but real life. Cancellations are happening at universities all across the country, but aren’t making the news. I’ve seen people excommunicated at [my university] and in social groups in [major American city], and I assume many often don’t even know it happened to them, or why. Now, in virtually every upper-crust media or academic setting I’ve been in people only talk about politics and media, through the lens of gender, race, colonialism, and watered-down marxism. It is not acceptable to like a movie that has too many white people in it, or too many men, for example. If I admitted to a colleague that I liked “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” I would most certainly be cancelled. Cancellation isn’t something flippant, it is the deprivation of livelihood, respect, and a role in society.

I have so many stories, none of which would be surprising to you. I am very glad that you mentioned in your speech that you have been interviewing people who survived communism, and that they seem to be the only ones seeing the rise of progressive totalitarianism today. This is an incredibly astute observation, but I have no doubt that there are many people like me in America who would find this observation obvious. Some of us are already living in it. If others who are experiencing it are like me, then they are entrenched (read: trapped) in liberal institutions and performing extraordinary levels of preference falsification, not unlike Havel’s “greengrocer,” or Czeslaw Milosz’s “Ketman.”

This doublethink is incredibly isolating. I have secretly disavowed progressivism and the democratic party, but nobody would ever know. Over the past three years I have secretly read dozens of books by conservative intellectuals (including The Benedict Option) and Soviet dissidents. My life as it currently is would be ruined if people knew I am a Republican with my own small — but growing — conservative library. My landlord here in [major coastal city], who is a friend-of-a-friend, surely would not let me renew my current lease if she knew I had books on conservative intellectual history and soviet dissident literature not just for creative research but because they are my most valuable possessions.

This intellectual isolation has done something beautiful for my life, however. I have reconnected with my entire extended family, who are all conservative and Christian. My parents, sister, grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins all know that I am a secret conservative (meaning: anti-communist, unabashedly American, a free-thinker). I will forever remember my family embracing me around our kitchen table this past Thanksgiving as I failed to fight back tears while sharing the level of hostility that I have been witnessing on the coasts against people like us. I have comfort knowing that I have a family back home, and I pray that other people in my circumstance have a family to embrace.

I don’t know what my next steps will be creatively and professionally.

I sent the reader my edited version back to ask his approval to publish it. He sent me approval, and added:

I read over your interview notes with the Soviet emigre — wow. I completely agree with her about everything she says about academia, cancelling/unpersonning, and American culture. It is illuminating to see her comparisons to the USSR, especially her mother and father’s experience. Sobering to read her prediction about how it will take several generations to overcome. Given her experience she’s probably not far-off.

I have a feeling that this little book of mine is going to occasion a lot of people like this finding each other.

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