#WalkAway: Democrat Leaves Party After Attending Trump Rally

This is a heartwarming story.  You may remember last summer that I wrote about the growing acrimony in the knitting world.  Um… yes, the knitting world.

Apparently, Revelry —  a large online knitting community – made a rule that any Trump-related products or projects were not welcome…. Even though knitting seems to be inherently non-ideological, they only want projects that conform to their ideological point of view.  They recently announced that any sort of Trump-related project cannot be uploaded to their site.  

“We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry,” they announced, spelling out their intolerance:

This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.

We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.

Oh, and they asked their members to help snitch on conservative users who violate the ban.  I guess this is literally a case of “snitches get stitches.”

Well one liberal knitter believed the knitting community’s intolerant response was over-the-top.  Karlyn Borysenko decided to actually go to a Trump rally and see what all the fuss was about.  On Medium, she explained what she learned from the experience:

I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.

But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.

That turned out not to be the case. The more voices outside the left that I listened to, the more I realized that these were not bad people. They were not racists, nazis, or white supremacists. We had differences of opinions on social and economic issues, but a difference of opinion does not make your opponent inherently evil. And they could justify their opinions using arguments, rather than the shouting and ranting I saw coming from my side of the aisle.

She goes on to write that the toxicity of the knitting community unmoored many of her political beliefs:

I started to discover (or perhaps rediscover) the #WalkAway movement. I had heard about #WalkAway when MSNBC told me it was fake and a bunch of Russian bots. But then I started to meet real people who had been Democrats and made the decision to leave because they could not stand the way the left was behaving. I watched town halls they held with different minority communities (all available in their entirety on YouTube), and I saw sane, rational discussion from people of all different races, backgrounds, orientations, and experiences. I joined the Facebook group for the community and saw stories popping up daily of people sharing why they are leaving the Democratic Party. This wasn’t fake. These people are not Russian bots. Moreover, it felt like a breath of fresh air. There was not universal agreement in this group — some were Trump supporters, some weren’t — but they talked and shared their perspective without shouting or rage or trying to cancel each other.

I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?

Borysenko is not a Trump supporter, but she is no longer under the trance of hatred and identity politics.  It is inspiring to see a person with the moral clarity and courage to leave a political party when the party no longer represents American values. 

More of this, please.

The Epoch Times on Flickr: Image Credit

Hat Tip: Medium