1 God was handing out ideologies before I entered this world and i got stuck with conservatism.

2 This is as good a basic description as any of what it is to be a conservative.

I have no idea how liberals are made.

Oh wait, I do.  You're hungry for cookies and ate all yours but you're still hungry for cookies, and you got more by taking them from someone who conserved theirs.\

If you have enough of these experiences early on, maybe you just decide that justice is a moving target.  Instead of being equal in treatment, we always have to make things equal in result.  Sure, that means everyone hogs their cookies and wastes things and we run out of cookies very fast, but dammit, I want more cookies right now.

3 What mother would be so unfair to her son?

This is because most women go with "feelings" which is why most women vote Democrat. Logic has nothing to do with it.

4 Good evening ladies.

5 The mom was just giving a fine example of government perverting the law and aiding the plunderers. It was a Bastiat lesson.

6 Is this a film review?

7
The lies of the left are what made me and many of my friends turn right.

8 I've been conservative as long as I can remember.Nearest I came to any left wing views was I was pro animal.Didn't like medical testing and such(never had a problem with meat production).I still prefer animals to humans,animals can't be evil.

9 Well, back in the day... I use to spout all that liberal bilge.  Cuz the liberal women are...what's the word I'm looking for?  SLUTS!! yea, that's it.  After I got what was I was looking to get..no not the Clap.  Well, yea did get that too, but not my point.  So when I decided to move on, I'd just started voicing my conservative opinions, and Voua-La!  Bitch be gone.  Never to be heard from again...

10 Been a conservative as long as I can remember. Sorry I can't help you.

11 I also don't like trophy hunting.If you kill it,eat it.

12 As my mind cleared from the red mist and I found myself standing, spattered with gore, clutching a flensing knife in one fist, in a dark alley surrounded by scores of skinned hobo corpses, I realized what I had become ...

13 I steal the line from Greg Guttfield -- I became a conservative from being around liberals, and I became a libertarian from being around conservatives.

14 The Democrat party turned me into staunch conservative. When they began to push ideas that were against everything I was taught was right or wrong. Raised in a lower middle class family where the parents and grandparents demanded honesty, integrity, responsibility. I look at the ideas the Democrats are pushing now and it seems they could not be from this planet, their thinking is completely alien.

15

What made me a Conservative?

I grew up.

16 Vic at 3 nails it, essentially, except that it also extends to overwrought leftist men.

17 My dad was a Kennedy-Democrat (until McGovern ran) and my mom was a life-long Republican.  We always talked about politics and current events in my house.  I think a few things when I was young sealed my politics. 

One was how the Democrats (especially) wanted to cut and run from Vietnam.  Our neighbors across the street were a former Naval officer and his Vietnamese wife.  We heard so much about her family and I was dumb-founded by the images of the people being rescued from the rooftops by helicopter.  Knowing that the folks who wanted to leave them there included the asshole yippies who ruined the 4th of July for us one year also helped.

Abortion was another.  It seemed obvious to me at aged 8 - and still very much obvious to me today, after many years of schooling (including a Ph.D. in developmental biology), that human life starts at conception and that human life is precious.  No amount of gum flapping by people who want to justify killing an innocent someone else has shaken my position on that. 

Finally, of all things, I remember arguing with my friend - we were probably about 9 or 10 - about school busing.  I have no idea why it was in the news (I lived in a very integrated community by then, so it wasn't a local issue), but I could tell from her arguments that she thought the government should "make" people behave a certain way.  It didn't make sense to me.  I knew then, and know now, that peoples' hearts have to change from within.  You can't legislate away social ills.  It doesn't work. 

18 Obama, Pelosi, and Reid made me a conservative.  I've been a Democrat all my life and never gave it a second thought.  Then all of a sudden I started realizing I was agreeing more with Rush Limbaugh...

19 Once upon a time, I was fairly liberal. Then I started noticing that implementing liberal strategies didn't seem to work in my personal life. Then a gay friend scared me back into being liberal by scaring me about W. It was enough to get me to vote against W the one time and finally became conservative after that.

20 I think all consevatives have a libertarian streak to some degree,sraunch libertarians are pretty nuts though.Practically anarchists.

21

Posted by: digitalbrownshirt

We've got some old school in the house.

22 Eh I was never really liberal. Used to be in that swing group. My liberal slant was "kids should not be punished because their parents suck" so was in favor of stuff like head start and so on and felt a "live and let live" attitude socially. Now I think we should not encourage parents TO suck by handing them unrestricted SSI checks for smoking, drinking etc while kid was in womb ( and the shit happened cases should be handled by charity or maybe vouchers but not just money transfer) and I have a "live and let die" attitude socially -- government has no business protecting people from consequences, even deadly consequences that result from peoples life choices.

23 Two words: James Earl Carter

24 Maybe I'm not conservative so much as conservative-libertarian. I really just want to keep the money I earn and have the gov't leave me the hell alone.

25 @8 I've been conservative as long as I can remember.Nearest I came to any left wing views was I was pro animal.Didn't like medical testing

OK, I was pro-Palestinian back in the day (teens).  So I guess I was pro-animal too. 

A friend was Palestinian-American and at the time I thought that they just wanted to have their own homeland. 

I know better now. 

26

September 11, 2001

27 Straight up racism; and Bush!!!

28 When I was a kid the exact same scenario went down when I savored my box of Nerds and my step-sister burned through hers like a junkie.  My dad and step-mom (who I only visited every three weeks) admonished me for being selfish at my reticence to "share" my Nerds with my sister, despite us obtaining the same sized boxes at the same time earlier in the day.

I knew, just knew it was wrong to be forced to share when things had already started out perfectly fair to begin with (and it's certainly not like she shared any of hers with me), but I was being told by two adult figures that I was the selfish one, and not my sister who was demanding a box-and-a-half to my half.

I'm not at all surprised that leftists want to seize everyone's 401k's now.  The lesson taught to me was simple: those who save are greedy misers, and candy* belongs to anyone that threatens to disturb the peace.

* Substitute for anything of value

As for my journey from Liberal to Conservative... well, I only was "liberal" in my 20's when it got me laid.  After that being liberal had seriously diminishing returns.

29 19 Just a question,what was to fear from W?

30 I really just want to keep the money I earn and have the gov't leave me the hell alone.

That is a real small "l" libertarian. The big L libertarians are anarchists and nutcases.

31 I can't think of a time when my brain didn't work properly.
Can't really help you.

32 I've been a conservative as long as I've been interested in politics.  In 1980, we had a class election.  I was the only one in the class who voted for Reagan.

33 @11 I also don't like trophy hunting.If you kill it,eat it.

But I bet you wouldn't legislate against it.  So you're still conservative, in my book anyway. 

34 Money.

Earning it and seeing others that don't.  Seeing how easy it is to make a good living in the USA, IF you will work.

Having my money taken by a government for those who are too lazy to earn their own.

What is a slave?  Someone that is owned and works 100% for the man.

We're 50% slave now, and Obama thinks that's not enough.

Don't get me started.

35

I think all consevatives have a libertarian streak to some degree

Yeah, I've got a "leave me the fuck alone" streak in me that runs a mile wide.

I don't get busybodies. I don't get people who want to force you to do things you don't want to do.

Get off me, motherfucker. I'll do my thing and you do yours. In about 10 years we'll probably have a good idea of who was right.

 

36 25 Animals are superior to Palestinians.I hate when people call them animals(I do it myself sometimes).Properly they are savages.

37 Can't help you either, it always seemed to me the liberal side was the unfair side as reflected in your story.

The answer to your question is envy though, I think.  Not jealousy which is wanting to also have what someone else has, but envy wanting to take it away from that other person also.

38 I was pretty conservative as a kid, my parents were, I was a baby Reagan supporter,   but  being self-employed really brought it home to me (my Dad owned his own  business himself,  became a Republican after generations of Union Democrats)

39 I have a "live and let die" attitude socially -- government has no business protecting people from consequences, even deadly consequences that result from peoples life choices.

This.

40 36 25 Animals are superior

You wouldn't say that if you could smell the death bomb my collie just let fly. 

peee-yewwww!

41 A transsexual.

I was a lefty first year grad student at the U of Iowa when I took a  microeconomics seminar in Price Theory from Don McCloskey, one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. Being a U of Chicago train economist (he also had a chair in History) he took a very dim view of government intervention and taxes with the reasoning to back it up. Also wrote the text we used in the class. Try as I might to counterargue, I was totally pummeled by the force of his logic. By the end of the semester I had gone from dogmatic lefty to a pretty solid small-l libertarian.

Today, Don McCloskey is now Dierdre McCloskey, and teaches at U-Illinois Chicago. Still brilliant, still a staunch libertarian type. But he is a she. Hey, go figure. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

42 40 My cat doesn't fart.Seriously,I've never smelled anything outside of the litterbox area.

43 Back when I was about 11 or 12, I snagged a copy of "Friday" by Robert Heinlein out of the library (primarily for the hot chick on the cover.)  Something clicked when I read it.  That lead me to "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" which REALLY clicked.  I was full blown libertarian by the end of the summer of 1985. 

That lead to Rand, Von Mises, Friedman, etc. by the time I was finished with high school.  Needless to say neither my Union Democrat, Dukakis supporting pops nor my god-fearing Methodist so-con (and fis-con) mum got it entirely.

44
I hate paying taxes and I'm scared of brown people.

45 When Al Gore bit the head off of my favorite hamster, Cuddles.

46 A guy came up to me and asked me to give up a few points of my 4.0 gpa so some smelly hippy lazy fuck could augment his gpa.  A light went off.

47 41 Wow,iowahawk a lefty!

48

While I was never a liberal I went for years without really sorting through my ideology.  So I did. When I finished, I knew better who I was and identified as a conservative.

 

49 My parents were standard-issue Republicans, which is to say conservative but not that much. Nixon Republicans, basically. What made me a far right whackjob was partly my hatred for the way the Left supported the Communists. Even more, though, it was a self-defense thing. I was a nerdy kid who got picked on and had to learn to fight. Meanwhile, I had fuckstain teachers telling me, "It takes two to start a fight." BULLSHIT, YOU COWARDLY LYING TARGETS! I learned that a man cannot depend on authority to save him. I also learned that the leftist line about "powerful capitalists" was 100% lying bullshit. Money does not give you power. A nerd with $20 didn't become powerful, he became a target for robbers. (I can proudly say, though, that although I did sometimes get my ass kicked, I never once had my money stolen by force). Put my short fat Jewish Democrat physics teacher in Watts and he wouldn't own Watts; Watts would own him. Put it differently: neither love nor money makes the world go round. Sufficient firepower makes the world go round.

50 33 True,because I don't like it doesn't mean it should be outlawed.Yeah,that is a very conservative(classic liberal)way of thinking.

51 I was a liberal until about midway through my senior year in high school. One of those liberals-by-default, never thought about it much. One thing I can tell you, from walking in their shoes, is that liberals define themselves by what they oppose. That's why they desperately need the Limbaughs, Becks, and Palins of the world. They'd have to invent enemies if they didn't have any handy -- witness the frantic attempts to turn the Kochs into some sort of Trilateral Comission.

What got me out of it was an epiphany. I read a debate in a far-left specialty mag. Well, a quoted article by  a stodgy establishment columnist (William Safire), and a dismemberment of the article by our hero, the leftist (Abbie Hoffman, seriously). I read the Safire article, and thought, yeah, that makes sense now, but just wait until our guy gets his hands on it, he'll turn it around. Then I read Hoffman's response, and it was a completely incoherent mess of crap. I was shaken to the core, and that was the beginning of the end of my leftism. The end came quickly after that, because suddenly I was paying attention.

52 All my life, I never had anything, and they keep taking from me...i.e. taxes!

53 Evan Sayet gave an illuminating talk at the Heritage Foundation "How Modern Liberals Think" that has become kind of a unified field theory of modern liberalism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

54 One of the problems is the perversion of the label 'liberal'. Nowadays that means a particular type of liberal, the progressive POS. That's the kind that mommy was. VDH is a liberal and so is Pat 'Warcock' Caddell, but only in the classic sense. They sound more like conservatives to us.
 
Closer labelling might find them in the libertarian camp. This too gets corrupted to an extent, particularly when you Capitalize it and call it a political party.

55 Devotion to our bloated military which seeks to replace God with its technology.  Pope has said technology is the tower of babel once again.

56 Conservatism was a learned philosophy for me. Starting at the dinner table. And I was lucky enough to have Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as our topic of conversation. Plus, my Dad stressed individualism. It shaped who I became during my teenage years and that bled into my political beliefs.

It didn't hurt that my Dad owned a business and took us to work on days when the EPA and OSHA was popping in for a little chat.

Enlightening, indeed.

57 I became a conservative when I grew up, got smart, got a real job and realized the government had their noses into all of my business and was taking my money and giving it to people who did not deserve it.

This happened in my mid-20's.  Before that, I was wishy-washy and really didn't care much, but I knew I hated Clinton.

58 42 40 My cat doesn't fart.

Come to think of it, ours don't either.  So one point to the kittehs.

However, a dog will do you the common courtesy of emoting prior to blowing chow, giving you a chance, at least, to get him/her out of the house (or off of the carpet) before issuing forth, as it were.

Cats, on the other hand, will calmly wait until you leave the bed, then without warning wooftah all over your pillow. 

59 1973, i was prez of the conservation club for the first earth day.Big all school assembly, had a movie that my buds made, etc. As I was sitting in the cafeteria figuring out what to close with, I looked around at the mess that they all had left. I bagged up a pile, walked on stage and told them " before you go fixing the whole planet, how about cleaning up your own mess." Resounding boos. I turned the corner that day and knew the whole movement was BS.

60 I learned a lot of history as I was growing up. Since my political philosophy was heavily informed based on history I became a conservative.

For example, if you know the basics of the formation of the Soviet Union before anyway tries to sell you on the wonders of communism,  you aren't going to be deceived.

I think this is fundamentally why the left tries so hard to dumb down history.

61 I read 1984 when I was 12(this was 195 and I have been leery about Government ever since. This made it impossible for me to ever be a liberal, let alone a Progressive.

62 If you truly believe in fairness you would have to be conservative. How else do fucking liberals justify giving preference to different races, genders, and religions depending on some bullshit "social" value whose only real value if you want to break it down Big Bird and Cookie Monster style, is simply their own way of patting themselves on the fucking back.

63 Rodney King riots. I was a typical California, stoned, anti-nuke dumbass lefty. When the riots broke out, I was all excited...ya - stick it to THE MAN!. But...wait...why are they looting those Korean grocery stores?? Koreans are an even SMALLER minority! Wait...you mean my whole worldview of the White Man being the *only* one capable of discrimination might be wrong?? Holy SHAT. Why...what else might I be wrong about. And here we are 20+ years later...Stomp a hippie for Freedom.

64
Conservatives are the true believers in "co-existing."

We generally have a don't fuck with me and mine and I won't fuck with you and yours.

The only time we get anti-anything is when others try force shit upon us. Aside from law & order and common courtesy, we don't "impose" our will or beliefs on anyone.

65 I remember watching video footage of San Francisco hippies when I was a kid. I remember thinking that they looked like assholes and a complete waste of life. Maybe it was then that I became a conservative. Actually, I more or less embraced the 'anything but hippie' option. If my only choices in life was being a 60's hippie or a cannibal, then I'll take a thigh and a breast, please, and leave me alone...

66 43: Yeah, Heinlein and science fiction had an influence as well. As nerdy as sf is, the older stuff is pretty macho. I'm not talking about the lame Buck Rogers, vaguely homoerotic, superheroic space opera planet-buster stuff, either; that stuff is just dumb, not macho. I'm talking about Heinlein and the fuck-you attitude toward people who stick their nose in your business, as well as an affection for firearms, and a love of the frontier.

67
P.S. Conservatism, fuckyeah!

68 My sister.

My (year and a half) younger sister was exactly like the brat in your story, except you have to add 'evil' to your discription.

She would take something of hers, hide it in my room and then go tell mom.

She would eat all of her treat, take mine, and when I went to get it back, she'd tell mom.

She would pinch, hit and bug me until I was bawling, not because I hurt, but because I understood I was never going to win.  I realized that she had fooled my mom so many times, I was the liar in her eyes.  I was the brat.  I was the thief.

Then I heard Reagan speak one night on our push button TV.  He basically validated everything I had been feeling/thinking all my life.  He said you either come down on the side of good, or the side of evil.

I knew I was on the side of good.

He also said that only the evil rule, the good govern.

To this day, that is still how I see it. 

Rulers make laws that control, people that govern let the people control (their lives).

69 forced busing!

70 Parents do not want justice.  They want QUIET!

71

I used to play in bands, which meant I spent a lot of time around lefties, most of whom just assumed I was one of them (you should have seen the look on the face of the Greenpeace guy who asked me to play an anti-Exxon benefit when I asked him if he knew where his plastic shoes came from). I think that for a lot of them, being Left is a feel-good thing. They can feel good about how generous they are willing to be with other people's money, and how noble they are. Since the World is going to ignore them anyway, their orange juice will still be delivered tomorrow AM, but they can pretend that they wish it cost more so the truck-driver could get paid better. Your tale captures the attitude nicely; if you only look at the present, and ignore how things got this way, it is awfully easy to think that The System is Not Fair. I mean, look, if you lived in, say, Libya, would you be inclined to defend The Powers That Be? Hell, no! The System Sucks! Well, it's different here. But is it different enough? That is a long argument. 

Then there is the chick factor. I saw a chart some time back, of when the various democracies had given women the vote, and when they had instituted the income tax. Guess what! About a ten-year delay. Women are probably just wired to be OK with the idea that other people (you know who you are) are supposed to give them stuff. That's basically what we're here for, right? Build a fire, sharpen a stick, kill something, give it to a woman.  

72 I guess I was from birth; but it was only when I hit about 13 and started paying attention (because of a really fantastic middle school history teacher) that it really took hold.

That, and my first paycheck.

73 The relentless left wing media made me a leftie.  I didn't know any better when I was a kid.  Then I began paying attention to left wing and right wing arguments...and thought that the right wing arguments were far more logical.  When I realized that all media was left wing and was brainwashing people with touchy-feely nonsense, I got angry.  A conservative was born.  I read Bernie Goldberg's book.  I went hard right.  I've never looked back.

74 How did your sister turn out, momma? 

Mine was pretty awful and she's a very unpleasant shrew to this day.

75 #41

What can you say?  Just wow.  What makes people do that shit.  There is a lawyer here that did the same thing.  Good guy, now strange as shit woman. 

The sad thing?  He had a son who had to go through his dad's crazy.

76 The day I went all-in: September 11, 2001.

77 2 troll idiots in here,which ones?

78 There aren't many liberals who are good at teh maths.

79

Levin is on fire!  This is a post-Constitutional society.

He's ranting about the NLRB's order to Boeing that they CAN'T relocate to S.C. and must remain in Washington state.  "Wait till they get those death panels going, baby!"

80 Today, Don McCloskey is now Dierdre McCloskey, and teaches at U-Illinois Chicago. Still brilliant, still a staunch libertarian type. But he is a she. Hey, go figure. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

Posted by: iowahawk at April 21, 2011 08:08 PM (veL4N)

But does (s)he still believe in inflexible demand?

81 I grew up listening to my dad (who is really more Democrat than anything else, though you can't challenge him on it) mock and denounce Democrats, and my mom (who is definitely not conservative) mock and denounce Republicans. It gave me a cynical attitude toward politics in general, and a desire to stay as far away from that whole deal as I could. However, I read "Atlas Shrugged" in junior high. It influenced me greatly as far as my own personal philosophy and outlook on life. I've had no real reason to change ideologies since that time. I've been a rock musician since I was in my teens, and so I'm usually finding myself in the company of left-leaning people. I used to not care so much--mostly out of a keen motivation to stay out of arguments with idiots--but over the last 10 years or so I have become more militantly conservative. My views have not really changed that much, but I do express them more, and feel less self-conscious about them.

82 There are fundamentally a couple of 'types' of Libs.

Basically, they can be summed up as Players, Bleeding Hearts, and Leeches.

1) There are people that simply want more. They know where their bread is buttered, and they can't (or can't be bothered to) see past 'immediate self-interest' to 'long-term self-interest'. Leeches.

2) The Bleeding Hearts have had their own charitable interests fused into accepting "Someone should do something." The well-heeled fields, academia, elite schools - all perpetuate the 'give back' ideals... and prod towards the 'have government do it' idea as both fair and easy.

3) The Players may have started as 'Bleeding Hearts', but they end up with some smidge of power, and they start catering to the leeches. So much so that 'fair' isn't a prime directive so much as punishing 'the other'.

I was a "Bleeding Heart", but I read a bit too much military fiction and sf. The book '1632' by Eric Flint (a Leftist, but of the 'true liberal' variety) resonated enough to have me rethink the reasoning -behind- the second amendment. (Short: Citizenship used to mean 'able to bear arms' not 'able to vote'.) And I was watching Clinton fumble the Middle East. From the 1993 WTC investigations through the Cole - I developed distain for his positions.

Voted Bush in 2000, mostly because Al Gore believes Global Warming. As a scientist/research engineer, I think it is wildly oversold. 9/11, the promises of the Dems to support Bush turning into pure crap -> Hell will freeze before I believe a Dem.

I think there are a lot of people in the "bleeding heart" camp than can honestly be reached if we harp incessantly on how much better conservative approaches to the never-ending litany of liberal problems actually work.

That is: Paul Ryan's voucher system is more money going to the individual - and it should end up being even more effective as market forces drive costs.

And the "Conservative Endgame" is very rarely stated. The media take is "They just want to end everything and burqa burqa burqa, etc." That isn't the goal, -I- recognize how charity, community, and personal savings work - but this all needs to be coalesced into a firm vision to compete with the incessant 'liberal utopian vision'.

83

I'm grateful to have been raised in a conservative home where my parents talked about why they believed what they did.  My personality is such that I'd like to believe the world will be a happy, sparkly place (unicorns and skittles abounding) one of these mornings.  This leads me to the suspicion that if I'd been raised in a liberal home I may well have just accepted a lot of the lies.  I certainly hope that something like 9-11 would have woken me up, but I wish I could be more sure.

84 I grew up in a midwest union democrat Irish Catholic family. All of my relatives have been Democrats since FDR.

I also grew up with some white liberal guilt. I'm not sure why since we live lower middle to middle class lifestyle. My desk was cinder blocks and 2x4s my Dad had "found' at a construction site.

But I did well in school and that put me around richer kids so maybe that rubbed off on me.

Going into college I was still a left-winger. I had a sense of noblesse oblige. I was in the honor's program at a pretty elite college.

By the end of college I was a right-winger.

What turned me?

Partly it was studying economics and evolution and how spontaneous order can arrive.

But mostly it was a visceral hatred of all the rich left-wing fuckers who looked down on people like me. I met kids with trust funds for the first time. I got in political arguments with these rich, leftist pricks who had such a sense of superiority.

And the anti-military thing really pissed me off since I was a military brat.

Also I think the rich lefty women were the worst since they bitched and whined and had an enormous sense of victimhood. They were, literally, the richest people I had ever met in my entire life, the most privileged people I'd ever known -- and they were constantly going off on how horrible their lives were and how oppressive and sexist America was. I was just baffled. They'd complain about how horrible America was ... and the next sentence was about the 2 week trip to Paris they just returned from.

I could have been a pro-military, patriotic conservative leaning Democrat. Intellectually I was gonna end up buying the ideas of free market economics and individual liberty.

But the intensity and hatred I have for the Left comes from those years in college being insulted and called a racist, sexist scumbag by these arrogant rich-bitch left-wing fuckers.

85

I knew, just knew it was wrong to be forced to share when things had already started out perfectly fair to begin with (and it's certainly not like she shared any of hers with me), but I was being told by two adult figures that I was the selfish one, and not my sister who was demanding a box-and-a-half to my half.

Amazing.

It's the same story.

Here's another example of an authority figure pushing their fucked up liberal bullshit on me when I was a kid.

I was in the 3rd grade playing outside on the school playground in the winter. A few of us were kicking around a flat piece of ice on the asphalt, playing a modified came of soccer (I think we were pretending it was hockey, but whatever).

Some jackass kid thought it would be cute to disrupt our game, so he ran across the asphalt and stepped on the ice "puck" we were kicking, smashing it to pieces so that it was useless to us.

We grabbed another piece of ice and started up again. He smashed that one as well.

After about the 5th time smashed puck, I'd had enough. I went after the bully and tackled him face first onto the blacktop. He had a toy car in his hand that ended up getting broken in the process, and he went howling in tears to the nearest teacher.

When she came over, I calmly explained to her that he was bullying us and so I gave him what he deserved. And if he didn't want people to tackle him on the blacktop, then he should learn to leave me and my friends alone.

That didn't go over well. So I ended up having my recess cut short and was ordered to buy him a new toy car.

I never did. I wasn't going to by that little asshole a damned thing and no one was going to make me. Not her, not anyone.

To this day, I shake my head in amazement at that teacher. The obvious lesson to the bully is, "Hey, don't stir up a hornet's nest then complain when you get stung." But no. I was at fault for reacting to his provocation.

 

 

86

Posted by: Joejm65 at April 21, 2011 08:14 PM (BDB5n)

What about The Grateful Dead? The name alone caused me to contemplate my values even back when I was a lil stoner in the 60's 

87  For me, it was Vietnam.

I dug into the history of the war in my 20s and came to realize that EVERYTHING spouted off as accepted 'wisdom' by the left was wrong wrong wrong. And absolutely deceitful.

I then started realizing that there would be no socialist left-wing if it wasn't for the amount of arrogant lying that they engage in. Maybe a little-guy sort of populist democrat party, but not what there is now.

88
You really wanna know what me a conservative?

Television.

I grew up glued to the t.v. set. Don't laugh. Shows such as Charlie's Angels, Kojak, Quincy, Fantasy Island, Hawaii Five-0, Brady Bunch, Alice, and the Jeffersons taught me important shit like the difference between right and wrong.

I shit you not.

89 I grew up in a conservative republican home and was  fortunate to have parents who were involved with the local republican party.

My father was a tank commander in Korea. I grew up wanting to be John Wayne.

I also went to jr high and high school in the sixties. I began to get caught up in the hippy bullshit because my friends did, but then one day in high school a few bus loads of war protesters arrived to picket the Marine Corps recruiting station which was just around the block from my school.

I looked on in disbelief. My fucking blood boiled, and I went and rounded up a bunch of friends. We went across the street to a deli and tried to buy 5 or 6 dozen eggs.

The guy behind the counter was an old Italian immigrant, he had a heavy accent, he said, "whatta ya gonna do wit does eggs?"

We said we were going to egg the hippies that had the Marine Staff Sgt surrounded. 

He looked at us and his eyes got watery and he said to us. You take the eggs for free, GOD BLESS AMERICA!

That was the moment I knew who and what I was politically. Two years later I was on Parris Island, and three years after that I was a United States Marine.

Semper Fi, maggots!

90 Nothing really "made" me a conservative other than instinct, so I assert that I came by it naturally. I can remember being nothing else (other than a few confusing years in college due to peer influence, but that thankfully passed). However, I do recall a specific incident from my youth which to this day remains in my conscience as a self-affirming moment of ideological clarity:

I was a big comic book geek as a kid in the '70s (A Marvel guy specifically), and as you fellow Marvel comics geeks know there was a  character back then named Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fun (capitalizing on the Bruce Lee/Kung Fu TV show popularity of the day).

There was a sequence in one of his comics which I have copied and tacked on my office bulletin board as a reminder of the moment when I interpreted it as emblematic of my philosophical outlook. The setting is late at night and Shang-Chi is crossing a city street into Chinatown (New York, where virtually all Marvel comic book stories take place). As he's walking (against the crossing signal) the following scene ensues:

COP: Hey, you! Can't ya read?

SHANG-CHI: What?

C: The Sign! It says: DON'T WALK!

S: But there are no cars. What do you say?

C: I say never mind -- just obey the sign.

S: Even when the sign serves no purpose?

C: What do you mean, "No purpose"? That sign's there to protect your life!

S: I can serve that purpose better than a sign.

C: Don't get wise with me, you little punk! Just obey the sign!

S: If the sign said "WALK" while a car was rushing down the street, would you have me walk in front of it?

C: Of course not! The sign can't see when some idiot on the cross-street is disobeying the law!

S: Yet I can see that there are no cars now. You can also see it. But the sign, as you say, can see nothing. Had you not stopped me, I would be

two blocks down the street, and the sign would neither know nor care.

Many years after initially reading that sequence it came to mind one day as I was pondering . . . well, I forget now, but it occurred to me that it served as an apt parable to describe my innate antipathy towards The State (cop/street sign) demanding blind obeisance of the Individual (Shang-Chi), despite the ability of the individual to provide for himself with better knowledge of what he needs than any abstract Authority (sign/cop) can surmise; it definitely fed into my instinctual distrust of Authoritarianism, one of the fundamental weapons in the battle of the Collective against the Individual. In other words, "I can decide what is best for me, so leave me the fuck alone." That lead to me reading a helluva lotta conservative ideology books later on, which reinforced my bedrock instincts with a deeper philosophical understanding.

So thanks, Marvel.

91 Fairly apolitical. Staunchly pro-American. Brainwashed by the MFM but never gave a shit because life was good. Saw what the Clinton's were like for 8 years and then... 9/11. That was it. Made the Churchillian switch. And damned glad of it, although it is a hard cross to bear-- especially in New York City.

92 Hey, that's like getting 99 weeks of 60% unemployment payments from the govt. and then wanting more! All of those professionals who have been laid off getting the max in unemployment.

Oh, Holey crap!  The max unemployment benefit per week in CT

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_unemployment_pay_in_Connecticut

 is $537 plus $15 per dependent.  $537 per week is $27,924.00 per year.  OK, lets call it 28K!!!!!!!

Oh, for Petes Sake!  There are people in the State of CT who have been getting 28K per freekin' year for the last two years, paid to do nothing.   Except apply for jobs! 

Great work if you can get it!

OH!  THE HUMANITY!!!!

There have to be other obvious examples of that children's story.

93 Also, I studied engineering in college which forces a more real-world, brass tacks, no bullshit outlook on life.

94

Think of liberals as closet monarchists, and it makes sense.  Most desire a king to kiss the boo-boos and make it all better.  They crave to be be peons, servants.  The remainder are those that want to be the kings.  This is why, by the way, so many Hollywood stars are liberals - they fit right into the sycophant system.

Better still - think of them as religious zealots with God removed from the equation.  They really, really, BELIEVE things, because believing in these things makes them fundamentally better people.  It doesn't matter if those things are wrong. 

 This is why arguing with liberals is so often pointless - even when they concede you are right on the facts, you are still somehow wrong.  It is like arguing whether Buddha or Jesus is stronger to them - you might score a point or two, but it'll never convince them of anything. 

 

95 I started out as a hardcore leftist. Happened this way. Both my parents were Republicans, but they never discussed politics. When I asked my mother what was the difference between Republicans and Democrats, she said there wasn't any.

My aunt was a liberal Dem activist. She was On Fire for the cause. For her, the diff between Dems and Republicans was the diff between good and evil. Literally.

I looked at my meh parents, and I looked at this woman who was ***passionate*** for her cause, and I made my choice. Passion is contagious.

I have the Boston Globe to thank for my conversion. They were SO lopsided and biased, they awakened me to the lies and vileness of the liberal cause. For a while I floundered around, a political activist w'out a cause, and then I tuned into Rush. He set me straight, and I've been a conservative ever since.

96

But does (s)he still believe in inflexible demand?

Posted by: TexasJew at April 21, 2011 08:18 PM (uR5Zf)

Or theory of marginal utility?

97

Problem is that I am not a "Conservative" as many would define it...

Fiscal Con, Social Libertarian... one who embraces the origional wording and intent of the Constitution....

And I got that way from seeing how many shithole countrys there were out there, where law was defined either through the barrel of a gun, or by the mob...

I believe in the REPUBLIC.... too bad Republicans don't anymore...

98 Oh and sports.

Sports were key in our household. Competition was the name of the game. Those were the good days when you didn't get a ribbon or trophy just for showing up and trying (or by sitting on the bench/sidelines). If you lost that just meant you tried harder the next time. And if you continued to lose you just assumed that was not the sport for you so you'd try something different.

Rub some dirt on it was a favorite in our house. I think P. Manning stole that from my Dad!

99 The only time we get anti-anything is when others try force shit upon us. Aside from law & order and common courtesy, we don't "impose" our will or beliefs on anyone.

Posted by: Leftover Soothsayers at April 21, 2011 08:14 PM (BPptn)

I wish that was always true, but there have been plenty of "conservative crusaders" who felt a moral obligation to regulate everyone's behavior as they sought fit.  If anyone was responsible for briefly making me a liberal, Edwin Meese floats to the top of that list.  Thankfully, their kind is mostly gone from the movement now (but you'll never convince a lefty of that).

100 I was liberal because, basically, I was lied to about what liberalism was all about. Ever since I was a kid I was always interested in freedom a liberty. I was led to believe that liberals were all about personal freedom and conservatives wanted to imprison us all in Jesus Jail. Also, I didn't quite grasp that the pit of government money wasn't bottomless.

When I got into college and started finding out what liberals really believe, I started to drift. After college, I was a union officer at my workplace. Then I quit the job, quit the union and quit the left. It was really the union experience that did it.

101 But mostly it was a visceral hatred of all the rich left-wing fuckers who looked down on people like me. I met kids with trust funds for the first time. I got in political arguments with these rich, leftist pricks who had such a sense of superiority.

Oh yes. I think nothing betters shatters the "young, smart, world changers" meme of the left like actually living with them.

102 Code red, i think you are over reacting about your childhood experience. But i love the way you described the robbing of children's' cookies. What are you wearing now? mmmmm? Which pocket are your credit cards in? Can you pull one out for me? Please pull your biggest one out just for me. Is it shinny and glistening? Do you love that word? It's Latin. It means to glist.

103

I was 7 years old when Reagan ran against Carter. My parents were both conservative Southern Democrats at the time (remember them! HA!) I remember feeling embarassment when I saw Carter and insisted that that mayo-pickle sauce used on fried fish be called "Carter Sauce," because he was so fishy.

I remember my mom brought home this huge bumper sticker that read, "SAY SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT AMERICA--JIMMY CARTER"

I made a comment that it was an awesome bumper sticker (showing that I was patriotic from the womb) and that all it needed to make it great was some scissors to cut out the words, "Jimmy Carter."

I got a spanking.

So I don't know if it was Reagan who made me feel proud and lucky to be an American or Carter who made me ashamed to be led by an idiot, but I've been conservative since I could put two thoughts together.

104 I was always somewhat conservative on military and most social issues, but kind of left in my economic issues. Then my dad died (right after Billy Jeff raised the estate taxes), and the first meeting with the attorney and CPA was pretty much the family business had to be sold. The family business that I had worked at ever since I was 8 years old, that I worked at for way below market wages, because it was the family business. The business that I had started running 18 months earlier. Sold to a large out of state company. This made me a conservative because I saw how many people lost their jobs, not just mine, because of tax policies.

I became a libertarian about 6 years later when a company I had started got royally ass reamed by the local government. Our fees and taxes went from about $60,000 per year to about $280.000 a year in a span of 4 years. Just a coincidence, the city had brought in a national competitor for "economic development". As we found out, the city paid this company $220,000 a year for 5 years. When I told the city this would put us out of business, and oh by the way, they will also be out of business in 5 years, their response was so what, we can get someone else in here when that happens. Well, we went out of business after 3 years, they brought another company in a year later, it lasted a year, then the company getting the sugar went out of business at the same time. Now, the city doesn't have anybody in that business, and anyone wanting those services have to drive 3-4 hours for it. When I talked to anyone on city council, they played stupid, then talked to me about all they had done, namely bringing in the competitor, and by the way, can you make a contribution to my re-election campaign?

Did I mention the entire city council are Democrats?

105

I entered college as a don't-really-care apolitical, but patriotic, type (ROTC).  The one-two punch of weak-ass, apologetic Carter and then proud, solid Reagan was pretty dramatic, especially once I started visiting all these places and meeting people liberals swooned over.

Never looked back.

 

 

 

 

106 @ 17 My dad was a Kennedy-Democrat (until McGovern ran) and my mom was a life-long Republican.

Describes my childhood household to a T. Even the McGovern part.

107 I was a single issue voter, the big A.  Then I realized there were more issues and I had little in common with the rest of the big A supporters.  Now I'm a conservative leaning libertarian.  I don't care who you do or what you do, just fucking pay for it yourself.

108 23 Two words:

James Earl Carter

Yep

109

Posted by: Leftover Soothsayers at April 21, 2011 08:20 PM (BPptn)

"Fantasy Island" taught me the importance of living in decadent sex-saturated tax havens in the Caribbean.

110 The gap I see is 'perfectible' vs. 'non-perfectible.'

The Left insists that Man is perfectable.  They believe that coercion via government, social engineering via government, and sheer oppression via government can overcome Man's base nature and move him toward Utopia.

Liberals know what shits they are-- they know they lie, cheat, and steal.  They project this on to everyone else, too.  The feelings of guilt are only assuaged with their moral superiority through forcing all their other flawed people toward perfection.

Conservatives do not believe that Man is perfectible.  They know the best that can be done is to insulate the individual from the failures of others through personal freedom and autonomy.

111 I was a high school hippie, finally graduated, went to work in a steel mill (the era before they began closing). I was thrilled to be making good money for a fairly easy job, compared to farm work. All around me were frigging grown men who behaved as children and expected the hated company to provide them with a great living. I don't mind goofing off, but I couldn't believe how these guys would actively sabotage the company.
That's when I started questioning the idea of people working in alleged solidarity, either as a union or a  society, and expecting some organzation to look after them.

112 I'm a military brat, and grew up living on Navy bases around the country.  This experience made the Cold War more than an abstraction to me and helped mold my conservative views.  I knew the Soviets were evil, and it was pretty clear one party wanted to beat them and another party wanted to acquiesce to their demands.  The choice seemed pretty clear to me.

113 Carter.

I turned eighteen just in time to pull the lever for Reagan. 

It was a good feeling, and one I've never regretted.

Thank you, Mr Reagan, we need more like you.

114 I didn't know I was a conservative until 9/11.

115 Getting a job and then seeing my taxes at work. Specifically, putting myself through graduate school full time...living in a roach infested apartment...without heat, without health insurance...barely able to make ends meet. I was on the edge thinking about applying for assistance from uncle sugar (food stamps, medicaid) but decided instead to work two part time jobs...then watching taxes taken out and given to those who stood in front of me in line at the supermarket using food stamps with 3 kids under their arms then seeing them strut out to the parking lot, gold jewelry, cellphone in hand and get into a pimped out BMW while I limped home in a sputtering 13 year old Toyota Corolla with a bag full of canned beans and ramen. Couldn't have been prouder...That was my turning point

116 The day I went all-in: September 11, 2001. I've heard this said many times, but don't take it personally when I say I don't understand it. I can see 9/11 making you into a war hawk...but a conservative? Conservatism isn't just about being gung-ho to kick Muslim, or Communist, or whatever ass. It's about constitutional limited government. Part of this, I guess, is that I don't understand why someone sensible enough to realize the need for war over 9/11 wouldn't also be sensible enough to see the tyrannical nature of the Clinton administration, with its murder of the Branch Davidians and its war on gun owners--a third of the population--not to mention its open demonization of, spying on, and tax-auditing its opponents, including private citizens. Clinton began his career supporting Ho Chi Minh, and he ended his career governing like Ho Chi Minh. Why was it 9/11 that broke the ice? Just wondering.

117 Shit.  Sock.

118
don't knock the wisdom of Mr Rourke

the man was both a philosopher and an angel -- he was a philangel.

or angelosopher

119 I was raised in a fairly conservative Catholic family in a fairly conservative area so I was conservative by default, but one of my good friends turned into a hardcore liberal around high school. This made me more interested in political ideas. I realized that he had good intentions and his side had a lot of good rhetoric, but I thought there was way too much hypocrisy among liberals in general, and that they absolutely sucked at predicting the consequences of their policies.

120

I went hard right.  I've never looked back.

I'm so far right tharwhen I'm drivimg the sidewalk is a bad place to be.

121 If my brother wanted to take my McDonad's cookies, he could have them. I'm no fan of shortbread. But go for my Oreo and we're gonna have problems, bro.We had a throw down once over a Fruit Roll-up. Nastiest things on the face of the Earth but a bloodbath ensued. Fighting for the sake of fighting IIRC.

122 My unit had established a perimeter in a city in Iraq when a bus full of civilians drove towards us. The bus driver had probably just panicked, but an embed starting firing his rifle at it, and the rest of us responded by unloading on it. Several civilians were killed. It really affected all of us pretty badly, and I began to complain that our leadership, including the President, were responsible for those deaths by putting us into that situation.

An NCO, our company sniper, started talking to me about how you can't just blame them for the bad without also acknowledging the good, and I had to admit that, despite the horrible tragedy, the Iraqis were better off than before we got there. That's when I developed my reality-based, results-oriented mentality that led me to realize that free markets work better than a state-run economy, and that freedom just works better than statism. I realized that the socialist utopia was a myth, and that there is no justification for abolishing our freedom to be successful, even though that means that not everyone will be successful.

Ya, not the best story, I know. I should really emphasize that I saw a lot of good happen. We did a hell of a lot of good, and most Iraqis (in the North) were really grateful to us. It's harder to talk about one really good thing that happened. A lot of the good was simply preventing other really bad things. But that incident was obviously a turning point.

123 My freshman year of college started in the Fall of 2000. I was never all that politically aware, but I knew Clinton was a jackass. Didn't think too much of Bush at the time, Gore was an obvious loser, so I registered Green and voted Nader. Went on to spend my years in college pretty much as a doctrinaire pot smoking lefty know-it-all.
I'd argue politics with dad whose politics I could never really figure out (wish he was still alive today...) and he kept me somewhat grounded. He'd say, "I don't know much, but I do know I pay too damn much in taxes and the Republicans are a hell of a lot more likely to lower them than the alternative." So I was a big Nader guy, but always somewhat suspicious of the Democrats "tax the rich!" mantra.
Anyway, come 2004, I started to see through the liberals' hypocrisies. Everyone who had been an adamant Nader supporting Green in 2000 had become a huge Kerry supporter, hell, even the Green Party took on a position that they wouldn't run in swing states that year, dumping Nader over the issue. "Anyone but Bush!" they'd yell. Fuck that, I'd say, at least you knew what you were getting with Bush.
That was when I started paying a little more attention to some of the things the more adamant Greens were talking about. I realized that the way they discussed universal health care sounded eerily like eugenics. I had also questioned the validity of Global Warming, having taken some physics courses and knowing a thing or two about thermodynamics. My doubt was met with, "Well, maybe it isn't real, but at least it's for the greater good." Left the Greens that instant.
Later on I remember watching the news talking about the coming Katrina hurricane for like three days before it hit. I remember seeing all those people on their roofs and going, "what the fuck is wrong with these retards? Why the hell were so many people still in that city?" Then the media started their non-stop "Bush hates black people campaign!" I began then to realize that the conservatives' complaints about media bias were not without merit.
Since then I've made steady progress over to the hard right. Still don't think Bush was that great, I feel like his "Compassionate conservationism" was liberal spending on bullshit big government programs (compassion!) mixed with born again Christianism (conservative!), but I can at least respect the guy, especially when compared to the disgraceful, America hating Obamunist.

124 I love this btw.

I feel like I'm reading everyone's diaries.

Saucy!

125 Iowahawk & Texasjew,

Wonder if he/she still believes in marginal compensity to consume?

This could go on until MR=MC, no doubt!

Look mom, a new language!

126
in fact, those other shows I listed taught me to be skeptical of other tv shows

such as M*A*S*H where they struggled with "issues" and moral equivalence

127 Warden, I've asked a similar question many times. How can someone like Pelosi really be like she is? Doesn't she too have to live in the mess she helped create? She can't truly be that stupid, right?
 
The answer is she is evil, or she is completely clueless. I think it is a combination. She knows that with her wealth she can hire hire armed guards for her enclave when the SHTF. She knows it brings her power and recognition. She plays chess one move at a time, with no thought to two or more moves ahead.
 
What I have more trouble with is why so many follow her.

128 @124

Dear Playgirl,

You won't believe this is true but...

129 I went to a "junior statesman" summer school in Sacramento in high school. The class met frequently with pols, including Maxine Waters. Listening to her, in particular, cemented my conviction that whatever she was, I was the opposite.

130

Q. What Made You A Conservative?

A.  Not being born a fucking imbecile.

 

131 I'll tell you one thing.  I'm damned lucky that my husband turned out to be a conservative.  Our hormones were raging so much, we never talked about politics. 

132 I think what got me off lefty thought was the reactions of leftists to the first intifada.

I thought: "F*ck 'em."

Then I read some Chomsky, that same year. And I thought:

F*ck 'em till they die, screaming.

133 I wasn't political when I joined the Marines in 1970, by the time I got out I don't know if even then I was a conservative but I deeply despised liberals and democrats. My feeling for democrats hasn't changed since then but along the way somewhere I became a conservative.

134 "Instead of being equal in treatment, we always have to make things equal in result." ^^^This is really what the progressive ideology is all about to most of them. They want equal results, and they don't realize or maybe just don't care that if all results are equal, they will all be equally shitty. But this is why you always see them pushing the income disparity/gap crap and talking about the rich paying their fair share. The fair share they mean is paying out enough so that they're on equal footing with the rest of us. I was pretty flaming liberal back in my early twenties. It was mostly in rebellion from my parents. But I started changing my mind a bit when I sat through part of the first session of a class entitled "The Psychology of Racial Predjudice". I was told by a stereotypical tweedy white nerd that all white people were racists regardless of whether or not we consciously knew it and that it was imossible for any minority to be racist or to discriminate. Only white people were guilty of those sins. I walked out about 15 minutes into the lecture and pretty much dropped out of college right afterwards. Then, September 11 gave me a pretty big shove into national security conservatism. It wasn't too long afterwards that I'd embraced the other two legs of the stool.

135 Ronald Reagan.  I was a "Reagan Democrat"  till his tear down the wall speech then I became an independent.  After 9/11 I went Republican.

136

Posted by: Leftover Soothsayers at April 21, 2011 08:14 PM (BPptn) .

..........................

that says it all for me.

137 Why was it 9/11 that broke the ice? Just wondering.

For me, I was 17 when 9/11 happened. That was when I really became a political junkie and realized where my views aligned. I was always right wing, I just didn't know I was.

138

I became a conservative once i beacame honest with myself. I was a fairly smart kid so i could argue with conservatives like most liberals do now. I would play semantic games and come up with analogies that would 'show' the hypocrisy of conservative ideas. I was the master of strawman arguements. I knew that I was twisting the truth in order to make my arguement but i didn't care as long as I felt i won the arguement and my ego was satisfied. Growing older and more humble, mostly because living by my liberal ideology was getting me no where, I slowly started to look at the logic of things...... thus becoming conservative.

 

139 To this day, I shake my head in amazement at that teacher.

Even here in SC in today's schools you would have been expelled for a minimum of 3 days. That is the new "zero common sense" policy.

140 @ 126 ...other shows I listed taught me to be skeptical of other tv shows such as M*A*S*H.

Yes, embracing my conservative nature definitely made me realize what lefty horsehit M*A*S*H really was. Looking at things with whole new set of goggles.

141
I am in management but would prefer that weed be decriminalized. So I guess I am a libertarian.

142

Interesting question.  I just asked my husband.  Here's his answer.

He grew up in a JFK type democrat household.  After we had been married a few years and Reagan got elected he remembered watching hearings, when Kasich was the head of the budget committee.  We were just starting to make decent money.  When we got those tax cuts it literally was 2 or 3 hundred dollars more a month for us.  Still when Clinton ran, we both voted for him.  After two months in office, Clinton said Oh man it's worse than I thought and wanted to have some sort of BTU tax, even though he ran on the promise of NO tax increases.  At the same time, he started listening to Limbaugh.  It was a combination of things for him, but Clinton pretty much sealed the deal.

 

143 I was a "liberal" democrat for 30+ years. I imbibed it almost literally with my mother's milk; our family was Kennedy Democrats (Irish Catholic, it was pretty much required by law if not by Papal Bull). I sopped it all up, from the nuns, to the public school teachers, as they talked about "equality" and "fairness". But I began to notice that there were a growing number of people, of all races, for whom "equality" was defined as "I had to give up something but they didn't" or "I had to work for something that they were simply given... if I could have it at all." Then I started being told "I had to give somebody something, not because of something that had happened to them, but because of something that had happened to someone else, someplace else, sometime ago." Then I noticed that, no matter what we gave them, their problems never seemed to go away, in fact, they got worse... and that was supposedly my fault, because I had never given them enough. About then, my faith in my "liberalism" started to fray. And then, of course, the Democrats I had grown up with, who at least tried to juggle liberalism and love of country, who had faced the challenges of Depression and war and totaliarianism, began to be supplanted by the current crop of school trained leftists with no life experience except the rationalized gratification of their own avarice. The Zell Millers and Scoop Jacksons and Sam Nunns were replaced with the McGoverns, Kuciniches, Reids and Pelosis. With that, my alienation from liberalism was pretty much complete.

144 Don't mistake being Republican with being conservative.There is some overllap but that is all.

145
here's a memory I recall that never happened to me but it's tv related:

Remember the second series of Real World, the one with the annoying gay dude with aids and that disgusting puck thing?

Well, Rachel was on that series and I think she's now married to Sean "the semi-disappoint" Duffy.

I remember one show when she came home all excited about her day at a Republican meeting. Jack Kemp was the speaker and he talked about taxes and other stuff. She was glowing with conservatism.

The rest of the household was displeased.

146 I guess I held some conservative views but watching that second jet hit the towers was when I woke up.

147 Here's another question for everyone:  When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you?  That's a big eye-opener for people on the fence.  When you identify that whiff of deeply biased bullshit for what it is the first time, it changes a person's whole outlook.

148 I am in management but would prefer that weed be decriminalized. So I guess I am a libertarian.

Posted by: sTevo at April 21, 2011 08:34 PM (VMcEw)

HE'S GOT WEEEEED! HE'S GOT WEEEEED!

149 When the Tooth Fairy made me give my tooth money to the big scumbag poor kid in the projects who used to beat the crap out of me for lunch money.

150 My dad worked for Taft in 52,  my fate was sealed early.

After all our help left the farm when LBJ passed the "Great Society" welfare, it was pretty clear that welfare works. 

It works by stoping people from working.  Why work if you can get the same shit for not working.  It was the right choice for them at the time.  It wasn't the right choice for the country.

It still isn't.

151 "Instead of being equal in treatment, we always have to make things equal in result."

The way I've always referred to that concept is, Conservatives desire equality of opportunity, while Liberals want equality of outcome.

152 No specific story, I just remember as a teenager that it seemed obvious to me that the Soviet Union and all the other communist countries were oppressive shitholes and America was a pretty cool place. I just never really understood the whole America Sucks/Communism is cool mentality.

153

I became a conservative once i beacame honest with myself. I was a fairly smart kid so i could argue with conservatives like most liberals do now. I would play semantic games and come up with analogies that would 'show' the hypocrisy of conservative ideas. I was the master of strawman arguements. I knew that I was twisting the truth in order to make my arguement but i didn't care as long as I felt i won the arguement and my ego was satisfied. Growing older and more humble, mostly because living by my liberal ideology was getting me no where, I slowly started to look at the logic of things...... thus becoming conservative.

 

Posted by: Trapperguy at April 21, 2011 08:33 PM (Q0/nl)

I used to do this all the fucking time. Now it makes me feel dirty to think back of what a shithead I was being just to browbeat someone in a political argument.

154 I was lucky, my journey started at birth and was influenced by two people, my dad and my grandfather. My dad was old school. Never terribly political in the sense we think of here but a man who lived conservative principles everyday. He came from nothing and started working when he was 12 and never stopped. I mean never stopped. His idea of fun a fun weekend was to get me up at 6 am and help him do chores. We moved around a bunch for his career and we always bought the oldest house they could find so we could fix it up culminating with a horse farm built in the early 1700's so chores were never in short supply. My grandfather, mom's dad, was the most brilliant man I've ever met. Dean of the political science department at NYU, author of numerous political books, advisor to multiple gov'ts domestic and abroad, yada yada. Yet I still think the most fun he ever had was sitting with his grand kids and just talking about life. There was just no way I could ever build an argument that he couldn't demolish with patient logic. These two men taught me by word and deed conservative principles and the value of work. They were also two of the most down to earth people I've ever met who would help anyone so long as that person worked as hard as they would. I miss them both.

155 "I know the leftists don't see it that way, of course."

Au contraire mon frere.  They see things like we do when it's their box of cookies that Mom wants to redistribute but not when it's yours. 

156

Grew up in the Bay Area in the 70s and 80s. Never heard the conservative side of anything, so believed that they were evil and mean. And evil.

Then, in high school history class, I started noticing that the teacher was full of shit some or even much of the time. And everyone else didn't care, just said "yeh!"

I have this thing about the truth...and started to question many of things I'd accepted as true.

Then, in the 90s, my husband started showing me some of the big lies about climate change. I started reading his libratarian propaganda. Eye opening.

  I think that for a lot of them, being Left is a feel-good thing.

Yeh, and so many times the truth was secondary to this. Can't deal with that, man.

157 How did your sister turn out, momma? 

Mine was pretty awful and she's a very unpleasant shrew to this day.

Posted by: Y-not at April 21, 2011 08:17 PM (pW2o

She is still an idiot liberal.  She loves Obama.  She started being nice to me because she likes to show off my kids.  Plus, she loves that they love her.

She has nothing but rich friends that spend money on her and really rich or semi-famous boyfriends.

She is all about looks (was disgusted that I had to have 2 'old style C sections) and traveling.

She is also very unhappy and doesn't even know it.

My five year old told me that she mentioned taking them to an Obama speech and I (calmly) asked, 'Oh.  What did you tell her?'

'Mom, I told her that dad has to work three jobs just so he can fly around on his jet telling every one else how to live when he is spending our money!'

'Mom, I also told her to check her taxes.'

Damn.  I have one freaking smart (actually two, because my 3 year old walls me to turn Rush-Bo on) kid!

158 The Catholic Church and it's political swing left dd a great deal of damage.A Church HAS to be conservative.John Paul was the Reagan of the Church.

159 I voted for John Kerry. Dear God. What changed me? My first son.

I got pregnant in college and every lefty I knew was quick to tell me to abort. An ex-boyfriend (not the father of the child, just a guy I used to date) actually told me he was going to fly down and force me to have an abortion because I was ruining my life.

I had a terrible pregnancy and ended up hospitalized for 2 months after my water broke. Again, lefties were very quick to tell me to throw in the towel. My husband was always conservative, and his family was very conservative. They were the only ones supporting me.

Before my son was born I was given a tour of the NICU so I'd know what to expect.  I had always been pro-choice (although I was of the "I'd never do it myself, but who am I to judge" mindset) but everything changed when they showed me an isolet that contained a little girl who was born at 25 weeks.  She was so tiny, but so perfect. I knew, instantly, that there was no justification for abortion. Ever. Period. End of story.

I continued to be a lefty for awhile after that, albeit a pro-life lefty.  Over the next few years I saw more and more that the "help" offered by the left wasn't really help at all. My husband worked a union job and realized that he was working twice as hard as the d-bags who came to work high but couldn't be fired less the Teamsters came knocking. Once he moved into management the fight against the union became a daily complaint.

I read more, and learned more. By the '06 elections, I was voting a straight Republican ticket.

What changed? I lived in the real world.

160 For me, it was 9/11.  Talk about a wake up call.  I was never political, just never gave it a thought.  God, I wish I had paid more attention.  But that's what did it for me.  I just did a lot of soul searching those days afterwards and I thought Bush did an excellent job of rallying the country.  Even the dems seemed to be with him.  It wasn't even 2 fucking weeks later and that was the end of that.  I saw the libs for what they were.  Spineless, souless, fucking pieces of shit.

161 when i was little my grandpa was a doomer during the carter years. He stockpiled survival supplies, food and sleeping bags, and so now i know what to do and how to do it too.
I think its funny that i grew up to be a doomer, despit growing up with everything being ok for me as a child.
Had a subsciption to the National review by the time i was ...ten i think. I know william F Buckley was my hero. And chuck Yeager. And yes Lee Iacocca. lolol. little Gushka was quite the child. It seems weird looking back but washington week in review was like a soundtrack for all being well with the world and my grandparents nearby. But then i was raised in the oil business and my grandpa babysat me in his offices where i sat quietly and read and watched the stock market show on TV.

I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time when i was eleven. read it every year or so after that. heh. knew it by heart. tried to understand how others could be liberal. Drove my socialist english teacher bonkers. she admired my talent hated my views.  But she introduced me to the concept of grudging respect. and i knew who i DIDNT want to be. she actually told my parents not to break my spirit. She admired it.
then i hit art school.

ugh

162

Mom and Dad used to buy peanuts by the bagfull when I was a kid. I was the kind of kid that would husk all of the peanuts in my bowl and put them on the table in front of the bowl, saving them for the time I finished husking the peanuts, and then eat them at a leisurely pace when done.

Parents got pissed, because after my 7 brothers and sisters got done hoovering their peanuts down, I was the only one left with a pile of peanuts in front of me. Dad actually accused me of teasing my brothers and sisters.

Know what? I came to manage money the same way I managed those peanuts. Saved everything until I actually need it.

What a life lesson learned. And I would have never remembered this except for the post you put up tonight.

163 Whatever you do DO NOT click this link I repeat DO NOT click this linky!http://tinyurl.com/3sr7njv BUT if you do then you will be conservative for life!

164 9/11 was when I began to question my commitment to Catholicism -- the one belief that holds many people back from fully embracing conservativism imho.

I was at a Catholic University for law school. When the second tower hit I went into the on-campus church and light a candle. The hippy dippy priest was in there with me. He took my hand and I thought he was going to say some words of comfort as we prayed. He asked me to pray for those that wanted to do us harm. I was flabbergasted and wanted to get sick right there in the church. He offered up this prayer before he prayed for our people. At the time I justified his stance - it's easy to pray for those we love. It's harder to take in those that wish to do us harm but still need our prayers.

I was naive and ignorant. It was only a few more years until I fully understood the Marxist order of the Priests when they showed their true colors during the immigration debate. Left the Church and never looked back. And I think I'm a stronger conservative for it.

165 When I was in Jr. High (1960s) I read "Last Days of the Late, Great State of California" by Curt Gentry because I thought it was a SF disaster novel about the end of California. In fact it was a progressive tract about the history of California and how badly the rest of the US would miss it if it were gone. And it ended with a 100 page earthquake scene that wiped out 90% the state - that was pretty cool. Anyway, reading that book made me a political liberal. But I was also reading Reader's Digest and they had a lot of Vietnam war coverage. I didn't like what the commies were doing there. I read the "Bridge at Andau" (Hungarian Revolution) by Michener - more commie suckage. In the 1972 Presidential election it was war monger Nixon against peacenik McGovern. Nixon was the one! So I became conservative and still am.

166 #20 "I think all consevatives have a libertarian streak to some degree,sraunch libertarians are pretty nuts though.Practically anarchists." You say that like it's bad thing.

167
Do you remember the first time you heard the phrase "social engineering?"

that was an eye opener for me because it began my journey into the leftist mindset

you know what I mean?

168 147 Here's another question for everyone:  When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you?

Well, dad used to get about 4 or 5 dailies (we lived in the Balto-DC corridor), so I kind of knew that the "important" papers were liberal rags.  And, of course, we had Rush Limbaugh on the radio.  But, I confess that when Charlie Gibson used to do GMA with that original blonde gal, I did not know he was an evil lying clocksucker. 

169 I was apolitical until I started spending alot of time on the road. Rush was on KFBK in Sacramento, what he was saying just made sense. He awoke my latent conservatism.

170

Scratch up another one for 9/11. I always considered myself a democrat, but when republicans went after Clinton over Lewinski, I fucking hated their guts.

And then a funny thing happened. I live in Northern California, on 9/11, people hardly talked about the disaster!! We couldn't turn on the TV or turn up the radio at work!! The next day I heard a co-worker say that maybe we kinda had it comming! It was like in an instant my whole world shifted like the street scene in Inception. I was on the wrong team.

171

I love this btw.

I feel like I'm reading everyone's diaries.

Yeah, I've been wanting to do this for awhile.

172 A friend with weed is a friend indeed,

but no Robtr, I don't have weed, because that would be illegal.

173

What made me a conservative?  I've always been competitive as hell and wanted to be the driving force in the direction of my own life.  Among many other undesirable traits, libs are wussies.

174

Yeah..but was the mom a MILF?

(boom-tish)

Seriously though, I was going to leave a comment with this link even before I read Warden's post. It sort of dovetails.

I highly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.

It's from Ed Driscoll at PJM. He writes about John Cleese's comments about how Cleese says that London is no longer an English city, so he now resides in Bath where multiculturalism has yet to take hold the way it has in London.

Driscoll's analysis...and especially the comments....make great observations about how Monty Python, and the Left in general, worked to tear down the old order...and now are having to live in this foreign and distasteful new society they helped bring about.

Be sure to read comment #15 by James May and the ones by Dave in Dallas (hmmm..could it be??), especially #19, which includes in part:

"C. S. Lewis, in “the Abolition of Man”, pointed out that when the smart young people claim to be able to “see through” every classical bit of wisdom as just an accretion of habits which are probably better off dispensed with so we can get to “the truth behind the accumulated obscuring flotsam of societies”, etc, then the solidity they claim to be trying to arrive at usually doesn’t add up to anything. To be able to “see through” every set of morals, customs, traditions and wisdom becomes, in the end, the inability to see anything at all. The culture destroyers of the past two generations didn’t really notice that the thing they wanted to replace it with was…. nothing."

175 @ 167 Do you remember the first time you heard the phrase "social engineering?" that was an eye opener for me because it began my journey into the leftist mindset

Oh gawd. The one that always does it for me is "social justice" -- the Lefties' euphemistic jargon for Socialism.

176 In 1993 I was paid as a contractor for 6 months, and I socked away 20% of pay for the tax man. Then I found out that FICA requires another 6 1/2% if self employed that an employer would submit, but I wasn't aware of. I had to go beyond my receipts, making a log of travel, taking a home office out deduction, etc in order to reduce the bill. I would never survive an audit.
So when my return was all done, I see the pie chart on the back of the IRS instructions. I was prepared to see Military: 75% (good)(I mean what else are they spending it on?) It was 26% or so. Over half of expenditures was money just sent back out to people. I read article 1, section 8, and have been pissed off ever since, and its only gotten worse.

177 I was a spoiled little shit that grew up in one of the richest counties in the U.S. King County, Washington (Bellevue/Seattle). I felt entitled. I was arrogant. My family was probably below average income-wise for the area but I simply didn't how good I had it. I think my leftist tendencies - such that an early teen can can have those between beating off to Farrah Fawcett, Christie Brinkley and the magazines hidden between my mattresses - helped me feel...purposeful. Better than.

I went to Yugoslavia (my family is from Croatia). I can't say the change was immediate in any way but I will NEVER forget the woman on the bus out to the island of Krk who, though agreeing with us, showed what appeared to be...fear...when we brought up politics & government as she motioned us to "Shh".

That seed stayed with me during the Reagan administration as I started to pay closer attention to those that would criticize a society that would have their citizens behave in that way.

I was simply ignorant that I was on the side of those guys. The oppressors. I wish I could provide more on the mechanics of that transition but it would take more time than I have while ignoring my work (where I still am).

Interesting question. I'll have to think more on it.

178

I have always been conservative.

I was trying to figure that out recently and was going to ask my father, a retired police officer, or my brother, my partner in my small business for the last 20 years.

Maybe I should ask those idoit relatives of mine who are so fucking stupid that they still live in that hell hole of a state my parents were born , where my cousin was a US Senator before becoming an Obama advisor.

179 It was not fitting in, always having that feeling...not sure why, not knowing much about anything...but that persistent feeling of being different. High school was strange... That led to me being somewhat suspicious of authority...and thinking I was a lefty... Then I read Atlas Shrugged and everything I ever felt when I was around people was laid bare for me to see and fit into a coherent "puzzle" of which I'm still figuring out... And I really hate blind stupid people who just follow like a fat neckfattened sheep all the current trendy shit, and then seeing the same people with Atlas on their bookshelves. I can't inhabit that stupid magical little fantasy world liberals have, and the fat thug union scumbags can fuck off too.

180
Growing up with a father flying in the Pacific during WWII and mom rising chickens and rabbits to survive made me a strong kid.  When dad returned in '45 and constructed the mock-up airplane for me to fly, I became a republican after flying numerous missions over Tokyo bombing the hell out of the Japs, even though the dirty bastards had surrendered.  They deserved to die, and my dog bullet and I delivered the goods.  

181 I been a conservative all my life. It really congealed in college. I was a philosophy major and studied history as a side thing. I came to the conclusion that modern liberalism is a slavish and fallacious pipe-dream that won't work due to human nature, and nations fall when they turn vices into virtues. It helped seeing all these spoiled children protesting their country defending itself, opened my eyes that did. Liberalism is decadence, and decadence is culture in decline. Rome took the same path we are taking.

182 A friend with weed is a friend indeed,

but no Robtr, I don't have weed, because that would be illegal.

Posted by: sTevo at April 21, 2011 08:41 PM (VMcEw)

There is a new republican who announced for president today. He used to be governor of NM i think. I don't remember his name. He wants to legalize weed. I saw him on CNN he seemed like an ok guy.

183 Heh. Les Habitants have a Russian winger named Kos-TITS-ny. Heh

184

back when my brother was a lib he was pissed at me for something and told me i was so rightwing i wouldnt eat the left side of a chicken...........

i will never forget that.........

185

The family business is refurbishing damaged boat props, repairing lower units and selling new ones. I learned how to grind and weld and grind and polish and buff and paint a damaged prop blade (and burn out an old hub and put in a new one) when I was 14.

The prop shop was cinder block with half a million dollars worth of steel prop forms of every possible boat prop on the market. There were hammering rooms, welding rooms, buffing rooms and painting booths.

My Papaw busted his ass and built that business all by himself and I learned how hard it is to succeed on your own.

He passed away 8 years ago and my Uncle Mike runs it now but I know very well that ingenuity built that, not some form of stumblefuck bureacracy that gets it wrong every single fucking time.

186 When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you?



When they covered for Clinton.  If a man cheats on his wife, how the fuck do people believe he isn't doing the same to the American people?

187 Completely O/T but WTH --

Doesn't someone on Fox get paid to look at the ladies and tell them if their look becomes distracting (no - not that way!)

Gretchen Carlson is ORANGE! Literally ORANGE!

188 lacey- our whole family is Catholic, yet my departed MIL, and 2 sisters in law are die hard libs.  I don't get that, I truly don't.

189
ahhh, 'social justice' conjurs up a court of sniveling modern-age witch burners in my mind

Arbitrarily judging what others ought to be doing is the epitome of Leftism. Sickening.

190 I studied Econ.  In my oral exams my advisor axed me what made Econ different from the other social sciences?  I had no clue.

Money.  Economist make prediction and they are either right or wrong.  How do you keep score?  Money. There is no hiding for an honest Economist. 

Now a dishonest ones never looks at the numbers, they just assumes numbers.  That would be Friedman.

191 The press always tilted left.I remember the harder questioning given to conservative,the snide way names were pronounced and certain words emphasized when talking about R's or conservatives.The criticism of the military,even if it hurt our national security.From 2006 on I look at those years with nostalgia,they now lie openly and freely show their contempt.

192 Don't mistake being Republican with being conservative.There is some overllap but that is all. Posted by: steevy Many act as though these political parties are some kind of conservative consciousness raising club that define their moral standards. Reminds me of Civil War reenactments. Something to help enjoy history. That's nice.

193 @189 I think you get a very wide-range of political opinions in Catholicism, definitely more so than in evangelical circles. I think a lot of it stems from the New Deal era and the Kennedy days; my whole extended family is pretty Catholic and doesn't really seem "liberal", yet my grandmother continues to vote for Democrats in every election

194 I'm a social con who believed that Republicans were evil because that's what I was taught. But towards the end of the 90s I was sick of Clinton and the "it was only sex" attitude of the Democrats so I quietly rooted for Bush. When the press started beating the "Where are the WMD!?!?" drum, I believed them. However, around 2004-2005 I just got sick of the Democrats and their constant whining. I started reading a right-leaning website before the 2004 election and again quietly rooted for Bush. In 2005 or 06 my dad started listening to Air America. My quiet support of the Republicans turned to red hot rage against the eternal smugness of the Democrats. (And what kills me is that Al Franklin flat out sucked as a radio host! He was sooooo dull. Stephanie Miller, for example, was about as mature as a bra snap but at least she had energy.) Around that time I found hotair.com and Ace of Spades and just read these sites regularly. I hate the Democrats constantly patting themselves on the back for their "morality." I'm sick of hearing about FOX NEEEEEWS! I'm sick of hearing about how everything is A) hypocritical, and B) racist. I'm sick of their idea of tolerance. I'm sick of the sophistry. I'm sick of "Tee hee hee, the 2001 terrorist attacks are hilarious!" I'm sick of their "Fuck you, got mine!" caricature of conservatism. I could probably add a dozen more of these so I'll stop.

195

Posted by: momma at April 21, 2011 08:38 PM (penCf)

Your kid is awesome! 

196

He passed away 8 years ago and my Uncle Mike runs it now but I know very well that ingenuity built that, not some form of stumblefuck bureacracy that gets it wrong every single fucking time.

Posted by: ErikW at April 21, 2011 08:44 PM (NQmAk)

Heh, I went to Johnson Motors Outboard Mechanic school in Waukegan, Ill when I was 14 and learned how to be a mechanic. I worked summers and weekends at a friend of the families marina. Loved doing it.

197
yeah, Nina friggin Totenberg pretty much blew the lid off that whole "objective" journalism thing

198 As to what makes liberals tick?  Who the fuck knows?  I gave up trying to figure them out.  I just think they are all demented and leave it at that.

199

Leftists think everything is UNFAIR - and that therefore, entitles them to your money.

200 Was just raised by a dad who taught if you don't work, you don't eat and would've killed any of us if we ended up on the dole. I was a single mom back in Northern Nevada back in the early 80's working 2 jobs and was shocked when another single mom told me she was moving back to California because she wasn't getting enough to live on in Nevada (no state income tax, no welfare state)...the thought that a person could live off what they could get off the govt was absolutely foreign to me.

201

Q. What Made You A Conservative?

A.  Not being born a fucking imbecile.

 Posted by: Sharkman at April 21, 2011 08:31 PM (Orc9J)

THIS!!!!!

202 I have a problem. No, you grew up. That's why they're so hard to understand.

203 Natural Law.

204 Went to the University of WI - it wasn't any different then as now - conservatives were not allowed.  Worked for CItizen Action in the 80s...never comfortable with the way women were treated, non-lesbian woman especially.  Later held office in a small town (nonpartisan) and was viciously attackled by the Dems because I didn't line up nicely.  Vicious.  Started the turn big time.  Then in 2008 at the TX Caucuses when Obama's people shoutged RACIST at me because I supported another candidate...followed by the way the Dems totally screwed the rules to let Barky win the nominaion...see ya.  Always was more of a moderate lefty, tight fiscal issues but moderate on the social stuff (just leave people alone), but not anymore.  Had enough.  Nobody's more vicious than a losing lefty, trust me.

205

Well I graduated high school from a small town in New Mexico, thinking it was the worst thing in the world to be a republican, after all they are all racist and greedy (so I was told) It wasn't until I was 20 and I moved on my own to Virginia and subscribed to two different newspapers; the Washington post and the Washington times, I read them and couldn't understand how the same story could be written so differently. You see I was under the impression that if it was on T.V. or in the newspaper it had to be true, I thought that it was against the law to write or report things that weren't true...(hahahahaha) that was the beginning of realizing I was a conservative. It was a hard road, but eventually I learned that everything I'd ever been taught just simply wasn't true. It took years to undo what I had drilled into my head as a child going to public school, even though I was brought up Catholic/Christian, I still fought my natural conservative feelings. Now IÂ’m proud to be conservative, and teach my two teenage daughters to question everything they are taught in public school, respectfully of course.

206 I had just assumed I was a liberal because, well dammit, I'm nice and people like me. The Rodney King fiasco made me aware of politics. The way they kept calling King an alleged motorist, always identifying the white cops, the entire press coverage justbdidn't ring true. I was a new mom at the time and the first inkling I had that there was another side to these stories was coming across an issue of National Review in my sister's bathroom. Especially an article comparing the tv movie version of the black kid killed after being chased into the street by racist whites to what actually happened. I always felt the MSM narrative was off, now I was finally seeing the reasons articulated. I think what stopped me from ever being a leftist was finding in my parents room (it was on the table by the phone and I remember toying with it while chatting) and finally reading The Gulag Archipelago. Astounding book, especially for a 14-15 year old.

207 Good thread, Warden. I feel like I'm at an AA meeting.

208 204 Natural Law.

Posted by: derit at April 21, 2011 08:50 PM (FQlFL)

I actually chose Political Science as the major I would flush my money down the toilet for after reading Thomas Aquinas' writings on natural law. It wasn't until more recent years though that I came to realize why it struck a chord in me.

209 When I was old enough to understand politics, I absolutely hated politics. I was more interested in why both God and Satan were equally unjust, until I got me some fuckin' knowledge. And then Rush came around and I realized I wasn't alone.

210

Why was it 9/11 that broke the ice

 

When I saw the Dem Party attack our soldiers, Bush ,america for being callous to the feelings of the Talibans' action (we deserved it somehow) as if thousands doing nothing more then showing up for work or flying home were somehow guilty.

when i realized the Iraq Liberation  document had been written during the Clinton Administration , then saw them Lie , Lie, Lie .

i realized they would lie about anything for power. even against the safety of our kids.

so i checked out the otherside, i saw people committed to life, to liberty. what i had thought were Dem virtues (only in my mind was that true)

211

Hey everyone!  Long time lurker...love the site and the comments.  I just had to comment on my conversion to conservatism.

I grew up in a middle class black family, in good 'ole Yorba Linda, California.  Both my parents hail from Virginia and came of age during the Civil Rights movement in the 60s.  Both were Democrats, although my father more liberal than my mother.

I remember when Reagan was elected; my father was pissed about it.  As an eight year old, I didn't quite understand what the problem was, so I asked.  My father gave me the liberal talking point about how Reagan as a governor had harmed people of color by his policies.  Ok...that didn't make much sense, but I bought it.

Flash forward to high school and as a senior I remember the Berlin Wall coming down and thinking that I was really witnessing history in the making.  And yet, I graduated from high school that spring, only to have some friends go off to war in the first Gulf War, and not realizing that my thoughts on how the world worked were being formed. 

The first time I voted was the fall of 1990 for the California gubernatorial race and my dad basically told me I had to vote Democrat "because of all the black people that died for my right to vote."  I voted for Feinstein and went on my merry way.  In 1993, I dropped out of college and joined the military.  Thus began my beautiful journey to conservatism.

Anywho...sorry for the long post.

 

 

 

212 I believe the true teaching of Christ(and therefore of the Church built by his disciple)is conservatism(classical liberalism).I think the current Pope and his predecessor both well understood this and largely stopped the leftward tilt.This is why they are hated by the right people.Think of those who hate the church most.Judge it by it's enemies.

213 And parents don't even see the schools are starting the kids off with the communal bullshit at an early age.

Parents spend their money to have their kids bring in glue, crayons, scissors, and Kleenex. Now stick it in this cabinet for future use by all.

What? I brought that in. My parents bought that for me. What the hell are you saying - I have to share this with the kid that didn't bring any? That's what I'd say now. Of course at six I wouldn't understand that. That's the job of the parent to raise a stink.

214 In my Catholic family the older generation are cool, anti-commie, pro-union patriotic Dems. The younger generations are hard left, America-hating progressives.

The older generation grew up poor. They generally don't talk about politics that much. They go to church. They follow sports.

The younger generation grew up rich. They make good, sometimes excellent, money. They went to good colleges. Only go to church for Christmas, easter, weddings, and funerals. They *love* talking about politics.

Nobody used to talk about poltics at family reunions. Just didn't come up. Now you can't go 5 minutes without one of the 20, or 30-something lefties making some condescending, sneering remark about how evil, racist, stupid, mean, evil, dumb, evil, crazy, and evil the right is.

Family reunions suck now.

215 I have pretended to be a lefty to get laid.I apologize.

216 Very good thread, it's fun to read how people changed and what made them change. 

217 Posted by: I Be That Chick at April 21, 2011 08:53 PM (Ww3Gh)

Nice. Thank you for your service.

218 I've always hated liberals - cheaters, whiners, obnoxious incompetents, and cry-babies.  Always.

Do you have an informational DVD I can get a copy of??

Word.Up.

219 217 I have pretended to be a lefty to get laid.I apologize.

Posted by: steevy at April 21, 2011 08:54 PM (0XJkt)

Why?  Didn't you realize that ALL Liberal women really want to try to dominate the 'Caveman' and bring them to the 'light'?

More Man I was, the more Liberal women would put out... just had to put up with their 'blather'... /smile

220 Thank you for your service.

Agreed. And welcome.

And low&slow -- that's reason enough!

221

"I believe the true teaching of Christ(and therefore of the Church built by his disciple)is conservatism(classical liberalism)."

-This! I absolutely do not understand the thinking that says its Christian behavior to vote to make people, OTHER people, of course, have more of their money taken from them than you're even willing to give.

222

>>Here's another question for everyone:  When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you?  That's a big eye-opener for people on the fence.  When you identify that whiff of deeply biased bullshit for what it is the first time, it changes a person's whole outlook.

I'm still working on that with my mom. I think the moment when it occured to her I might possibly be right was when I pissed on the "Reagan was an idiot" meme by showing her the book with his radio addresses written out in his handwriting.

For me, it was October 17, 1989. Earthquake back home. The media had no fucking clue what was going on and said anything and everything. Couldn't tell Oakland from San Francisco for hours on end. Lied and misled and didn't give a rat fuck. Millions of people could have done better, but they weren't Peter Jennings or Al Michaels.

(Actually, my first suspicion was earlier when 60 Minutes did a story on San Fran and wanted it to look like only freaks lived there. Not hard, you'd think, but they showed the same two freaks over and over again. Because that's what they wanted to say. Didn't matter that the actual issue involved non-freaky people.)

 

 

223 217 I have pretended to be a lefty to get laid.I apologize.

Posted by: steevy

We've all been there.

224 There is a new republican who announced for president today. He used to be governor of NM i think. I don't remember his name. He wants to legalize weed. I saw him on CNN he seemed like an ok guy. His name is Gary Johnson. The problem is that many "libertarian" Republicans are really just moderate liberal Republicans, usually competing in heavily Democrat districts. I don't know about Johnson, but I know that Rep. Tom Campbell of CA welcomed the "libertarian" label, when in reality he was anything but. He supported gun control, even supporting the bill that would allow the government to make a secret list of people not allowed to own firearms. He was also an environmental whacko, IIRC. Usually, if a Republican politician actually calls himself a libertarian, he's lying through his teeth. The most real libertarian in the Senate is Rand Paul; not coincidentally, he is probably also one of the most conservative. Even he probably isn't quite libertarian enough to claim the name, however; although he, practically alone in the GOP, supports military cuts, he still supports a much larger standing army than any true libertarian would support. Granted, Gary Johnson may be the exception. But I'd be wary if I were you.

225 Oops. I've been non-sock misspelling my normal handle. Must be a little lefty still in me.

226 I think working in small businesses did it for me. Seeing how much money came in and then seeing where it went will open your eyes in a hurry. And it isn't just income taxes, there are taxes on the phone bill, the utility bill, sales tax on office equipment and matching taxes for SS and Medicare on payroll, unemployment tax to the state AND the feds, and on and on and on. Good golly, they should be drowning in money.

Listening to the some of the employees gave me some insight to lefties. Some of these people are still looking for daddy and mommy to fix things for them. They don't want to think, they don't want to make hard choices or plan ahead, they want someone to wave a magic wand and make make things work they way they want without any effort from themselves. And if you don't produce a magic solution you get the blame because you didn't help them.

227 Ken,

On 9/11, the very first thought that popped into my head was that those *evil* white, Militia members must have really gone and done it this time. Despite the little voice inside arguing otherwise.

That's when I really got angry. Not at Muslims, but at the relentless, leftist propaganda I'd been subjected to my entire life (try growing up in Canada, friend). The technical term for this is Cognitive Dissonance. When faced with two contradictory beliefs, you are forced to go wholeheartedly with only one of them. I believe I chose wisely.

I'd always had conservative feelings, but try to understand that up here, those feelings are almost universally accepted as being pure, unadulterated *evil.* And all us "polite" Canadians are all too happy to let you know it if you step outside of the official, party line. Very easy to sublimate or repress those feelings in such an environment.

Anyway, after 9/11 I finally started saying, "fuck them." And thankfully, an awful lot of my countrymen have slowly been coming to the same conclusion.

We have a general election up here, soon. The ruling Conservative party, in power since 2006, is hoping to get an actual majority this time (it's complicated).

Keep your fingers crossed for us.

228

I was never a liberal. I did however, change my voter registration to Democrat in 2008 in order to vote for The Gorillary in the primaries as a part of Operation Chaos.

I felt physically ill when I did that...and I had to go see a priest to cast out the evil.

229 Grew up in AK. Not just "get off my lawn" but "get out of my state, you fucking feds." So, there's that.

Also, didn't care much for how the Dems treated women. Any women. Even lesbian women. And babies? Forget it.

230 I also converted my 81 year old mom!  Die hard dem all her life, but she started seeing the light during Bush 2.  We had many an interesting discussion of politics and she slowly started seeing the truth.

231 If the need and dangers in the Middle east are so terrible, it is bigger and much worst in Mexico. And i'm just like the next guy, i get horny for war too. Usually i just watch Red Dawn or something and i'm fine As a country if we are so hard up for war, wouldn't it be more useful to take over and then nation build in Mexico? One is fine and one is arrogant for even suggesting war with Mexico. It is not a moral standard, it is just a Narrative of recent political thought that is different.

232 I was a Unitarian atheist. New wife left me -- and she was pregnant. She left behind the sonogram. I turned to the Roe opinion for clearer thinking. Shock. A new conservative was born. So was my son.

233 I worked summers and weekends at a friend of the families marina. Loved doing it.

Posted by: robtr at April 21, 2011 08:48 PM (MtwBb)

My favorite part of the biz was making the run to marinas at Buckeye Lake and Dayton.

The shop was hellish hot. The blowers would pull the aluminum and SS grindings out but they would also pull out any cool air that blew in. With TIG and oxy acetylyne and a couple dozen belts going, it was a hot fucking bitch.

234 Great topic. I don't know how to explain it but I had an interest in politics and history from a very young age. The first political issues I remember being aware of were the Cold War and the"nuclear freeze movement." The position of the Right just seemed obvious to me and the position of the Left seemed absurd. Everything after that followed the same pattern. The strange thing is that there was no outside influence that I am aware of that caused my political leanings. It makes me believe that there is some credence to the idea that people can have, in some cases, an inherent political tendency or temperament.

235 I can do basic arithmetic, making it impossible to be a liberal.

236 At the the time of the OKC bombing I was working at a brokerage firm,many of the brokers were jews,orthodox ones too.Everybody was yelling"it must be arabs!".Noone was happier than the MFM that it was whiteguy(indeed he may have been working with muzzies but the gubmint was happy to not look into that too well).

237

Anywho...sorry for the long post.

 

 

 

Posted by: I Be That Chick at April 21, 2011 08:53 PM (Ww3Gh)

Don't be a stranger

238 Holy shit! I had no idea we had so many reformed libs here. It's no wonder there's so much crazy up in here.

239 The Hammer is on Hannity right now.

240 What mother would be so unfair to her son? This is because most women go with "feelings" which is why most women vote Democrat. Logic has nothing to do with it. Posted by: Vic at April 21, 2011 07:54 PM (M9Ie6) This story of the kids and cookies was similar for me, so thats where it started. If I earned something, it's mine, and nobody elses. The fact that I should be guilted or forced to give away what is mine is abhorrent. Oh and seeing the projects in Baltimore solidified my conservativism. Here, the "pride" of the welfare state- cement blocks filled with crack and wasted lives. That pretty much did it for me.

241

My favorite part of the biz was making the run to marinas at Buckeye Lake and Dayton.

The shop was hellish hot. The blowers would pull the aluminum and SS grindings out but they would also pull out any cool air that blew in. With TIG and oxy acetylyne and a couple dozen belts going, it was a hot fucking bitch.

Posted by: ErikW at April 21, 2011 09:01 PM (NQmAk)

I still love outboards, I've switched from OMC to Mercury but outboards are still my favorite 

242 This is because most women go with "feelings" which is why most women vote Democrat. Logic has nothing to do with it.

Posted by: Vic at April 21, 2011 07:54 PM (M9Ie6)

As a conservative woman, let me be the first to say "bite me."

243 237 Yep,I felt the same way as a kid.Reagans dealing with the Soviets made sense,the Democrats basically wanted to give up.That's why I say I was always conservative.

244 OT (This has probably been posted a few times, but I never saw it here)

I heard this on the radio today.  It REALLY goes along with the Liberals are fucking idiot twats meme:

Fury aimed at titans hits wrong Koch firmAngry callers are mistaking Koch Brothers, a Des Moines office supply firm, with the brothers who own Koch Industries, the global energy conglomerate. Billionaires Charles and David Koch have fought Wisconsin unions, financed the tea party and opposed climate change rules.

"I initially thought it was humorous to be confused with a multibillionaire," he said, but then a death threat was left on his answering machine. Koch reported the call to the FBI, which he said traced it to a California man.

245 When I was 6 years old, Jimmy Carter was nominated by the Democrat Party for the office of President of the United States. I could not believe that a political party would choose a peanut farmer to be their candidate. (I didn't really know he was governor- or what that was, even- or that he had been a Navy Nuke officer.) At that point, I decided that I was a Republican. The next 4 years, I listened to my parents talk about the country, and remember the Iranian Hostage situation. By the time Governor Reagan, Hollywood actor that he was, started his campaign, I was sold. Slowly, the "I'm a Republican" became "I'm a conservative" as I actually took the time to learn about the issues.

The only thing I know about how liberals think is that it has everything to do with "feelings" and almost nothing to do with logic or reason or fact.

246 @ 211: And then Rush came around and I realized I wasn't alone.

Yeah, Limbaugh definitely played a small part in my ideological awareness, but not really because of anything he said -- it was more an assessment of the way those around me reacted to him that really sparked my innate notions. I was in college in the early '90s and Limbaugh had his TV show going. I'd never heard of him, but all those around me -- fellow students, friends, workmates -- would rail daily about some "stupid shit that fat Limbaugh guy" had said. So one night I checked him out on TV and I couldn't see what the big deal was. That is, he said some things I agreed with and some I didn't agree with, but that was really it -- I couldn't understand why he engendered such vehement reactions in everyone around me. Later I realized it was because he was doing the unspeakable: desiccating Liberals. Oh the horror!

247

As a conservative woman, let me be the first to say "bite me."

Posted by: tcn at April 21, 2011 09:05 PM (QuGK2)

You need to say it with more feeling

248 246 As a conservative woman can you deny he is right about the majority of women?Don't take it as an insult,it's a statement of proven fact.

249

I guess I'm an 'Alex P. Keaton' conservative

Posted by: Soap MacTavish at April 21, 2011 09:03 PM (vbh31)

I met Michael J. Fox back in my bartending days. He actually seemed pretty cool. I just wonder if he was a raving leftist lunatic back then.

250

As a conservative woman, let me be the first to say "bite me."

Posted by: tcn at April 21, 2011 09:05 PM (QuGK2)

Well I'd be much obliged, darlin'. I've never bitten a Moronette before. 'Bout damn time.

251 >>As a conservative woman, let me be the first to say "bite me." I can't believe it took this long.

252

I was pretty conservative just due to raising. My parents were the type that felt like the only thing wrong with the Kennedy assasinations is that it should've been a trifecta.

But what really cemented it for me was the Clinton impeachment process. I just couldn't believe how many democrats absolutely REFUSED to acknowledge the facts and danced neat circles around the crime. "The republicans are trying to outlaw sex" was a goddamned lie and the people who were telling the lie knew it was a lie when they told it. I decided I'd be better off permanently alligning with people who kinda half-assed stuck to the truth most of the time. With all of their scrapes and scabs and scummy politicians the R's still deal with the American public more honestly than the D's. Liberals have to fall back on the old, tired "false conciousness" lie in order to make the case that conservatives are less than honest most of the time.

253 Went from a JFK Democrat to a Rush Limbaugh Conservative.  Republican voter by default.

254 237 Yep,I felt the same way as a kid.Reagans dealing with the Soviets made sense,the Democrats basically wanted to give up.That's why I say I was always conservative. Posted by: steevy I use to tell the hippies in the 80s, I'd like to see how hippyfied you would be if the fussians were in charge here.

255

Thanks for the welcome! 

You know what really gets me?  I moved back to Southern California in 2004 and I swear that I didn't even recognize it.  Some parts literally look like a third world nation.  And it's such a beautiful state, but it is so messed up by years of liberals running it into the ground!

By the way, my father called to tell me he saw Air Force One land today at LAX (he works at Raytheon and has a birds-eye view of the airport from his office).  I just shake my head and pray from him.

256 My favorite part of the biz was making the run to marinas at Buckeye Lake




Hey, that's my lake


PS:  Why is FireFox screwing up the formatting in my posts yesterday and today?

257 I was raised in a knee-jerk liberal Democratic household.  I avidly watched the Watergate hearings on t.v. and hated Nixon.  I was somewhat subconsciously  racially aware (no blacks in elementary school and the behavior of those in middle school was an eye opener) but still mostly a liberal through college.  Then I went overseas.  I experienced socialism, communism, and black-run government firsthand.  I really began to think about what made me American, and what mattered to me, and what I wanted to pass on to my future children.  I met active-duty members of the American military for the first time.  I met lots of Southerners and found them delightful people, not the racist reactionary rednecks I had been taught to believe by Hollywood and the leftist press.  I was overseas for 1980, but voted for Reagan in 84. 

Since then I've done lots more living and lots more learning.  Those who claim they were "awoken" by 9/11 have a looong way to go.  As another commenter noted, being a conservative and a Republican are not synonymous.  Many who call themselves conservatives are merely right liberals (think Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and so forth).  Once your eyes have been opened, you start noticing more and more of today's "received truth" is irrational and destructive.  I don't play games and I'm not deterred by names (racistsexistantisemitehomophobehater). 

258 You need to say it with more feeling Posted by: robtr at April 21, 2011 09:07 PM (MtwBb) And post pics of your boobs.

259 It was the lies leading up to the 2004 election.  Dems just can't help themselves, and they're getting worse.

260

As weird as it seems to look back on, I became a conservative while I was at Duke University getting a Ph.D. in English in the 1980s -- the time when Stanley Fish and Frank Lentricchia and Frederic Jameson were all over the place and Duke was "hot" in academia, mainly because its leftists were even further left than other schools' leftists.   I thought of myself as a left-liberal, although I didn't much know what that meant; mostly I just liked being thought of as someone who liked the cool books (Foucault, Derrida, the Frankfurt School, etc.), and someone who thought the same way as everyone else.  

Anyway, one day in the department office, a twenty-something grad student woman I knew asked me to sign a petition that would demand that the University Health Clinic provide free abortions to students.   I declined to sign; if I remember, my reaction was more toward the notion of university money going to pay for it, rather than a reaction against abortion per se.   But the withering, absolutely hateful reaction from the woman that I got really took be aback.   I had immediately become for her a pariah simply because I wouldn't subscribe to her little free abortion on demand petition.  It seemed so odd a reaction on her part, and it made me feel very uncomfortable and, frankly, mad.   I was a good guy, I thought the right thoughts -- how could she look at me like that?

It got me to thinking, though.  At the time I was single with a capital-S, and, looking back, I was behaving pretty badly with young women I knew.   I worked in a bar, and it gave me lots of opportunities, if you know what I mean.  When I honestly examined my own conduct (albeit not without a lot of backsliding), at some point I concluded that my attitude on abortion had a lot to do with empowering me to act badly.   I still think that's true about abortion-on-demand; it's basically been a disaster for women and a boon for irresponsible young men.   So I began re-thinking my own prejudices, which is what I had thought was supposed to be part of the liberal arts anyway.  (Surprise!  It wasn't.)   And I, over the course of a few months, suddenly found myself becoming Pro-Life, which I've been ever since.

The truth for me about becoming a conservative is that, once you've flipped on abortion, the rest follows, because once you start confronting the question of personal responsibility, a whole host of conservative positions  -- on marriage, children, work, taxes, etc. -- all flow from that original concept.   (It helped that, at about the same time, a friend introduced me to National Review too.)

P.S.  I managed to get the Duke Ph.D. by, frankly, concealing my conservatism in my dissertation.    But it was a close run thing.   Luckily, I'm now far, far out of academia, and safely ensconced in the Real World.   Managed to become a Catholic too, or at least marry a Catholic and raise Catholic children.  

P.P.S.  A lot of it too was just growing up.   Cheers.  

261 Hey - wouldn't an Alex P. Keaton conservative have to be born into a raving left-wing household?

262 My conservative awakening was when Bill Clinton pulled the 'I didn't inhale' bullshit.

That was such bold horseshit he told and he expected ME to BUY IT.  He had an opportunity to say 'yeah, I did it, whatever' and actually how some character, confess a flaw, but rather than do that, he just told this pathetic lie and let me know he thought I was a fuking moron.

And then the Left covered for him, and ran on 'character is not an issue' that let me know they were morally bankrupt.  And smeared GHWB to boot, a fucking honorable man and a war hero (even if he was a squish, he deserved respect).

That was when I started tuning in to Limbaugh.

263 Actually, I can go back further than that. Before high school, it was Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings. Simple ditties, but they drilled the Preamble into my head and sparked an interest in history. And before that...as a very young kid, seeing a wounded vet with a hook for a hand, selling flag pins, being cursed at by a carload of angry hippies driving by. I walked over and bought a flag pin. This would have been 1972.

264

9/11 definitely was the watershed for me. When I was in high school, I was definitely more liberal. But I grew up in Alaska, so it was impossible not to have those strains of individualism that is almost a requirement to living in such a rugged rural country. (I say almost because even Alaska has cities, and with cities come liberals.)

But 9/11 changed everything. I realized that even though I wanted to ignore politics, and blame America for "meddling" and even though I sincerely wanted America to just stick to its own borders and leave the rest of the world to its own devices, the rest of the world didn't give a rats ass. These bastards were out to destroy us. Then I started learning. I learned everything I was taught in history class was a fucking lie. I learned that the country had become something that would have shocked and appalled our founding fathers, and the founders were so damn famous because they were really REALLY smart men.

Then I learned that "a right" is not something the government gives out, but is something that is given to us by God. (Or a philosophical belief that must be kept constant in order to ensure that circumstances don't erode core principles, etc, etc, for the non-Christians, NTTAWWT) Then I started to realize that the rights of the individual should only be abridged when they threaten the rights of others.

I quickly formed a foundation of principles upon which I could build internally consistent political beliefs.

There is now only one issue which is difficult for me to tackle with these beliefs, which I won't go into here as it is beyond the scope of your request.

But otherwise, yes, that is how I became a conservative. I never went from, you know, David Mamet to Rush Limbaugh, but I still went pretty far.

I still remember some of the crazy political beliefs I had back then. Especially about Israel, blugh.

265

By the way, my father called to tell me he saw Air Force One land today at LAX (he works at Raytheon and has a birds-eye view of the airport from his office).  I just shake my head and pray from him.

Posted by: I Be That Chick at April 21, 2011 09:08 PM (Ww3Gh)

Meh, I get excited when I see that plane too. I don't care who is riding in it at the time.

266 @261
Don't you feel a little odd making that comment about "black-run governments" on the same thread with a lurker who's told us she is a black, conservative serving our country in the military? 

267 It's simple.There is right and wrong.Ever since I can remember if I ever wanted anything I had to work for it.Cutting lawns, pumping gas, and shoveling chicken shit just to name a few of the jobs I had.That kept gas in my mini bike and a few dollars in my pocket.Not once did I ask for or borrow money from my folks.It was just understood. Then It was off to the military.

268 Noone was happier than the MFM that it was whiteguy(indeed he may have been working with muzzies but the gubmint was happy to not look into that too well). It was indeed a white man behind the OKC bombing. A white man named William Jefferson Clinton. It's all covered in Ambrose Evans Pritchard's book, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton. Basically, McVeigh was a member of a neo-Nazi group, Christian Identity, and Clinton placed a government agent, Andreas Strassmeyer, in the organization. Strassmeyer convinced McVeigh to bomb the OKC federal building in order to help Clinton's sagging political fortunes. Clinton, quite frankly, should be executed for masterminding the OKC bombing--as well as murdering 80 Seventh-Day Adventists at Mt. Carmel, TX, many of them cute little babies. Sadly, the GOP are too gutless to call for even his prosecution, let alone for him to face the death penalty for his crimes.

269

269

I was flying out of Atlanta back in 2004 and our plane was delayed on the runway so that Air Force One could take off.  I just smiled and waved to Dubya as it took off.

270

Have always been a conservative, shaped by my father, who had the misfortune of experiencing the evil side first hand.  Dad was at one point a registered Demonrat and member of the teacher's union and even worked on a few campagins for Demonrats.  After seeing how the union treated members and how they behaved towards the school district, that started to change my father's political views.  Then came Carter, after that it was the point of no return for my dad and thus his turn into a wingnut.  It was through his experience with the left that he was able to explain to me the pure evil that is the left.   

271 Always have been, always will be conservative.

272 I was blessed to come of voting age in 1984, saw Ronald Reagan on campus, and got caught up in the whole thing, without really understanding it.  After Iran-Contra, switched to Dem (still in college and not really politically aware).  Voted for Bush in 2004 as a Dem, and subsequently switched back to GOP.  By 2006, I became very dismayed at the Establishment Republicans who ran all three branches of gov't and couldn't cut spending and big government programs, and didn't really defy the Dems because they were part of the same entrenched interest groups.

I am now a "declined to state: which is Californian for "independent" and consider myself a small "l" libertarian.

Reading Goldwater, Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg, and especially Orwell informed my political opinions.  I have also concluded that Democrats are comprised of two elements:

The Guilty and the Gullible.  The guilty are those who profit from the redistribution of wealth through false and demagogued pretenses, and the gullible are the bleeding hearts who want gov't and other people's money to "fix" things so that can feel better about themselves and actually believe the tripe fed to them by the party.  These tools are the type Stalin called "Useful Idiots".

273 This is because most women go with "feelings" which is why most women vote Democrat. Logic has nothing to do with it.

Posted by: Vic at April 21, 2011 07:54 PM (M9Ie6)

As a conservative woman, let me be the first to say "bite me."

Posted by: tcn at April 21, 2011 09:05 PM (QuGK2)

(Most) Women don't go on feelings, they based decisions on:

1. How good it will make them look

2. What their friends (or those they want to be like) are doing.

3. How good it will make them feel (not the same as going on feeling).

(Most) women are either incredibly conceited or incredibly stupid or incredibly selfish (but I repeat myself.)

274 Schoolhouse Rock nowadays, sadly, would be considered too right-wing and jingoistic and would never be produced. No More Kings was my favorite. Made me proud to be an American as a young boy. Now kids just watch Dora extol the wonders of diversity.

Actual lyrics

They knew that now they'd run their own land,
But George the Third still vowed
He'd rule them till the end.
Anything I say, do it my way now.
Anything I say, do it my way.
Don't you get to feeling independent
'Cause I'm gonna force you to obey.

He taxed their property,
He didn't give them any choice,
And back in England,
He didn't give them any voice.
(That's called taxation without representation,
and it's not fair!)
But when the Colonies complained
The king said: "I don't care!"

...

Rockin' and a-rollin', splishin' and a-splashin',
Over the horizon, what can it be?
Looks like it's going to be a free country.

275 I wasn't a liberal before, more a-political.

What woke my ass up was the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 83.

I watched the political fallout from that, and one side sickened me. Guess which one.

276

I was more libratarian than conservative til the idiots at Reason drove me away. "The Patriot Act is so evil that I'm going to vote for Kerry".

Okay...well, then I'll be over here with the adults.

277 I'm another born (as distinct from born-again) conservative. Majoring in history in college just added to the intellectual arsenal that I had built up by high school.

278 Liberals.

279

 Those who claim they were "awoken" by 9/11 have a looong way to go. 

I'm not sure what you mean, but I'm already there baby. 

280 Btw, that cookie thing would never have washed with my mother (or me). She had six kids. The oldest and youngest are 12 years apart. WHEN she bought cookies they were immediately divided and we were given ours with the admonishment that we could do what we wanted with them (eat them all at once, take a couple to school each day, barter with them) but she didn't want to hear any whining. Make your choice and deal with it. Everyone knew Dad was the soft touch, UNLESS you were in big trouble. I overheard my Mom commenting to friends that as far as the kids were concerned he had the voice of God. She was right. Wonderful parents.

281 (Most) women are either incredibly conceited or incredibly stupid or incredibly selfish (but I repeat myself.) Posted by: momma Reminds me, I saw Meghan McCain on Hee-Haw. She did the bit; Me so corny. Me so corny. Me bore you long time. very convincing

282 283 I think you are correct.Is it racist to point out that Africa has been a disaster since the blacks threw out the colonial powers?It's a fact.Soutn Africa under white rule was the best country to live in in Africa.Was Apartheid right?Of course not.

283

Hey, that's my lake

Posted by: momma at April 21, 2011 09:09 PM (penCf)

You're not a Papa Boo's denizen are you?

 

284 I watched teh ones inauguration and his sheep followers. Been Conservative since.

285 I love how this thread has brought a lot of lurkers out.  Very cool.

286 @288  And look at what Robert Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe.

287 I've said it before,I'm very lucky to be in a very conservative family.Only my BIL leans left and he keeps his mouth zipped(he's a union guy and not totally stupid).Family get togethers turn into Obama bashing festivals.Although depressing because we all see our nation in decline.

288 Oh, thank God! I was waiting for a post like this. I'm trying to figure out the same thing. I'm trying to read "liberal" books as much as I can. Right now I'm reading "A Conservative History of the American Left" by Daniel Flynn. Yet, it doesn't touch much on the way liberals think. It's a very good book, though. Highly recommended. I have been trying to have conversations with liberals on so many blog, been banned at least once by every single one of them, and still have no idea why they think the way they do. It's so damn hard not to get into screaming matches (so-to-speak) on liberal blogs. I can point out fact after fact after fact, point out the many contradictions in what they post, and they just...ignore it. It's maddening. I'm trying to do research for a book I'm writing about this very topic. As far as I can tell, there's been no book written by a conservative about why they believe liberals are the way they are.

289

You're not a Papa Boo's denizen are you?

 

Posted by: ErikW at April 21, 2011 09:20 PM (NQmAk)

Every summer (had to look up def. of denizen though)

290 283 Well there are black run governments and to be brutally honest none are all that stellar. I don't think there's anything wrong stating that.

Strictly speaking, no, but yet it jars somehow. I think it's because the phrasing implies that it's the color of their skin that makes them bad. I'd sure love to live under a "black run government" here, if the President were Thomas Sowell, and his VP were Allen West.

291 288 283 I think you are correct.Is it racist to point out that Africa has been a disaster

I think it is in the context of the previous comments about the behavior of black kids in middle school.  Drawing a connection to the behavior of a bunch of 12 year olds as if it provides some huge insight into how foreign governments (not specified) have behaved or performed strikes me as a rather pathetic need to justify bigotry. 

292

(Most) Women don't go on feelings, they based decisions on:

1. How good it will make them look

2. What their friends (or those they want to be like) are doing.

3. How good it will make them feel (not the same as going on feeling).

(Most) women are either incredibly conceited or incredibly stupid or incredibly selfish (but I repeat myself.)

Does this ideology make my butt look fat?

293

Well there are black run governments and to be brutally honest none are all that stellar. I don't think there's anything wrong stating that.

Posted by: lowandslow at April 21, 2011 09:18 PM (GZitp)

Well we have one and it's the best government in the world. I don't agree with Obama's policies, none of them but it doesn't have anything to do with what color he is. I wouldn't be any happier with Hillary running things.

That being said I didn't think her remark was out of line.

294 294 I think it is pretty simple.If a liberal,shown all the facts remains a liberal(what we label left wing progressives today),reamins a true believer.They are sick and possibly evil.

295

Genius post.  My dad made me a conservative back in 1992 during the Clinton vs. Tsongas primary.  I asked him why the Republicans wanted lower taxes.  He explained that an owner of a t-shirt factory would then be able to hire more people, who would then have more money to buy more t-shirts and just about everything else, thus generating more wealth for everyone.  That's how the economy works, son.

Been a conservative ever since.  I was 12 at the time.

296

I was born into a Conservative household and reared with Conservative principles.  I knew nothing different except what I observed from other people and families around me who were not the same.  I realized those people tended to have more self-induced problems (everybody has challenges, but there are choices we can make to reduce problems).  My school "friends" who were liberal from middle school and on through college were major brats, and 90% of them were haughty white people who thought they were smarter than they really were.  I disliked being around them and often found myself persecuted with no respect for me having my own mind and opinions. . .  they rejected me while making me feel like I was the "horrible intolerant" person when in reality, they were unlovingly intolerant. 

So I shook the dust off my little feet and kept on getting on with Conservatism.  "Friends" are over-rated, and liberal "friends" aren't worth sh*t.

I've always been Conservative and realize all the old-timers with humility, work ethic and character were Conservatives.  These are the people who take care of their own, go about their business with diligence and without affecting a great deal of attention to "self", are wiser, and give more without being asked or even expecting someone to "scratch their back" in return.  Liberals are whiners who often adopt causes that "make them feel better about themselves".  They have a need for labelling people via put-on self-image, and gah, they just make me sick!

I'm rearing my five children to take note of the fallacies of liberalism and be courageous to fight liberalism to the bitter end.  Yes, they are only ages 10 and under, but it's never to early to guide them in ways that will protect them and others.

The torch was passed to me, and I'm passing it on to younger people.  Conservatism has never led me wrong in any of my decisions.

297 I was never a liberal. I just couldn't be, my parents were too analytical. Despite that one of them used to be a liberal and the other one has trended more that way recently (mainly through dependence on terrible news sources and being surrounded by hippies).

I'm not actually a conservative, I just look a *lot* like one because most of our positions are the same. I draw my conclusions based on all the evidence I can get my hands on, and since most conservatives do the same we get along fine.

I seek to maximize personal liberty and the Libertarians peed that one down their leg a while back, so "conservatives" are what's left.

I didn't have a journey, per se, but there are a lot of building blocks that have been mentioned here. I learned early on that leftists had terrible arguments and got really mad when you pointed that out.

298 i just watched a short clip on Hannity of Jugears talking. he said webe doing this and that......   i dont think i have ever heard the word webe on here.

299 @288  And look at what Robert Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe.

Posted by: I Be That Chick at April 21, 2011 09:22 PM (Ww3Gh)

It's what Barack Ogabe is trying to do here.

300 The 60's and the dirty hippies coupled with 67 riots in Detroit.  I couldn't understand how chaos was helping anything.  I saw people who claimed they could run things better acting like mindless Barbarians and it had a huge impact on me. 

By the time I got into junior high school, the cool kids were all these hippie dippy druggies, so I tried to get in with them so I could hang with all the hot girls.  I tried pot a couple times, hated it and decided drugs weren't for me.  The "cool kids" then turned on me because they thought I would narc on them.

I didn't know what a conservative was but I knew I didn't trust the filthy hippies.  As I grew older it dawned on me that those 60's burnouts got control of academia, the government and the media.  People that once claimed to be fighting against "the man" had become "the man". 

Fuck them all.  I will hate many in my own generation for the rest of my life for their bullshit mentality.  They are liars and charlatans who pretend to care about others only to retain power over all of us. Fuck all of those who are associated with them as well, like the unions who destroyed the once vibrant state of Michigan.

301 2 issues made me conservative. First, I was in college from '68-'72. Like pretty much everyone else at that time I followed the lefty, anti war line. I went to anti war rallies, attended speeches by the, get this, Jane Fonda. Even then in my youthful silliness, I could see her for the superficial flake that she is. In her speech, she spouted every leftwing slogan there was, no meat, no brains. I had a roommate for one semester who got mixed up with the really radical people. This was in Michigan, and the SDS was founded at U of M, so there were SDS ers floating around to the other universities. I just started noticing that the farther left people were, the more hypocritical people were. These people who supposedly preached love and peace were the most selfish, exploitative people I've ever known. This girl, 18 at the time, was sexually manipulated and exploited to the point where, by the end of the semester she was sitting around the dorm room crying all the time and had to be sent to a counselor. Also, she was epileptic, with grande mal seizures, and these "love and peace " people were always trying to talk her into going from using Marajuana, to LSD, "cause doctors are just part of the system, man". To this day, knowing that that worthless, fool in the white house has associations with Dorn and Ayers, turns my stomach. I will never understand how moderates and independents could fall for a fraud who hangs out with the likes of those people, and pretends to be a moderate. Also, a kid who had gone to my high school had been a POW in the south, not kept in the Hanoi Hilton, but tiger cages in the jungle. He escaped and they made a big deal about him in the news. Anyway, the filthy treatment these POW's received pretty much blew the lid off the idea that the commies in Viet Nam were decent human beings.

302

  Read Tom Sowell's "Conflict of Visions". All will become clear.

303 296 297 I see your points.

304

Posted by: I Be That Chick at April 21, 2011 09:13 PM (Ww3Gh)

Come on in. The water's fine. You can even pee in the pool. We all do.

305 (Most) Women don't go on feelings, they based decisions on: 1. How good it will make them look 2. What their friends (or those they want to be like) are doing. 3. How good it will make them feel (not the same as going on feeling). (Most) women are either incredibly conceited or incredibly stupid or incredibly selfish (but I repeat myself.) That is not nature, however, nor is it universal. The pioneer women who picked up their dead husbands' guns and started firing, as the Indians closed in on the stockade, were not frivolous shopaholic sluts. Any woman who is a shopaholic slut needs to be informed of the rich heritage of American woman, and shamed into following it.

306

Short answer: I was born a Democrat and then reality made me a conservative.

I was born and raised in Philadelphia to a family of Democrats. (Except Mom....that's another story.) Staunch Democrats. My 4 foot 5 inch grandmother was a Democratic committeewoman who attended Truman's inaugural.

I took the El and subway to college.

Got a journalism degree. Saw life and government from the inside. Covered one too many inane peace rallies. And did what journalists do, followed the facts to....the Right.

It helped that strict affirmative action policies meant I had to leave the Phila. region to find work.

The facts led me to being a conservative. I still believe the facts are on our side. If I ever stop believing that, I'll move on.

307

What made me conservative?

20 years of self-employment.

308 Ok, who is code red btw?

309 Yeah, Africa hasn't exactly produced a lot of Thomas Sowell and Allen West type leaders.

Sadly, the most revered black African leader is Nelson Mandela, who is a communist.  Mandela and the ANC's economic policies were horrible.

Gandhi is another example of a man universally regarded as a near saint, but who was basically a communist and kept Indians in bone-crushing poverty for decades due to his dumbass backwards policies. Personally, I loathe Gandhi.

310 I was raised by very conservative parents, and was super right wing in high school and college. To me, it was all black and white, no gray areas at all. Very rigid, the sort of conservative liberals love to paint ALL conservatives as, know what I mean? Then I went to graduate school and somehow managed to graduate without murdering my green-haired hippie classmates (I went to Emerson College, an uber-liberal artsy fartsy school in Boston.... seriously, it's a miracle I made it through.). I remember one time they were all talking about finances, how it sucked that they lived in cockroach-ridden apartments eating ramen all the time just so they could afford to pay their student loans. It just wasn't FAIR, they said. One asked me if I had any horror stories with financial aid and i mentioned that I never had any. they couldn't believe it, just were gobsmacked. I explained: my father put me (and my two brothers) through college. Upon graduating I got a job -- an honest to God, 29K a year salaried job, not slinging lattes at Starbucks. My company reimbursed me for half my grad education since it went toward my job. I lived at home with my parents, didn't have to pay rent, didn't own a car, and had exactly three bills: my tuition payment, my credit card (which I'd pay off each month), and my cell phone. Basically I sacrificed the "fun" of living on my own in the big city for being responsible and lived within my means. Their answer? "Oh no, I could never do that! You have no freedom! You're a slave to The Man!" Yeah, well, I also wasn't living off of spaghetti-o's, either, you jackwagons.

That was about the time I began to realize I didn't just disagree with liberals, I hated them. With the firey passion of a thousand suns -- and the feeling was entirely mutual. My first year of grad school I met the man who'd later become my husband. He was pretty much liberal, having been raised by anti-establishment hippies (which always struck me as odd, since his parents were BOTH in the military, and there is a very strong history of military service in his family). I told him how I was constantly asked by my classmates how it felt to "sleep with a baby killer." Well, first of all, we weren't sleeping together (yay abstinence!) -- so the assumptions in their questions were twofold. He'd just grimace and shake his head.

His conversion to the Right side began while we were dating... he was going to college, doing ROTC. Well, one day it was a ROTC day and he had to wear his uniform to classes all day (he had been enlisted for about three or four years by then, too, and was at that point an officer candidate). There was an anti-war protest going on, and some of the dirty hippies there spat on him as he passed by. They SPAT ON HIM. And one did call him a babykiller to his face. His response was "the only babies I'd kill would be yours, because you don't deserve to sully the gene pool." God, I love that man.

Anyway, it's been a slow and steady slog for him toward conservatism ever since. He definitely has a strong libertarian streak (for instance, when it comes to gay marriage or DADT he says he couldn't care less, just do your job and be a decent person, who cares what hole you stick your junk in?) but the way Obama has been consistently screwing the pooch is helping him get even more right leaning, I think.

311

When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you? . 

When NBC called Florida for Bush and Katie C*ntric did an eyeroll on National TV because her butt buddy Gore was toast. It was not the first time but it is SEARED in my brain.

 

 

312 @304  That's everyday language on my step-mother's side of the family.    I cringe when they talk.

313 >>Well there are black run governments and to be brutally honest none are all that stellar. I don't think there's anything wrong stating that. It has nothing to do with color. It has to do with influence. Look around the globe, from Hong Kong to Australia to India to Canada and the US and beyond, wherever the English Empire planted it's ideology you see democratic gov'ts that are some of the most prosperous and free places on the planet. This isn't a coincidence.

314 Too many words in this thre...Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.....what? huh? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

315 I didn't follow politics too much until jimmah carter fucked the country up to no end, and I started to wonder just how the hell that could  happen. Then there were the gas lines, and iran holding our people. I couldn't believe we didn't go into that little piss ant country and level it. My father also had a small business, so I saw what he was going through.  I started becoming aware just who the assholes were. Then Reagan came along, and it really did start to feel like America was on the right track.

 I saw towns that looked kinda shitty get totally rebuilt, people were starting businesses again. I was doing home remodeling, so I saw towns get so rebuilt that there was no run down properties available for the love of money. They literally were all bought, rebuilt and flipped. I saw a homeless kid I helped get a job as a helper with another contractor eventually start his own frigging remodeling business.   Then I watched the scumbag dems raise the capitol gains taxes because they wanted a piece, and just couldn't keep their fucking hands off the people's money, and of course they killed the economy again in the late 80's,  and had the fucking BALLS to blame bush Sr. That is when I knew the dems are liars, and will sell the country down the tubes for political gain faster than an F-18 leaves an aircraft carrier.

Then over the years it just seemed every time there was something I found I liked to do, there was an asshole democrat looking to ban it, or tax it, or just fuck it up somehow.  I wasn't born hating democrats, but they sure the fuck went out of their way to  remedy that.

316 Second, Being the sweet, caring idiot that I was, I bought into the "War on Poverty", all the welfare programs. Then I started noticing something. There were young women from my suburban area who, because of unwed pregnancy, or divorce, who ended up on welfare. These young women from solid working class and middle class families, once on welfare, sat on their asses and took the free loot for as long as they could get away with it. And I developed this brilliant conclusion: Give people free money for doing nothing, they don't want to work. If you want proof watch daytime tv, Judge Judy, Maury Povich. The war on poverty has normalized and made acceptable, lazy ass bum behavior.

317

We are all conservatives.  Some of us are honest enough to admit it.

You will notice that Barak Obama encouraged his high priced accounts to take every tax deduction he could get away with.  He hordes his animal crackers just like any three year old would.

When I was a ‘liberalÂ’ my conservative friends trashed me every time we debated.  I thought I just sucked as a debater.  One night I went out to dinner with one conservative friend and a bunch of liberals.  It was traditional to discuss politics at these dinners.  My conservative friend offered me a deal I could not refuse.  He said, “Just for fun tonight you take the conservative side and IÂ’ll take the liberal side and IÂ’ll buy your dinner.”  I cleaned the liberalÂ’s clocks, got a free dinner and discovered how good it feels to be honest.

318

Every summer (had to look up def. of denizen though)

Posted by: momma at April 21, 2011 09:23 PM (penCf)

There should be a Redneck Riviera Moron Meet Up.

I think there would only be about five of us tho.

319 @ 281: I was more libratarian than conservative til the idiots at Reason drove me away

Yeah, if you hate cops and hate the military, Reason is the place to be. Otherwise, when it comes to economic issues they're spot-on.

320

Posted by: nerdygirl at April 21, 2011 09:26 PM (SfSiO)

Did you ever read the book by Pete Collier and David Horowitz about their experience with the Left in that era? "The Radical Left" or something. Great book. The exploitation of women is similar to what you describe.

321 When I was in the Army in West Germany we had the Chain of Command on the wall with rank and pictures just like every headquarters. We were required to know them all, and the only one that bothered me was the dud at the top, Carter.

I got out in Feb of '80, a month after Reagan was inaugurated and the hostages that had been held in Iran the whole time that I was there were released.

Reagan and Thatcher's conservatism were a big part of the conversation at the time. And while I've since recognized little epiphanies in my earlier life, it was then that I knew the word "conservative" best described what I had always known to be "that something" that separated my approach from everyone else I'd known growing up just south of Boston.
An unwillingness to "go along to get along" was not only natural for me but invaluable there as well.
And that is something that I know will not change no matter what comes. 
    

322 "Rainbow Fish."

323 I haven't had a 'come to Jesus  Reagan moment'.....yet

But I read some story about some progressive asshole loser making fun of a child with down's syndrome yesterday.

That has me thinking....

324 Posted by: Y-not at April 21, 2011 09:24 PM (pW2o


Yeah!!  Stop printing all those invisible "boy"s !!!!

325 @ 294 As far as I can tell, there's been no book written by a conservative about why they believe liberals are the way they are.

This one is excellent. Highly recommended.

326 I can't say that I made a journey from left to right, though in a way I could.

I was raised by a deep blue Cali liberal, but not raised particularly political, no real discussions about politics around the house other than offhand comments about supporting Mondale or Dukakis. On the other hand, I grew up in Nebraska, which isn't always the deepest red, I guess (its been 17 years since I lived there...), but has that conservative midwestern atmosphere all the same.

As an untutored youth, I supported Clinton, because he was cool, then hated him because he was obviously a lying scumbag and I could watch the damage his medical reform attempts did to the medical care in this country. Every time I read a story about a doctor having to lie to an HRO to get a patient care, I seethe once more, just a little bit.

The point is: For any number of reasons, I could honestly claim that I started out as a Democratic supporter and a liberal. 

But that's not exactly true.  The moment I began studying politics closely I immedeatly realized that a large portion of my politics fell on the Conservative side of the divide. Not all of them, and not even all the big ones...

Cue several years of amateur political study and now I can say that I am a conservative with a strong libertarian bent, and unlike when I called myself a liberal I actually know what I'm saying I am... I mean it.  My views haven't really changed [much],  just my awareness of the labels I was using.

So I really haven't gone anywhere at all.

Ah... what a comment.

327 I was a hard-core liberal up until late 2004. Born and raised in Canada made it pretty damn easy. Man, I remember the way I thought about things, too. Lots of anti-Americanism, anti-Bush (worse than Hitler) and just...angry all the damn time. I remember being angry that the world was so unfair. I was an idealist and it blinded me to some pretty harsh realities. I was young and naive about the way the world works. I felt like a rebel; it felt good to tear everything down and "stick it to the man". I gotta admit, I felt pretty vindicated when I heard all those Americans saying they'd move to Canada if Bush was re-elected. Let me tell you guys something: Canadians hate you. I'd say about 85% of Canadians want America to be destroyed. They fucking hate your guts. Anyway, what changed was...moving to Calgary, Alberta. Alberta is known as "Texas of the North". So, all it took was a simple change of view. I guess my liberal beliefs weren't as strong as I thought. I'd never really examined my beliefs though, so it was pretty easy to believe all the propaganda (from the government, too). Once I started to ask myself WHY I believed what I did, things kind of fell apart. I guess that's partly why I want to write my book; it was so easy to change from hard-core liberal to strong conservative that I want to make it my mission to "save" other liberals.

328 I hate communism.  I always have.  Liberalism is just communism lite.

329 326 I have to say,I was super pro police besides pro military.I'm reconsidering the former(and the high command of the latter has damaged my faith in them).I now no longer believe law enforcement is right all the time or that prosecutors want justice all the time.

330 This thread should go to other conservative websites.

It could become a more productive and less toxic 'Banhammer III'.

331 @ 294 As far as I can tell, there's been no book written by a conservative about why they believe liberals are the way they are.

Ann Coulter and P. J. O' Rourke have always done a pretty good job of it.

332 I was basically an uninformed idiot about politics well into my 20s. My parents both came over from Ukraine after the war so I had a good understanding of the horrors of communism from the stories they told me. They were both Kennedy Dems but the thing I took from them was my work ethic and sense of right and wrong. I remember walking out of my Humanities class in community college on night and seeing the news that we invaded Iraq for the first time under Bush Sr and thinking "Why? Sanctions would have worked!" What a stupid moron I was and looking back on that moment, I become embarrassed. Well 9/11 solidified my beliefs and just look at the well informed moron I have become in such a short time.

333
Everyone knew Dad was the soft touch, UNLESS you were in big trouble. I overheard my Mom commenting to friends that as far as the kids were concerned he had the voice of God. She was right. Wonderful parents.

Posted by: Cindy in San Diego at April 21, 2011 09:19 PM (IB25

Isn't THAT the way it should be! My dad never raised his voice. Never had to. He was the most fun, the most involved dad in the world, but we knew there was a line and to cross it meant sudden death.

Oh, and mom? Boot camp would have been a breeze after a summer with  mom. Even my best friend, who spent summers with us, knew that when mom said she was going to kick your butt, she would, in fact, kick your sorry butt.

Fair, sensible, never heavy handed, but always respected. I should be half the parents they were/are.

334 bumper sticker Give Me Libertarianism Or Give Beth. [i'm seeing a partially nude woman painted in a WWII airplane nose art manner with several weapons of freedom]

335 So.. were you in the "they released them because they were scared to death of Reagan"camp?  or the "they released them to humiliate Carter" camp?

336 Yeah, if you hate cops and hate the military, Reason is the place to be. Otherwise, when it comes to economic issues they're spot-on.

Posted by: Fartnoise at April 21, 2011 09:32 PM (bCxgV)

What about Wisconsin cops who look the other way?

That being said, Reason writers don't always reason that well, sadly. As I said earlier, Capital-L Libertarians kind of got lost a while back. Sad.

They had the potential to do what the TEA Party has done (and/or is trying to do), but they concentrated too much on masturbatory ideological purity and school-government style campaigning when it was obvious they would almost never win.

As the old ads in political mags used to say, "Libertarians have the best ideas..." and an almost total lack of the "get things done" gene.

337 Regarding #239
We still don't know to what extent Timothy McVie conspired with others.  There seems to be bits of information that include the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence agents, and a trip to the Philippines which was a planning spot for Khalid Sheik Mohammad, combined with the fact that McVie was prosecuted and executed the fastest I have ever seen the gov't rush to kill someone.

I don't mean to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but there is an incomplete picture here.

338 Give Me Libertarianism Or Give Me Beth. there we go

339 duh, Feb of '81....when Reagan was inaugurated.

340

There should be a Redneck Riviera Moron Meet Up.

I think there would only be about five of us tho.

Posted by: ErikW at April 21, 2011 09:31 PM (NQmAk)

maybe 6..........  i know my way around there. i've spent alot of time in Shuckems........

341 So.. were you in the "they released them because they were scared to death of Reagan"camp?  or the "they released them to humiliate Carter" camp? Posted by: jewells45 at April 21, 2011 09:38 PM

Scared shitless of Reagan.

342 I, like many here, was never a leftist (I refuse to call them "liberal"). I was never much interested in politics until high school. I remember having some left-wing views on a few issues back then, but not enough to be considered a leftist. I only really held those views because I had never heard the opposition, especially on issues like abortion, the environment, etc. Once I did, it was pretty much over for me.

I also don't really understand the left-wing mindset. Like Warden, I know what they think. I understand their arguments (they're not at all hard to understand, despite what they think). What I don't understand is how they cannot see the rather obvious flaws in their arguments. Through the years, I've known plenty of leftists, including my college roommate, and nearly everyone I now work with. In my personal and professional life, I know far more leftists than I do conservatives. And while I know plenty of intelligent people who happen to be leftists, I've never met an intelligent leftist; in other words, I've never met a left-winger who could make an intelligent case for leftism/progressivism. Despite their intelligence on other issues, they always struck me as babbling morons when it came to defending leftism. It seemed like they came to their positions on issues first, and then figured out the arguments later, if ever. In the case of my college roommate, his parents were rich, and it seemed like his leftism stemmed from guilt about that (although not enough guilt to give up his trust fund, apparently).

343 So.. were you in the "they released them because they were scared to death of Reagan"camp?  or the "they released them to humiliate Carter" camp?

Posted by: jewells45 at April 21, 2011 09:38 PM (Z71Vg)

The latter is probably true but I like to believe the former.

344 346 Yeah,something stinks.

345 It was a gradual thing but I do remember changing parties during Clinton's presidency.

346 I read some story about some progressive asshole loser making fun of a child with down's syndrome yesterday.

That has me thinking....

Posted by: A lot of disgusted Independents at April 21, 2011 09:34 PM (54D5s)

Yeah, you people would let your entire political philosophy hinge on the outrage of the day. Just don't vote anymore, Pretend Independents.

347 346 Yeah,something stinks.

Posted by: steevy at April 21, 2011 09:42 PM (0XJkt)

It only stinks because the speed at which he was executed is how it should usually go, and doesn't. He was bad, now he's dead. See how well that works?

348 Erik W-

That would be cool.  I think there are more Central Buckeyes on here than you think.



.....


The thing about Liberal sis that they don't believe in any thing.  They say they do, but they really don't - not their Country, not their fellow American, not themselves.

349 351 Yeah,they really are mentally ill or evil.Something is not connecting in their logic centers.

350 320 Look around the globe, from Hong Kong to Australia to India to Canada and the US and beyond, wherever the English Empire planted it's ideology you see democratic gov'ts that are some of the most prosperous and free places on the planet.

This isn't a coincidence.

^^ This. Civilization and liberty don't just spring from human nature. They had to be discovered, and spread. The miracle is that they've spread and survived as much as they have, not that they're still lacking in places. And always there is the struggle with the natural tendency for some guy to climb to the top of the pile and start enforcing his will by force, Constitutions be damned. It never stops.

It's like when people talk about stamping out poverty, as though it were a thing. It's not. It's the lack of a thing. They should be talking instead about enabling and nurturing productivity and prosperity, which is the actual thing.

351 What made me a conservative?  Jimmy Carter.

I  grew up in a yellow dog democrat family,  and was quite liberal until I lived in West Berlin.   Riding the train out through East germany,  I actually saw a man plowing a field - and his wife was pulling the plow.  You could look over the wall and see the gray buildings of communism.

Came back to the states,  went to college,  and forgot some of that.  Got upset with Nixon and voted for McGovern (my first vote).  Voted for Carter because everyone in my family did,  and I was mad at Ford for pardoning Nixon.

And then,  18+% mortgage rates, gas lines, no Christmas lights,  selling Panama canal,  pardoning draft dodgers, Iran mess with hostages,  gutting military and intelligence, beef shortage, thermostats turned down to 65 in winter, no Olympics, etc. 

I voted for Reagan because I was certain he couldn't be worse,  and wouldn't be embarrassing.   And I have never voted for a democrat again.

352 256 Oh,I agree with the speedy execution of justice.I just don't trust the DOJ,than or now.

353 @ 345: [Reason Libertarians] concentrated too much on masturbatory ideological purity and school-government style campaigning when it was obvious they would almost never win.

Amen. I'm highly influenced by libertarian ideas and philosophy (the whole "socially libertarian" concept), but capital-L Libertarians are too unyielding, rigid and uncompromising to ever be a viable political majority party. Strict libertarianism is simply too self-demanding a personal ideology for the vast majority of the populous to embrace it -- too many people want their free shit from the gumment.

354 England failed to pass on a democratic legacy in Africa and the ME.It does have something to do with the people after all.

355

The latter is probably true but I like to believe the former.

My husband and I constantly debate this, just for fun.  He is in the former camp.  But remember, I was oblivious to politics at the time and my first instinct was, they wanted to twist the knife one last time.

356

 I'd say about 85% of Canadians want America to be destroyed. They fucking hate your guts.

What?? That stirs so many passions in me...indifference, boredom, gas.

Seriously, that's cute.

But I'm glad you're up there. Testify, Brother Joffen.

357 Can't help you. I was a Reagan girl at 18 but, if I had to guess, the idealism of youth is to blame, however; beyond age 25, maybe 28 or so, I'm at a loss.

But as far as what goes on those looney heads of theirs ... how they get from A-B, so to speak ... I got nothing.

Maybe that's the point: There's simply no connection between their brains and their, "hearts." The only journey from point A to point B is a big stinking blind leap into the abyss.

358

Another eye-opener for me that sealed the deal of pursuing Conservatism was a faculty member named Alex Miller (now an Associate Vice Chancellor) at NC State University.  It was 1992, and our scholars dorm was having an election event mixer. . .  we were told to wear name tags with who we voted for President.  This was my first Presidential election, and I voted for George Bush.  I was in the minority, and I was fair game for all kinds of jeers and insults at this event.  When a brazen and cocky liberal faculty member mocks you for your own thinking whether he agrees with it or not, you can't help but to think these asses are bullies you want nothing to do with.   

359 Posted by: CJ at April 21, 2011 09:48 PM (tNWxq) Hahaha, yeah I'm living in the good 'ol U.S. of A. now. My entire family hates it. Hahaha

360 Grew up in northern NY, first job out of college was in the LA basin.  That pretty much cured me of my northeastern liberalism.

361 The thing about Liberal sis that they don't believe in any thing.  They say they do, but they really don't - not their Country, not their fellow American, not themselves.

Posted by: momma at April 21, 2011 09:43 PM (penCf)

momma-san..

I pulled this from my earlier comment #175 above. I think it goes along with your thoughts here.

"C. S. Lewis, in “the Abolition of Man”, pointed out that when the smart young people claim to be able to “see through” every classical bit of wisdom as just an accretion of habits which are probably better off dispensed with so we can get to “the truth behind the accumulated obscuring flotsam of societies”, etc, then the solidity they claim to be trying to arrive at usually doesn’t add up to anything. To be able to “see through” every set of morals, customs, traditions and wisdom becomes, in the end, the inability to see anything at all. The culture destroyers of the past two generations didn’t really notice that the thing they wanted to replace it with was…. nothing."

 

362

Maybe that's the point: There's simply no connection between their brains and their, "hearts." The only journey from point A to point B is a big stinking blind leap into the abyss.

I think you got it! LOL!

363

My husband and I constantly debate this, just for fun.  He is in the former camp.  But remember, I was oblivious to politics at the time and my first instinct was, they wanted to twist the knife one last time.

Posted by: jewells45 at April 21, 2011 09:48 PM (Z71Vg)

I really think it was a twofer for them. They could get Reagan off their ass and go about oppressing their citizens and also ding Carter just one last time solidifying his place as the worst president ever.

364 ONT up.

365 340 @ 294 As far as I can tell, there's been no book written by a conservative about why they believe liberals are the way they are.

Ann Coulter and P. J. O' Rourke have always done a pretty good job of it.

Posted by: robtr at April 21, 2011 09:37 PM (MtwBb)

Thomas Sowell : Vision of the Annointed

I've always been a conservative and pushed parents, husband, in-laws, sister, nephews over with me.

Why? The left always seemed dishonest. I hate liars. I despise whiners and the crying Indian (italian) annoyed me.

366 I went from pretty left-wing freshmen in college to right-wing but more libertarian -- I was reading Reason and Cato in the 90s. The whole War on Terror-thing pushed me away from libertarianism as they started mouthing some of the same anti-military, anti-American rhetoric that turned me off from the Left.

Partly it's just growing up and maturing and not looking to be so  philosophically "pure".

367 >>England failed to pass on a democratic legacy in Africa and the ME.It does have something to do with the people after all. Ever been to S. Africa? UAE? Every country with an indigenous population, tradition, history and culture had it's own issues but the most advanced countries in every region where the Brits held sway are the most advanced, free and democratic. Regardless of the people.

368 @316: "Yeah, Africa hasn't exactly produced a lot of Thomas Sowell and Allen West type leaders."

There have been some decent African leaders - Moise Tshombe, Jonas Savimbi, and Paul Kagame all come to mind.  Not to say that there weren't flaws, but still....

Sowell's an academic - he doesn't lead much of anything.  Allen West isn't exactly a major leader either.  Potential, yes, but a freshman Representative and Lt. Col. isn't exactly a world-shaker.

369

He took my hand and I thought he was going to say some words of comfort as we prayed. He asked me to pray for those that wanted to do us harm. I was flabbergasted and wanted to get sick right there in the church. He offered up this prayer before he prayed for our people.

lacy, the old hippie-dippie priest at my church started the "pray for our enemies" BS, which then got changed to "pray for those who would harm us." (Must've been in the newsletter. /sarc.)  I'd grit my teeth and wonder why no one else was bothered by this. 

Then election season '08 rolled around and he was forced to intimate that abortion-on-demand was not a value of the Catholic church (while you could tell all the while that he was going to be an Obama voter).  After that and one too many of those "pray for those who would harm us," I asked the mister his two cents and off we went to the second-closest Catholic Church.  This one caters to illegals, but we're able to steer clear in separate services. 

No matter.  These priests are just men, fallible men.  I won't give up my religion for a couple crackpots.  There are still plenty of decent CC's around, and I suspect most of the priests have been told to keep their politics to themselves, which is A-OK with me.  We take our kids to church every week, and I homeschool with Baltimore Catechism texts from the '60s. 

They'll see the error of their ways.  Eventually.

370 378 I didn't say all.They ran more than those two though.

371 What Made You A Conservative?Ronald Wilson Reagan

372

Posted by: Joffen at April 21, 2011 09:49 PM (EPcuy)

I really do have a warm spot for Canada. It might be my trips there to play hockey, or SCTV...I just like it.

"King of the Hill":

Obnoxious Canadian Visitor: "Ignorant American. Name the Canadian Prime Minister."
Hank Hill: "Why?"

I stiill have hope for that beautiful country.

 

373 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things - 1 Corinthians 13:11. Quite simply put it happened when I grew up and had to start taking responsibility for myself.

374 383 That show was great.

375 Let me tell you guys something: Canadians hate you. I'd say about 85% of Canadians want America to be destroyed. They fucking hate your guts.


Canada, those are the ones we call America's Hat, right? They're so cute when they get all miffed.

376 Nothing really made me a conservative, it was just a gradual shift to the right as I grew up and got more information.

A long time ago, there was a man named Jimmy Carter, he was the President and I thought that everyone should obey his wishes because he was the man in charge.  Then came this "person" named Ronald Reagan who took the presidency away from Jimmy.  I was as furious as an 8 year old could be.  How dare this person take away Jimmy Carter's job.  So when I was around ten years old or so I wound up listening to some people who advocated something called National Socialism who also happend to hate Jews.  I wasn't too sure on why it was Jews and other minorities fault that the world had problems but hey, they were older than me and knew more.  So began what I call the Nazi years.  I taught my brother to hate the Jew as I had been shown "the truth".  In the meantime Regan had started getting the country turned around and I began thinking how good this man was to strengthen the nation so we could defeat the communists.  So... I started paying more attention to what Reagan was saying about personal responsibility and other stuff.  It took a few more years until the last vestiges of liberalism were stamped out but by the time I was 18 I was a full on Reaganite.  I fondly recall the ass kicking he gave mondale.  That was the first time I was ever allowed to stay up really late.

Anyway, I am now the most right-wing person I know.  My sisters however, are one short step from being communists.  One learned it at the Ernie Swift Youth Concentration (conservation) Camp and the other spent too much time listening to a rat bastard commie teacher in high school.  My two brothers lean conservative for the most part, they hate the government stealing from them too.


This post is long and rambling, feel free to ignore it.

377

and I homeschool with Baltimore Catechism texts from the '60s. 

What do you see in the 1992 Catechism that bothers you?

378 I'm picking up what might be a really good strategy here. A lot of people say they were embarrassed by Democrat presidents. Maybe we should emphasize that liberals really should be embarrassed by what Obama has done.

379 390 If they were sane they would be.They also wouldn't be democrats.

380 29 19 Just a question,what was to fear from W?

Posted by: steevy at April 21, 2011 08:04 PM (0XJkt)

Good old racial issues. It all seems so silly in hindsight.

381

My dad made me a conservative from the day I was born.  He taught me the dignity of living within my means and understanding that nobody owes me anything. 

And sharing is for pussies. 

382 I do think we will stomp out the current brand of leftism, but it will take more than one election. That's why we cannot nominate Romney. He lacks the courage to defeat the Left. We need someone not afraid to crush the Left, in a civil war if need be. These are our enemies--a treasonous Fifth Column that needs to be eliminated completely.

383 Posted by: Unclefacts Luxury-Yacht at April 21, 2011 10:00 PM (6IReR) Haha, yeah. The best part is Canadians actually think Americans give a shit what they think of them.

384

Come on in. The water's fine. You can even pee in the pool. We all do.

Posted by: beedubya at April 21, 2011 09:27 PM (AnTyA)

Is the fact that I actually think this is a warm and affectionate welcome an indication that I've been here too many years?

385 That's cute that Canada has an opinion

386 I was just thinking about this the other day. I grew up in a very liberal city so of course I became a reflexive liberal myself. My parents were pretty apolitical, but my Aunt was a huge Women's Libber. When I was a child she had me marching around singing "I am woman hear me roar." Really. I truly believed the women's rights movement was about standing up for our sisters who had been discriminated against by our patriarchal society. Then Clinton was elected and, yes, I voted for him. The scales fell from my eyes when I realized that not one woman from the so-called women's rights movement was ever going to call out Clinton for all of his cheating scumbagery. I had an epiphany -- the women's libbers were liberals before all. I felt angry and betrayed and began to question every political assumption I had ever held. I soon realized I had been voting against my real beliefs. Dog that he is, I will be ever grateful to Clinton for making me realize how conservative I am.

387 #376 the Vision of the Anointed is great. As I recall, surprisingly snarky for Sowell. A Conflict of Visions by Sowell is a much more in depth study on the same subject. Also really loved David Horowitz's Radical Son, his story of moving from left to right.

388 392 The Israelis got mugged by reality.

389 how did i become a conservative? i moved to berkeley. i lived near campus, and the ever-stinky peoples' park. i loved the food, the grittiness, and the lack of value judgements. however, what made me a conservative? well, our landlord was a wimpy liberal. this person gave homeless people permission to sleep, eat, and yes, COOK in the carports. the car ports were not gated, so every morning i'd walk out to my car and have to roust the homeless people that had encamped around all the cars. it never failed, every morning i'd end up getting cussed out by some homeless drug addict that seemed truly amazed that people actually had to work. i talked to the land lord about it and his response was that these poor people needed a place to sleep, that they weren't hurting anyone, and that if i didn't like it i should move to el cerrito (huh?). finally, i tried calling the police. what did the bazerkeley police do? nothing. why? because these poor people needed somewhere to sleep, and if i didn't like i should probably move to el cerrito (what?). it was at this point that I realized that all of these people were out of their flipping minds, and that i was, in fact, a conservative republican. i finally moved and as it turned out, the guy who moved in after me walked into HIS car port one night to just get something out of his car and someone pulled a gun on him. apparently, he walked in on a drug deal. liberals are stupid, and people that coddle drug addicts & criminals put the rest of us at risk. so yeah, i went to berkeley a democrat, and left a conservative republican.

390 I loved Sowell's Migrations and Cultures. It helps one understand why geographical areas produce people with certain attributes and accomplishments.

391 Don't even get me started on that shit they have the balls to call bacon.

That should be grounds for war

392 I was born that way.

393 For those that have family or friends who are left-wing, take heart in the various conversion stories here and don't give up. And don't burn the bridges of your relationships to family and friends due to political differences -- 5 years from now they might hate Obama more than you do.

394 I became Conservative when my cousins GF of 12 years broke up with him because she became pregnant with a one night stand. When I heard of it my first thought was that she should have an abortion so that they can forget the whole event and continue on the path to be married but my second thought was no.

 

  Now he has 1 kid and one on the way with someone else after 3 years of marriage. And the first GF got married herself and another kid with the new guy.

395 Warden: "How about it?"

No can do. Never been leftist. Ever. Learned it from both parents and only turn more anti-Left each and every year. Might as well ask me how Obama still has an audience.

396

wow soothsayer is scared of brown people? are you Michelle Malkin soothsayer?

anywho, seriously, I became conservative because I'm a History buff and History said stay away from liberals and Dems

397

My sister was 16 years older and fell in love with a guy who marched with the hippies in the 60s, grew his hair long, drove a beetle, grew out his facial hair, and acted like he was too awesome. My retired army col dad hated him with a passion and one of my first memories was dad telling him that the washington post had an agenda. Fast forward a few years and hairpole is out of work and spending his days playing the mandolin and smoking pot in the basement. Mom goes and gets sister's kids and cleans her house and makes her get a graduate degree so that she can earn a better living. Fast forward and sister does make money which hairpole spends whether he's currently working or not, while also being an agitating atheist. Oh, and hairpole's parents give him money throughout so he can buy "music".

 

398 I was never a lefty, but I would say there were two major events that shaped my right-leaning. "small-L" libertarian politics. First, when I was about 9 years old in church. My state -- Illinois -- was in the middle of a drought. We arrived at the "intercession" part of the Mass, and the priest starting listing prayers -- mostly for people who were ill. But at the end he urged the partitioner to pray to God that the drought be ended, and I was shocked. I though, "How different is this from Indians doing a stupid rain dance?" I knew a lot about storms because we always had plenty of lightning and thunder during the summer and I watched the TV weathermen explain things on their maps. I knew where rain came from, and the thought of Christian God answering prayers for rain, seemed as pointless and degrading of humanity as a bunch of animists beseeching the Great Thunderbird in the sky to save their crops. From that point on, it became clear to me not to believe what anybody told me but to think for myself. So when all my college friends and friends in the movie business became flaming liberals, I let them go their way, and I went mine. I didn't challenge them, but I never fell for their crap. At the time I was not political. I think the best description of me at the time was "anti-idiotarian" although the word was not invented yet. The second big event was so pedestrian that it seems embarrassing to admit. Yeah...it was The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which I did not discover until my 30s. The fact that Rand was a godless Capitalist sealed the deal for me! At last...someone who was an atheist and not a socialist! The thing about Rand is that she brilliantly expressed the things I already felt and believed, but could not express myself in a coherent way. In other words, it's not so much that she had to convince me of anything, it's that she explained to me why I believed what I believed...which I would have been hard-pressed to do before. And she also added a moral aspect to my beliefs, something I hadn't really appreciated before. Individualism was must as much an ideal as altruism, and had the benefit of actually being more beneficial to mankind. And that gave me the courage to come out to my friends and acquaintances as a fellow Moron, because now I could argue with them successfully...not that I would convince them of anything, but simply to clarify where we differed...and *that* we differed. And that is the greatest weapon to use against lefties -- they believe what they believe mostly because they want to fit in with their friends and workmates and get ahead in life that way. Rand called them "social metaphysicians." Their view of reality is shaped by their desire to fit in and become part of the club. Challenge the source of their beliefs, and they fold intellectually like the evening news. Anyway, that's my story -- never a lefty, but not blossoming politically until Rand.

399 410 Wow,didn't the same thing happen in Wonder Years?

400

I don't think I really was ever a leftist, but when I was about 8 I do recall driving my brother nuts by saying I was for Carter - just to piss him off, I really did not care.

I think I ended up where I am because I started reading WAY ahead of my grade level early on, and soon I found myself reading through the WWII history books.  When you read that much about Hitler and his horrors, how the Soviets weren't exactly kinder & gentler, and about the horrors of the Pacific, you know there is evil in the world, that there is right and there is wrong, and that leftists will excuse that away (or just flat ignore it, or lie) at every opportunity.

It also helped that I travelled to Poland and the USSR while Gorbachev was in power - meaning we got to see more of the reality of communism.  Thanks to the fiction of the USSR exchange rate for the ruble (at par with the dollar) - at a time when the unofficial exchange rate was 10 or more rubles to the dollar - I paid for my Russian part of the trip out of that difference.  On entry, I exchanged some money at the official rate (and kept the receipt), and while in Russia I traded at the unofficial rate for the rest, but when it came time to leave, I used the receipt and traded rubles into dollars at par.

If that didn't illustrate the idiocy of communism and the USSR, what would?

After that, in Poland I visited Auschwitz/Birkenau.  It rather focuses one's mind on that question of evil when you are walking those grounds, and see the infamous ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate at Auschwitz, and the rest of those death camps.

These days leftists would talk about how how Hitler is a misunderstood artistic visionary, and don't those darn JOOOOOS deserve a comeuppance?

I'm still very much a Catholic too, because it's always struck me as funny that liberal Catholics accept the "we're all sinners, we are all flawed human beings" bit but don't see how that means we have to be careful in not giving government - run by those flawed human beings - too much power just because they are SUCH smart folk. 

401

I would argue it comes down to Myers/Briggs personality types. The T vs the F.  After that it just comes down to the time it takes to accept who you are.

402

 Btw, that cookie thing would never have washed with my mother (or me)

When I was 8, my dad took my brother and I to the amusement park. He gave us each 10 bucks and said, this is your money for the day. You spend it how you want, but I'm not giving you more.

I promptly blew mine at the arcade in about 20 minutes. Money used to burn a hole in my pocket.

My older, more miserly brother saved his.

We stopped at McDonalds on the 3 hr drive home. I was hungry but out of money.

I watched my brother and my dad eat dinner while I went hungry.

My wife is horrified by that story. I think it's one of the reasons that I run our household finances and not her.

It was a valuable lesson.

403 My sister was 16 years older

Older or old?

404 411 There's nothing wrong with praying for the intercession of God for rain.I don't see your point there.

405 (Note: "History of the Ming Chang Yuchun Biography": "(regular book) violent shanghai apartment for rent illness and death, at age forty.")

406 i was never a lefty.....never....

407 416 My sister was 16 years older

Older or old?   Older than me.   There's nothing wrong with praying for the intercession of God for rain.I don't see your point there.

Me neither

Wonder years?

TV? Don't watch it. Haven't since the 70s.

408

Posted by: Warden at April 21, 2011 10:30 PM (1Damt)

whoa I understand teaching the value of money but letting your own kid starve is a little extreme for me

409 Don't want to even imagine the feces resulting from the same header question from a Leftist blog site, or even worse - how hideously the question would be framed.

410 420 His older sister(the Fred Savage character) had almost the same expperience.Of course I'm sure they made the hippy come off better than the father.The boyfriend was actually David Schwimmer(Ross from Friends).

411 I'll second the "I grew up" reasoning.

412 421 One missed meal is not starving.A life lesson.

413 Jimmy Carter made me a conservative.

414

Posted by: steevy at April 21, 2011 10:37 PM (0XJkt)

but it seems cruel to sit there and watch your son be hungry, granted you dont have to buy him a full meal and you can warn him. "see what happens when you don't save" but to watch them hunger I can't allow that, I mean I hate to sound like a liberal but there's extremes to me when dealing w/ one's own sons, noticed I had no problem w/ him not getting anymore money just the meal part

415 I'm "starving" my kid right now. He blew through his own money and I refuse to give him more since I'm paying for a meal plan. He insists they close too early and he gets hungry. Tough shit. Plan ahead or stop drinking, I don't care which or both.

416 I've been "conservative" since childhood.  During the '62 Cuban Missile Crisis, I remember the men of the neighborhood gathering at our house one night to discuss the events taking place (Dad had worked a stretch with von Braun at Chrysler Missile).  The talk  turned to bomb shelters, survival supplies, and likely targets.  Dad gave them the quick list of obvious ICBM targets  with the basic premise that anyone living within 40 miles of Detroit would be in a world of hurt (we lived well within that radius).  I was 7 at the time and when he saw the kids listening in, he told Mom to put us to bed.  As I turned to leave, I saw a lot of sober faces.

 

417 427 I'd probably argue "but dad I thought you meant the money was for the amusement park,you didn't tell me to save some for dinner".Mighta worked.

418

Posted by: dagny at April 21, 2011 10:40 PM (JhiPF)

1. how old is your son?

2. again no prob w/ not giving him anymore money but if he's hungry...

419 I served 20 years in the military traveling to mostly third-world countries. I am conservative because I didn't want to see America turn into a third-world country. Learn to love the bad smells. Think of them as 'interesting whiffs of cultural divershity."

420

I've never been a Liberal but I've argued with them often. I think it comes down to an over-simplified moral philosophy. Most people take what their parents taught them at face value and never analyze it. What many Americans' parents taught them was to "not be selfish." Now, to not be selfish is a very fine thing. It's one of the building blocks of any decent society. But if your sole moral lodestone is "don't be selfish," it's easy to see how people can drift into some very odd places.

America has always been a place where Judeo-Christian values held sway. But it has also been a place where simplicity was held in high esteem. When you combine the two, you get an awful lot of people who take the most basic tenets of Christianity and isolate them.

The truth is that the Bible is closer to Ayn Rand, of all people, than to modern "Liberals." What could you say about a religion that teaches about an individual creator who has absolute power over his created order—and who exercises that power jealously? What can you say about a moral framework that says "thou shalt not steal" and "the laborer is worthy of his hire" and "if any would not work, neither should he eat"? The Christian sense of justice is entirely focused on personal responsibility and liberty: God created one man and gave him complete freedom to obey or disobey, along with all the consequences that go with it. The Man chose to disobey and suffered the consequences exactly as had been promised.

But in America, the urge for simplification and anti-intellectualism led to a grossly watered down religion that lost even the doctrine of atonement. By the end of the 19th century, "Christianity" became little more than "be a good person so society will prosper." We were left with a husk (called the "Social Gospel") that has now been passed down for several generations. "Don't be selfish" is about all that's left. And that's pretty much all that modern Liberalism believes in.

421

Posted by: steevy at April 21, 2011 10:41 PM (0XJkt)

good point

422 Another show I remember vividly from my older childhood: "Wait 'Til Your Father Gets Home." Cartoon, but dealt with the brewing culture wars, tradition and upheaval, in ways that resonated with me. I think Tom Bosley was the voice of the Dad. Three kids: a hippie son, a daughter in the awkward early teens, the youngest about ten and the pragmatic conservative of the bunch. I remember an episode where they went to a beach being overtaken by hippie nudists, striking blows for "freedom", who got schooled by the youngster who pointed out their selfishness was ruining his vacation since he wasn't allowed near the beach.

423

Finding Thomas Sowell's book Conquests and Cultures in a book store did it for me. 

Couldn't find any more books by him here (N. California).  So when I finally got access to the internet I went looking for him. 

 Dr Sowell  lead me to Michelle Malkin, Theodore Dalrymple, Hot Air, and then here: the Moron Home.

I feel better, now.

424

Posted by: sulla at April 21, 2011 10:45 PM (0GucZ)

I remember watching that show growing up on Cartoon Network, I stayed up until midnight to watch it, I had no clue just how racy it was for it's time until later

425

1. how old is your son?

2. again no prob w/ not giving him anymore money but if he's hungry...

That one is 19. He went to school with $3000 which he spent on fast food and booze by Thanksgiving. I had $750 more of his money I've been doling out as he's asked for it since then. He's out now and SWEARS the $$$ I paid for his meal plan isn't enough. However, he's 15 lbs heavier than he was when he left, has a tatoo (on his butt), a hamster, and a pissed off mother. He has two weeks to go. I'll send him a food-stuff care package for exams but not one thin dime.

426

Posted by: argie at April 21, 2011 10:47 PM (rfhVO)

Hot Air?

*shudders*

427 417 steevy -- "There's nothing wrong with praying for the intercession of God for rain.I don't see your point there." When you don't believe in the supernatural, then there is something wrong in ... to steal a phrase ... "wishcasting" for rain. And while I'm an atheist, I believe America owes a great debt to religion -- it would not be the great nation that it is today if it were not founded on Judeo-Christian ethics. (Although we also owe an equal debt to the Grecco-Roman ethics as well, which helped shape the principles that America was founded on.) It is possible to believe that religion can be a powerful force for good in the world, without having to believe the supernatural source of that goodness. That's why I believe deeply in freedom of religion and think that the wish of some Atheists (usually on the left) to eradicate religion from the public sphere is terribly wrongheaded.

428 436 Dalrymple is great.

429 439  Sorry to offend, but it did go in those stages.

430 440 Okay fine but I don't see how that steered you towards conservatism.How it was germane to the point.Obviously to me my religion is not superstition though I believe in the supernatural by necessity.

431 Conservatives = Ants
Liberals = Grasshoppers

432

Posted by: argie at April 21, 2011 10:52 PM (rfhVO)

lol it's okay I just generally despise that blog

Posted by: Ostral B Heretic at April 21, 2011 10:53 PM (TprD1)

nice Bug's Life reference

433 Realizing that the anti-Bush sentiments (the 2nd one--I'm part of the DOOMed generation) of my high-school class could be summed up with two vacuous phrases: "lied about the war" and "fuck rich people" (even though the community I lived in was relatively affluent). The latter, sadly, still composes over half of the common liberal's rhetorical arsenal. I was also lucky to have fairly conservative parents that actually cared about being educated on current political issues.

434

Posted by: Kevin at April 21, 2011 10:57 PM (hNyA5)

fellow Doom generation guy here, yep I remember asking the anti-Bush kids at school what beef they had, instead of worries of debt and such they pointed to "he hates gay people" & "this is an illegal war", once you got them to specifics and facts though they had nothing...

435 Those wonderful, wonderful Reagan info-mercial style TV appearances.  He was campaigning for Ford at the time.  It seems like they were 30 minute talks.  No notes, of course.  I doubt there was a prompter.  It was just Reagan talking casually in an office.  At times he sat on the end of the desk, seems like.

My dad and I watched in stunned silence.  Neither of us moved or said a word--which was unusual, especially for me, since I was a little boy.  When Reagan was done, we look at each other wide-eyed and said the same thing:  Actually dad said, "He should be the one running for president."  At the same moment I said, "Why isn't he running for president?" 

In my kid way, I was thinking the equivalent of "dayam!"

Then we had Carter, and that made me understand.  That sealed it.

436 I have been Conservative as long as I can remember.  I had a brief flirtation with being a a social moderate and fiscal conservative when I was in my early twenties but that was some time ago and I have since returned to the fold of full blooded Ronald Reagan Conservatism.

437

It is possible to believe that religion can be a powerful force for good in the world, without having to believe the supernatural source of that goodness.

This is exactly the disease I was talking about in my last post. Looking to religion as simply a set of "good moral teachings" divorced from the fundamental philosophical (and supernatural) groundwork that underlies it is the recipe for the state we find ourselves in now.

438 Anyone else remember those Reagan campaign spots for Ford?

439 I was a peace/justice/nonviolence/enviro/no-nuke/human-rights/anti-free-trade activist for about 20 years. I never considered myself a full "Leftist" though, partly because I didn't like or trust the various communists who kept trying to infiltrate our groups, and partly because I have always been anti-abortion, and the Leftist stance on that issue was and is repulsive to me.

The 2000 election was an eye-opener. The blatant efforts of the Democrats to steal the election -- and the disconnect between what they were doing and the way it was being portrayed on NPR -- inspired me to start listening to Rush Limbaugh for the first time because I knew NPR was not giving the whole story. I was amazed; the evil, dreaded Limbaugh knew his stuff, and was delivering not just opinions but HARD FACTS that the liberal media were simply not reporting.

Then, there was 9/11. I watched and listened in horror as some of personal acquaintances in lefty circles blamed the U.S. and made excuses for the terrorists.

About that time, the doubts I'd always had about the Left because of their obstinate pro-abortion fanaticism finally came to the foreground. I could no longer stuff it all in the background. I asked myself: If they can be so obtuse on an issue that is so obvious -- you don't kill a defenseless child -- then why should I trust their opinions on matters that are much more complex, such as economics and foreign policy?

Several years later, a leftist writing syndicate that I was part of turned down a piece I wrote that was favorable to the pro-life cause. When I confronted them, they admitted that the piece was well-written, but they were rejecting it because it was "too controversial." That was when my divorce from the Left became final.

440

Posted by: rdbrewer at April 21, 2011 11:05 PM (miG+7)

that's 13 years before I was born...

441 1969- LAX.  My father returns from SEA (3rd time around).  My mother, brother & I (aged 5 and 7) wade through a troop of dirty smelly hippies mindlessly chanting "baby killers" and other nasty epithets to greet my father and his comrades.

The seeds planted, the real basis for conservatism- economic awaking- occurred in 1976- Listening to the great One as he sought the nomination in palce of the doomed RINO G.R. Ford.  Yeah, I was 14.

442 What brought me to the right?

Well, it was the realization that the Democrats were just damned wrong about pretty much everything. How they shoved a black man out to be elected; because they knew the rest of the crop of idiots that they were running couldn't get elected....including Hillary.

Honestly though, I never quite got over The whole Waco thing, that happened on Clinton's watch.

Of course, as you all know, I do live in this cesspool we call Detroit, Michigan. (well, near it anyhow...) and that moron Jennifer Granholm about ran this state in the sewer and now, people like me, cannot find work for crap. I've been out of a job since 2005. I don't know if I'll ever find work ever again or not. Why I was sort of hoping this blog would lead to something great. But, because I tend to be vocal about my opinions, I'm not well liked. Price you pay I suppose.

Anyhow, that's my reason, in a nutshell. I just couldn't reconcile the whole Abortion and gay rights thing and my Christian faith, plus, I just hated the idea of my taxes going to fund welfare and other stupid stuff.

I might not be the "Perfect" Conservative. But I don't buy that crap that the left is peddling. America needs jobs, not stupidity and the Democrats are peddling stupidity.

-Patrick 
Owner
politicalbyline dot com

443

Posted by: Alamo at April 21, 2011 11:08 PM (KWyQY)

Ford was no RINO, he was a moderate but he never sold out the party; yes he wasn't the man of the time but the man helped pass many conservative issues and helped frame the civil rights african-americans claimed was given to them by Dems. Ford once said "any govt. that is bg enough to give you something is big enough to take it from you", that qoute should be heard by everyone who claims to be a conservative/liberterian. Ford also showed humility when he said "the state of the Union is not good" in the 1975 SOTU speech, Obama wouldn't have the balls to say that

444

<blockquote>Yeah, I've got a "leave me the fuck alone" streak in me that runs a mile wide.

I don't get busybodies. I don't get people who want to force you to do things you don't want to do.

Get off me, motherfucker. I'll do my thing and you do yours. In about 10 years we'll probably have a good idea of who was right.</blockquote>

Sounds about like me.

445 YRM, if you can find them, they're worth watching. 

446 <quote> The Democrat party turned me into staunch conservative. When they began to push ideas that were against everything I was taught was right or wrong. Raised in a lower middle class family where the parents and grandparents demanded honesty, integrity, responsibility. I look at the ideas the Democrats are pushing now and it seems they could not be from this planet, their thinking is completely alien.</quote>

Same here. I come from a Democratic Party voting family. My mom and dad both vote for 'em. I just couldn't after all I've learned by actually being engaged like I have been since 2006.

Bush was no picnic, IMHO... But now, looking back, he was better than what Obama has ever been.

447

Posted by: rdbrewer at April 21, 2011 11:14 PM (miG+7)

oh I have, just saying I wasn't around at the time

YouTube has everything Reagan uploaded

448 The left seems to be obsessed with "it's not fair" which makes your story even more appropriate.  So much of it boils down to envy...such an ugly emotion.  Most of it on the left is just that...ugly emotion.  I think I realized that when I got to college, and they started doing everything the could to shove it down my throat.  That's when I grew up.

449 I found a commercial from back then, but not the long TV appearance.  BTW, it seems like there were two long TV appearances, but maybe there was just one.  Here's the 30 second commercial for Ford.

450 dagny, et al.

Thanks for your broad-stroke insults of all Canadians. Even the 15% of us who don't think Americans are all "dumb, racist rednecks." Good work.

451 A paycheck.

452 Gulag for me too.

453 I was a few years too young to be an authentic hippie; I was in 6th grade in the halcyon 'days of 67-68, but that just made me all the more enamored of the whole thing. Like 11 year old girls obsessed with boys and dating. All the beautiful people, all the rock stars, were on the left. In the suburbs of New York City there was no right wing to even be against. In '69, Nixon and Agnew, two Brycreem-wearing guys who looked and acted like used car salesmen. It was a cinch to be left wing. But then came Jimmy Carter with all the misery that era entailed. Then came Reagan and everyone was happy, employed and making shitloads of money. I found myself shedding liberal beliefs but my friends were still holding on. I'd sometimes argue with them (those were the days, I'd never try that now). In the mid 90's I started reading the New York Post's Op Eds and it felt like oxygen flowing in my lungs after holding my breath under water. Then I read The National Review. Two old friends of mine turned out to be closet conservatives, so I didn't feel completely closed off. The act that made me change my voter registration to Republican was when Clinton came to NYC tell us if we didn't re-elect David Dinkins for Mayor (who did to NYC what Obama's doing to the US) it's because we're racists.

454 I have always been conservative.  I don't understand the victim/poor me mindset (particulary in our wonderful free country).  I don't get whining or demanding something you didn't earn.  My grandmother, a staunch small "L" libertarian used to say "free people are never equal, and equal people are never free"

455 I was pretty much a leftist from college onwards for a number of years. Back in the 80s I often voted for third party candidates because I didn't think the Democrats were left-wing enough. It was Ayn Rand who did it for me. I discovered her in the mid-90s, but I don't remember exactly how. I read The Fountainhead, and then dove in to her non-fiction essays. I actually didn't get around to reading Atlas Shrugged until after I'd read most of her other stuff. The best way I can describe her effect on me is that she systematically demolished my most cherished beliefs and assumptions, and then proceeded to rebuild them on a stronger foundation. It was actually less painful than it sounds. I loved the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, by the way. I heartily recommend it, especially for those who have never read the book. Seeing it just might whet your appetite to check out the book, and I suspect that that's what the filmmakers intended. You won't regret it.

456 I remember two things: Gerald Ford being sworn in as President and being glad because he played football for the Michigan Wolverines. Then I remember crying when he lost to that man, Jimmah.

I was 10 at the time, had no one telling me Carter was bad, blue was bad or liberal policies sucked. I just new the bad guy won in '76.

When '80 came around I was pleased because everything was right as rain.

Now, not so much.

Thanks for your time.

457 When I was about thirteen, for no reason that I can remember, I stayed up all night to watch the results of the 2000 election.

I was raised a Christian, so I defaulted to the right.  Never thought about it much, I just knew that the Republicans were more like me than the Democrats.

Then 9/11 happened.  It seemed to unite the country, and, with as little attention as I paid, I thought little of Left vs. Right, and more about how we were at war with an enemy that hated life.

A year later, I saw the dessicated corpse of an aborted infant.

That was when I knew.

My entire life philosophy revolves around Christ, and justice.  I learned then that there was no justice in the Left, and I realized they were an enemy.

Then, I began to realize that the Republicans didn't really care either, and, even further, realized that justice had been perverted more than I had ever known.  Taking from those who work, giving to those who do not, chronically, shamelessly lying to the people about taxes, about Washington's intentions, about the value of human lives to girls who were scared and alone and vulnerable to suggestion from dark-hearted, wicked men with souls blacker than night, and how they preyed upon hurting souls for the sake of Sanger's blood-splattered utopia, and for their own pocketbooks.

Then I began to learn more about Islam, and the realizations were all too familiar.

By the time I was twenty, I felt like I was forty, and now, mid-twenties, my friends and acquaintances tell me I speak like I'm a bitter, old man.  Might be true.

I anxiously await the kingdom of God.  But until that comes, the Left is my enemy, as much haters of life as Islam. 

458 Two words: Ayn Rand.

459 The Fall of the USSR was a factor. The howling at the NYT was epic. The fall of the Sandinistas, too. One other thing was an article in Mother Jones or some other such thing against missile defense. It was so completely stupid and wrong on every level that if you accepted it, you were a member of a previously unnamed species, Homo stupidensis.

460 @Clubber Lang --

Thanks for reminding me about Schoolhouse Rock. On your reminder, I went and ordered a copy for my new niece.

God Save the Republic!

461

Leftists think?

I decided that John Birch really wasn't a liberal pussy, so I went to the left enough to be a conservative.

462 YRM at April 21, 2011 11:12 PM

Don't get me wrong- I believe Gerald ford was an honorable man, but much like R.M. Nixon, he was not a true conservative (although libs have always portrayed Nixon as a prototypical conservative).  Ford, Nixon and most of the non-Goldwater wing were Big government Repubs.  Or "slightly smaller government than the Dems propose".  Real and active pursuit of reductions in governments size and influence began with Goldwater, continued with Reagan, and was comatose during Bush I &II.

463 Okay, in all honesty...I was probably never that liberal.

 I was a Democrat that leaned left, though. I struggled with it big time. In 2004, I almost voted for Bush. I was conflicted because while I supported his social policy AND I supported the war...I really believed Republicans hated poor people. And, well, I was poor as hell.

 I was always a pretty conservative guy, so I was willing to listen to conservative ideas if they weren't packaged in "Republican" terminology. I probably would have continued to be a swing voter that would usually go left, if not for a few factors.

1. Obama and Hillary pushed me away completely. Both of them are way too liberal for this conservative guy to take. I was suspicious of both from the beginning because they came across as way too loyal to their identity group and not what was right.

2. Despite being poor, I never took handouts. Seeing how much taxes killed me, it really put a cramp in any fiscal liberalism I had.

3. I was persuadable. I'm a logical guy, and the logic is on the side of conservative ideas. It came slowly to me, but I actually listened to the arguments.

 Overall, liberalism lost me because it's illogical. It makes no sense in the big picture, grand scheme of things. I don't think all liberal ideas are stupid, I just think the overall ideology is. I'm pro-life, but I understand the pro-choice argument on some level. What I don't grasp is pro-'choicers' who believe in taking away almost every other choice they can. I understand the "offensive speech" objections, but I don't get trying to regulate legitimate moral and political discourse while endorsing worthless offensive 'art'. etc. Some individual positions are defensible, but liberalism as a whole is not a big picture ideology. It's an issue-by-issue, 'whatever works in the moment" ideology. Even if I disagree with some of my libertarianish brothers, their ideology is at least internally consistent. Liberalism is for people who can't think beyond the moment. I'm too smart, and sexy, for that movement.

464 Another thing was becoming a scientist. Scientists are trained to find patterns. Liberalism is Socialism is Communism. The difference were just matters of dilution, and eventually like in many things in chemistry, once a transformation began it would stop only at it's thermodynamic end. In other words, start with the mildest form of Liberalism and you must end with Communism. Why do you think Liberals hate the term "creeping Socialism"?

465

I was a liberal in high school. Called myself a Socialist, became a vegetarian.

I marched in anti-war rallies in college in the first Gulf War. I was "no blood for oil" back when most modern lefties were still watching Sesame Street. I was pro-choice, although I was never deluded enough that I didn't think a fetus was a human child--I just wasn't going to tell others what to do. I marched in Take Back the Night rallies--"racist, sexist, anti-gay--don't you take our rights away."

I was a dope.

Then I went to Europe. Ireland. The great socialist hope. Everyone had access to health care, everyone had access to housing. Sure the houses were drab and depressing. Sure, the hospitals were dirty and backward. Beggars and drunks were everywhere. And everyone felt they had a right to harangue me about my government's actions in Guatemala or whatever. It became clear to me that the Socialist lifestyle made things worse for people, not better--it just made everything worse equally.

Then I went to graduate school--the first day some dopey woman professor heard about my majoring in the Classics as an undergrad and said "Oh, you took the dead white European male" major, thereby deriding 3000 years of culture and progress in the process. In my one year at j-school, I was indoctrinated in liberation theology and dependency theory, and it made me sick. I was always a bit rebellious, and it became clear to me that the true conformists were the leftists. No politically incorrect thought allowed.

After I left grad school, I read a lot of Rand. I read the founders. I shot a gun. I came to realize that freedom, liberty, and self-reliance were intrinsic to people's human dignity. I became politically libertarian, and personally conservative. I don't even recognize that girl from college anymore...

466 I've always been a conservative.

I first became aware of it when I was 5 or 6 on Long Island in the re-education camps that passed for schools. Nixon and Goldwater set my beliefs in granite, McGovern and Carter seared them in permanently and Regan polished them to a perfect shine.

Unfortunately I'm so old school hardcore that most Republicans look like spineless pussies and Democrats are moral degenerates.

The latest crop of TEA Party conservatives has revived my hopes but I'm at that point in life where I'm just getting to old for the BS that passes for politics today.

467 I became a conservative when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto in the early 1970s. For a kid from Chicago, it was an eye-opening experience: the month of my arrival in Canada, September 1970, coincided with the FLQ crisis, which is the only time I've ever been under martial law. And Toronto was a great university, with faculty members like Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye, Robertson Davies, and Allan Bloom, most of whom taught undergraduates.

I didn't care much for Bloom - it seemed to me that he encouraged a cult-like devotion among his students - but he always had interesting speaking to his classes. One of them was an American sociologist named Edward C. Banfield. I'd read Banfield's "Political Influence" while in high school, and thought it was one of the best books on politics I'd ever read (I still do). However, he was a controversial figure, having published a book called "The Unholy City".

The campus left decided to make Banfield its cause: they condemned his book as "racist", and tried to get him banned from speaking on campus. Further, they campaigned to have his books removed from the campus bookstore and library.

What struck me most forcefully was that the left had appointed themselves as the gatekeepers of my mind: they declared that they could read Banfield book (presumably they had, if only to condemn it), but saw it as their mission to stop me from doing the same - I suppose to prevent my mind from being polluted by Banfield's arguments. And they followed that up with their usual thuggery: assaults, shouting down opposition, and so on - the stuff on display nightly in Wisconsin.

That left me absolutely shaking with fury. The sheer, bloody arrogance of the left, with its finger-wagging self-righteousness, without the slightest notion of grace or civility, always talking, never listening: To this day, even thinking about it leaves me shaking with anger.

There's a lot about the right I don't like, particularly Randbots and their ilk. But for those of us who hate the left, there's no place else to go.

468 ok please cue up the Theme From the movie "Arthur" and let's begin shall we? Kindergarten to 3rd grade private Catholic school where if you messed up pain was your best friend that day. Dad was a factory rat in Heat Treat & Coil Steel & a Union Steward. As a young lad, it seems he was always on strike every year around Christmas. Fast forward to 1978, 1979 and the President Carter misery index + 19% interest to purchase my first car + 1980 when the Republican Convention was held in downtown Detroit. I crashed every event and talked to people Who Were Nice and took the time to Put Me Some fukkin' knowledge... 25 years later, Hat Tip to Ace, Maet ,Ghenghis, Maleor(sp?) I am working on a liter of Val-uRite and please forgive typos & such. I am still a student and see the glass half full. Good G_d I am glad I am not a Miss America contestant...lol Moronettes, plz show a bit of what you were blessed with and help me off the stage :=)

469 I was in graduate school, and had been the usual 'by default' liberal in academia. I was serving on the university council as a grad student government rep, and reported back to the GSG that the university was about to shut down one of our recreational fields for a business development. I couldn't get the leadership's attention because they were so [blasphemy] fixated on "solidarity with the people of El Salvador." That's when I learned most liberals were posers.

470 laceyunderalls@164:

I sympathize with you, since I'm a conservative AND a Catholic.
I'm sorry that you left the Church that Jesus founded. I hope you find your way back.
Me, I get really, really frustrated with all the lefty priests I know -- but I figure, this too shall pass. Jesus guaranteed His Church, and even the lefty priests can't destroy it.
Also, I bear in mind that infallibility applies ONLY to the big, core dogmas such as the Trinity, the divine inspiration of Scripture, the virgin birth, etc. It does NOT apply to politics! Popes can certainly be mistaken about politics -- and often have been -- so when we disagree, I just blow it off.
Also, I look to the example of various "warrior saints" such as St. Fernando III, who slayed a lot of Muslims in his day! I.e,, being Catholic has not always been synonymous with being a wuss. That's just a modern fad. I try to take the long view....

471

Late comer to the party-

What  really pushed me over the edge to full blown Libertarian/Conservatism was discovering, at the ripe old age of 13, that the yellow line I may happen to step over on a bus was FEDERAL LAW.

Are you f'ing kidding me?  they have nothing better to do? 

 

State's Rights- violated- every damn day the Congress is in session.

472 I started trending conservative around early 1980's when I started applying to various law schools.  If you read the fine print of the admissions brochures, it implied the schools were going to take other things into consideration rather than my college grades (things such as my race, sex, etc.).  It did not seem fair that despite my working hard and studying, that I was going to be published for being a white male.  Also around this time Ronald Reagan was showing what conservative ideas could accomplish (with regard to the economy, national defense, etc).  If you add in the Democratic Party chosing Walter Mondale as thier standard bearer in 1984, it was very easy to change parties and become a Republican.

473 A few more things:

1. I think, subconsciously, I rejected liberalism because as a kid...I used to have people hit me, I'd respond back...and get suspended. That's nanny statism AND liberal foreign policy. Blame the victim.

2.  I can't believe I made the "Why support socialism? Socialism has failed everywhere" argument even when I was an apolitical hack.

and 3. Liberal hypocrisy is so easy to find, you can find it anywhere. Even inside their interest groups. I remember a gay activist telling me "God doesn't make mistakes" or whatever. I pointed out to him that the gay positions on transgendered people is that they were "born the wrong gender". Seriously? That sounds like a mistake of nature to me, Bub."

 I mean, if you think gayness and changing genders is cool because it's a choice and we should respect choices...fine. But don't give me this doublespeak of "Nature tells us we are!" and "Nature made me the wrong way" within the same fucking interest group.

474 464 dagny, et al. Thanks for your broad-stroke insults of all Canadians. Even the 15% of us who don't think Americans are all "dumb, racist rednecks." Good work. Posted by: BC at April 21, 2011 11:22 PM (Tb8bu) Who cares? Canadians aren't real.

475 @Reginald Van Gleason III --

Just to let you know, man, you're not the only atheist here.

I think you're right about one of the keys to being conservative and atheist -- you recognize that the actual message contained in the religion (the morality and ethics) is still a good thing, and worth protecting.

We may not believe that it was handed down by God, but we do recognize that our ancestors worked very hard for thousands of years to pass the wisdom down to us.

476 After reading 1984 by George Orwell... scared the crap out of me.  I've been a Republican ever since.

477 489 @Reginald Van Gleason III -- Just to let you know, man, you're not the only atheist here. I think you're right about one of the keys to being conservative and atheist -- you recognize that the actual message contained in the religion (the morality and ethics) is still a good thing, and worth protecting. We may not believe that it was handed down by God, but we do recognize that our ancestors worked very hard for thousands of years to pass the wisdom down to us. Posted by: Meiczyslaw at April 22, 2011 12:11 AM (CCXwt) Another conservative atheist here, I agree with you word for word! Kudos

478 "I think all conservatives have a libertarian streak to some degree,staunch libertarians are pretty nuts though.Practically anarchists."

Hey steevy, being a Constitutional Libertarian, I actually take that as a compliment.

Do no harm to another and do not infringe on their God given rights to Life, Liberty and Property. Add in the Constitution and their you have my philosophy.

479 "Who cares? Canadians aren't real."

No, no, they are real. I live in the Northwoods and we have seen signs!

480 Late to this one:  I've always been a conservative because that's what Father Hate was and I always looked up to him; plus he was a self-made man and I figured that's what stand-up guys did.  He was somewhat involved with politics in Maryland where I grew up because he ran for the House of Delegates there in 1962 (iirc) and because he was a Repub got his ass kicked, although he did better than most.  I've always felt really bad for him that he died early in Reagan's first term and never got to see what Ronnie did for the country although I'm glad neither of my parents had to endure the stench of Slick and the JEF.

I've always been a registered donk because both in Maryland and NE Ohio, it makes sense to vote in their primaries and then fuck all those cocksuckers in the general.

481 Posted by: Brown Line at April 21, 2011 11:46 PM (cPAHx)

Did you have Robertson Davies as a teacher?  If so I hope he was a good guy because I thoroughly enjoy everything I've read by him (not a small number) and it would pain me to think he had the fuckstick politics of a Garrison Keillor.

482

Today, Don McCloskey is now Dierdre McCloskey, and teaches at U-Illinois Chicago.

 

Wow, she looks like she had her apple bobbed.

483 My family has been Republican, on both sides, literally and traceably since Lincoln. I walked precincts for Goldwater with my  Mom when I was 5. My older brothers were all in YAF. In short, I was blessed from the start. Sure, I had my period of challenging all my received beliefs, but that only served to solidify my conservatism (although it did add a libertarian tinge).

My older brothers all drifted leftward, and two drifted back rightward. But I've been right all along.

484

My parents were both conservatives, although my dad registered as a Democrat in PA so  he could vote against them in the Primaries.  My mom's a little squishy, though.  I voted for Ronald Reagan, my first presidential election, but only because my dad told me to.  I didn't pay attention to politics at all.  I do remember getting my first "real" paycheck when I graduated from college, and being appalled by how much money was being deducted from my check in taxes. 

Fast forward years later, and living in Seattle, I usually voted against things that raised my taxes (except for the baseball stadium--I voted yes on that!), but still wasn't politically engaged at all.  (I enjoyed listening to NPR, for crying out loud!)  Their anti-Israel slant was a little troubling, but I would just change the channel if that was being discussed. 

I voted for GWB in 2000 because (and this is so lame because it's true), Runners World did an article on him and Al Gore and marathons they had run.  GWB ran one in the 3:40's (respectable time) and Gore was over 4 1/2 hours.  Al Gore made the excuse that "I could have gone faster, but I was waiting for my daughter."  I voted for GWB based soley on that--his faster time and thinking Al Gore was lame for making an excuse. 

Fast forward to Sept. 11, 2001.  That got my attention really quick.  After watching endless coverage of the towers coming down, I asked myself, "How did this happen?"  I started listening to Talk Radio, and didn't like Rush for the first week or so, but then realized that the guy was actually right.  Thus I was awakened from my carefree slumber.  And now, I'm so engaged and so informed, I can't sleep at night!

Great post, btw!  I'm enjoying reading everyone's "story".

485 My 6th grade history teacher was telling all us students that a progressive tax system was good. "If a person makes $100,000 and another makes $10,000, you can take 30% from the first and he still has $70,000. If you take 30% from the second, he only has $7,000. So it is more fair to have the first pay a higher percentage, because a person cannot get by on $7,000 a year."

"But Mr. X," I said, "Wouldn't it be fair for everyone to pay the same rate?"

"No. The richer people have more, and they will still have a lot of money even when they pay more as a percentage."

"Yes, Mr. X. But I just don't think that's fair."

I've just always thought that way. Of course, I didn't really know about redistributionism, or any of the actual insanity of our tax code. I just knew that fair was fair, and progressive taxes weren't fair.

486 My political journey wasn't from left to right -- it was along the axis from statist to libertarian.

When I was younger, I was of the opinion that anything could be solved through the application of enough brainpower. I was a smart kid, and (given enough time) I could figure anything out. So my thought was that the right way to run a country was to assemble the right schmot guys and direct how things would be done.

(I wasn't very humble in those days.)

It was Al Gore, of all people, who got me thinking that technocracy wasn't a good idea. Back in those days, everybody thought he was one of the smart guys -- some of you might recall a book called Earth in the Balance. The nerdier of you might also remember that Chaos Theory was hip and happening at the time. I was working the in the college library, and read Gore's book after finishing a couple on Chaos Theory.

The juxtaposition of the two topics didn't go well for Gore: the dude obviously didn't understand control systems and feedback loops. It was then that I realized if Gore got control of the environment in a centrally-directed fashion, it would be a disaster. If he was wrong (and I was pretty sure he was) then he'd destroy the whole system. But if you disconnected the system, you could try different solutions in different sections: no failure could take down the entire system, and you could rebuild sections after isolated failures.

Sounds a little bit like dividing your domestic policy into states, doesn't it?

So I stopped being a statist freak. The final, hard shift to libertarianism was driven by the current administration -- it's proof that centralizing power anywhere just waits for an incompetent to grab hold of the controls.

So I'm still a believer in the personal doctrines of conservatism, but would rather deprive the government the power to enforce them. For example: drugs are bad, but government shouldn't be taking them away from you.

I don't think I'll ever be a full-on Libertarian, though: foreign policy behaves more like a pack of dogs than a gathering of humans, so you need a big stick to beat off the challengers.

487 I think I was born conservative.

488

Check out comment 89 if you're a late arrival.

My own story - I just hate stupid people who are incapable of critical thinking

489 Allen West isn't exactly a major leader either.  Potential, yes, but a freshman Representative and Lt. Col. isn't exactly a world-shaker.

Posted by: Fa Cube Itches at April 21, 2011 09:54 PM (xy9wk)

Yeah, West surely hasn't been a major leader.  Especially if you don't count that Lt. Col. in the military thing.   For gosh sakes, the man oozes leadership.

490 Also - I have problems with authority that isn't me.

491 Gay conservative here. A few years ago, when I first came out of the closet in my freshman year of college, I fully expected my Republican friends to crinkle their faces in disgust and remove me from their facebook lists...that's why I was told by liberals, and they would never lie, right? It turns out the most extreme reaction I received from a Republican buddy was, "Okay, this will take some time to get used to, but whatever; you want to get high?" My liberal friends, on the other hand, suddenly decided they wanted to rope me into political arguments (on their side, of course) that they never cared to hear my opinion on before, and repeatedly assert how strongly they support "my community," no matter how irrelevant that would be to a given conversation. Their reactions, if it turned out (in 90% of the cases) that I fundamentally disagreed with their stances on the economy, foreign policy, or illegal immigration, was "Why...how...but you're supposed to be on our...how?" To put it succinctly, I quickly figured out which group of friends saw me as an individual with complex personal beliefs, and which one saw me as nothing more than a faceless group automaton and a cheap, supposedly guaranteed vote in their favor.

492 As I mentioned above, I believe I was born conservative. And then in grad school, I found Rush (and Beck, too - don't remember who I heard first) and thought, oh, they're making absolute sense, duh. (That was back when Beck was really funny and less apocalyptic.) In one show , I went from thinking Rush was a hateful, horrible person (based only on hearsay, as is usually the case) to realizing he is a hilarious, good-natured, brilliant person whose views just made sense to me.

493 Always been a conservative.  Won't change.

Probably went through liberal phases, but once asked to think it over, always went back to conservatism.

I just want the government to leave me the hell alone and take their hands out of my pockets.  Oh, and stop telling me how to live.  That seems to be how liberals are - telling me how I think rather than asking.  Just because I look a certain way and am a certain age doesn't mean I'm a liberal.

494 506 Pat - awesome story - I have to clean my keyboard re the "you want to get high" comment.

495 Bravo, all.  I think I can now pull the cable plug.  This thread was by far the most entertaining and positively affirming series of thoughts I've ever read at the HQ.

Thanks for all your stories.
 I'd add mine, but it is one gigantic mix of" all of the above".
I applaud all of you for making the journey. We can beat these marxist f*ckers.

 

496 I guess I was always conservative because I always believed, from a very small child, in the death penalty and killing nazis and communists.  Still believe in that holy trinity.  Just added the muslim horde onto the list post 9/11.

497 I was a leftist. Clinton, Nader. Philosophy changed me. I knew things were wrong between the ideas and the results. I took Descartes to heart and tried to prove what I knew about all the things I believed. Abortion was the first one. Once I could no longer argue in favor of it, except in the extreme cases (and even then, there are arguments against it), the damage was done. The rest of it started to fall into place.

There are four kinds of collectivism: biology, nationalism, religious, and statist. They evolved in that order. History played them out in that order, or roughly thereof. Biology is literally in your veins. The tribe will outlast everything. As history progressed we moved toward the libertarianism of the Enlightenment and away from what are truly - and historically - right wing collectivisms. The tail end - the end that still favored racism, misogyny and religious hatred should have cast that aside and caught up and that should have been the end of it. But it took time. And while it was coming some people kept going, thinking that turning left was progress, when it was really just doubling back down a parallel road toward a new kind of collectivism.

Progressives claim equality and race-blindness,  but they can't tell you why those things are important without the libertarian principle of individual sovereignty. That's why they are so ready to abandon those things for the sake of power. It is only an accident of history that an equality of women's rights shows up in Progressivism.

To answer the question of why conservatives have a libertarian streak in them, it's simple: because there are almost no right-wingers in America. Who favors the crown or the church over democratic government based on individual liberty? That's what the right-wing of the French parliament, where the term was coined, was about. They ain't here. History is history. "We" moved toward libertarianism and stopped. The left, thinking it was something new, kept going right on past where they should have put on the brake.

So why am I a conservative and not a libertarian? Because man is an animal who transmits his genes. Because he loves his children and wonders at his place in the universe. Man is a beast, not an automaton. He is given to violence of a sort never known on this world. Libertarianism in a pure form cannot exist safely in a world with the four collectivisms.

Because even if you're an atheist like I am, you must also stand in awe at how truly, very different we are from even our closest biological relatives in the animal kingdom. What monkeys do is not so different from what dogs do. The distance is not great. But stop for a moment and just look around the room in which you sit. Look at what you are wearing, and the meaning of the things around you. You are nothing at all like chimpanzees. Yeah, you have a common ancestor. But it a very, very long way from jabbing wet straw into termite hills to smartphones, history, the arts, the power to gaze at the stars and imagine worlds that exist only there inside your head.

498 @Pat.. Yeah, that's long been a problem with liberals. Their "tolerance" is mostly just a facade , or a general ploy to win over groups. As a somewhat traditional social con, my stance on gayness is always treated as some kind of hatred or even "fear". In reality, that's far from the truth. My brother is gay, it doesn't really bother me. We get along fine. He's an independant, anti-government sort of dude. I have reasons for my viewpoints, and I state them openly. But I have no hatred or anger towards anyone who doesn't wish me harm.

 Generally, the response you'll get from cons is an uncertainty on how to respond on gay-centered issues. Otherwise, we don't really care. Yeah, we may disagree on some stuff...but  at least we don't actively support dumb fucks in the Middle East that kill women and gays. So, we have that going for us.

 Seriously, how can gays support defenders of Middle East-style theocracy? That has to be worse than Christians not liking gay marriage.

499 For me, it's a long story. There wasn't really any big epiphany for me; just a long series of small ones. It began with the first Iraq war. I was 16, almost 17, at the time, and I was rather liberal. I didn't like the idea at all. But, my brother was in the Army at the time, and he sent me an Operation: Desert Storm sweatshirt. That really helped to put a human face on the whole thing for me. I'd heard in school about the war protesters spitting on our returning Vietnam War troops, and I was determined NOT to be like that. Despite my misgivings about the war, I decided to be a bit of a cheerleader for our troops. I wanted them to kick lots of ass, and get as many of them home safe as possible. I didn't like President Bush at the time, but I supported him as well for the sake of the troops. I was actually pissed off when we declared victory and pulled out, leaving Saddam in power. If we were gonna go to war, we needed to be prepared to finish it. Later, when I was fresh out of high school and working for a living, I got to know my friends from school better and found out that some of them owned guns. That made me think twice about gun control; these were cool guys, and I trusted them not to do anything stupid with their guns. At this time, I became a pro-gun Democrat. I was happy when Bill Clinton was elected to his first term. I didn't vote in that election, because I'd been scheduled to work all day. Well, not like my one vote would've made a difference, right? Yeah... Anyway, Clinton and his party lost my support during the congressional investigation of lewd song lyrics. I saw all sorts of Democrat officials speaking out in favor of government control over music. First off, Democrats were supposed to be the party of artistic freedom; if they weren't really for artistic freedom, what was the point in supporting them? Secondly... it occurred to me that if they asserted federal power over artistic liberty, it wasn't much of a stretch for them to extend their demand for power over speech to cover political speech, too. They wanted gun control and censorship? Fuck those clowns. At this point, I changed from a conservative Democrat to a liberal Republican. From there, I gradually grew more and more conservative over the next decade, mainly because, well, the Republicans were my team now. I was open to conservative arguments, because I wanted to support my team. Sure, I had some delusions about changing the minds of Republicans on some issues, like abortion and "social justice." Understanding where they were really coming from on these issues would be a key part of changing their minds and giving us one liberal party and one party of common-sense moderates. Wouldn't you know it, though? As I grew to understand the views of conservatives, they won me over on issue after issue. Their arguments made more sense to my open mind, and liberals, rather than engage conservatives in the arena of ideas, constantly sought to silence them. Why try to shout down and intimidate the opposition if you're right? Once my eyes were fully open to liberal tactics, liberals really helped push me more and more to the right.

500 Sorry about the wall of text. How do you break up posts into those nice little paragraphs on this site?

501 Hearing my Mom tell me stories of how some woman in the checkout line at the grocery store told her she hoped my Dad died in Vietnam.

Mom was 7 or 8 months pregnant with my older brother.

Dad was defusing mines and traps near Cam Rahn Bay.

502 #513: And then there's all those Hollywood movies about rock and roll, where conservatives worrying about the effects such music might have on teens are the bad guys. Meanwhile, those same filmmakers idolize people like Che Guevara, who actually executed teenagers for enjoying rock and roll.

503 Just because I look a certain way and am a certain age doesn't mean I'm a liberal.

Posted by: soulpile is... expendable at April 22, 2011 01:04 AM (afWhQ)

 Yeah...I wear urban style clothing. Way too large for me, but whatever...it's who I am.  I'm not a hippie, I'm not a "gangsta"...I'm not a degenerate loser. Well, maybe I AM a loser.

 Still, I get the feeling most people assume I'm liberal. 26, kind of scruffy...baggy clothing? Must be liberal. Not just that, but I'm actually a geeky-intellectual type. A young, intellectual type? Must be liberal! Gah.

 Actually, I relate to what Merovign said earlier. I'm probably conservative because I look at issues and happen to agree with conservatives most. I've never tried to BE anything...ideologically, socially, whatever. I don't conform to social norms at all, so I could never be a leftist. Leftists all think, dress and talk the same way.

504 @512 Amos, with all due respect for your right to call yourself whatever you like, I suspect that when you follow your (entirely sound) lines of thought out far enough, you will see that they are perhaps incongruent with atheism.

505 Genetic Tunder, don't mean to sound snarky because I know sometimes formatting goes south on this site when you hit "post", but did you try two returns after each paragraph?

506

Posted by: Joffen at April 22, 2011 12:14 AM (EPcuy)

And another conservative atheist.

507 And then there's all those Hollywood movies about rock and roll, where conservatives worrying about the effects such music might have on teens are the bad guys. Meanwhile, those same filmmakers idolize people like Che Guevara, who actually executed teenagers for enjoying rock and roll.

Posted by: Genetic Tunder at April 22, 2011 01:24 AM (mfQD5)

THIS.

I've always been annoyed at that, too. Tipper Gore and Joseph Lieberman kept trying to censor video games, and it irritated me beyond belief as a kid. I was sane. I was responsible. I played Mortal Kombat.

 Then, some jerks out there act like themselves...jerks. And they just HAPPEN to be fans of violent games. Look, I'm a sensible guy. Unlike most gamers, I recognize the need to self-police and I do believe gamers can be spoiled brats when their hobby is demeaned. This doesn't help our argument, at ALL. Nevertheless, the way in which these guys just thrashed an industry without giving it a fair shake...it's not exactly how Government should act. Quite often, though, it is how they act.

 Now I see senators trying to fight for the ability to shut down sites that engage in file sharing. That right already exists, it's called copyright violation and/or piracy. This new law, however, gives Government special new powers. Great.

508 #520: Yeah, Otis, I did double-enter between paragraphs, but the site still ran it all together into a wall of text.

509 Your average liberal, though, responds with more fury to some independent watchdog criticizing their hobbies than to Senators of their own party who try to actively censor it with Government power.

 Why? The watchdogs are often "moral" groups. And liberals hate morals.

510 Also, having grown up in a third world dictatorship, I see too many similarities between liberals leaders' behavior/philosophies and those of politicians in my beloved but seriously messed up country to prevent me from considering even for a second to become a lib. Hell no.

511 I have loved reading this thread, thank you all for sharing.

Another Canadian here.  Born and raised in Alberta, so not marinated in anti-Americanism (although there's still more here than I would expect).

My family never really talked much about politics in my younger years.  My grandparents were farmers, worked hard, raised a bunch of kids and saved their money- they lived conservative values without articulating them.

My parents on the other hand decided that their parents were stifling and uncreative, and decided to their "true path"- divorce, flakiness, self-inflicted wealth destruction... it was illuminating to see the effects of conservative values and liberal values as applied in reality. 

Oh, and I learned early that New Age crap is really no substitute for religion, channeling, crystal-carrying astrology freaks.   It was illuminating- the liberal ideas my parents and friends championed always seemed to justify their own bad behavior and guilty consciences.  It was always about self-flattery, and "like-minded people".

My grandparents' quiet conservative values meant they looked after their own, and made sacrifices that wouldn't be considered "fair".  And they never asked for kudos or attention for doing what they thought was the right thing.

I have never gone wrong when facing a decision and asking, "What would Grandpa say?"  I sure do miss him. 

512

What made me a conservative?

Well, it was when I moved about fifty quintillion points to the left on the political scale.

 

Khan, Ghengis A.

Mongolia, Outer.

 

513 Never mind this post; I'm experimenting with formatting. Maybe triple-entering is the way to go?

514 Nope; didn't help.

515 @523 I think that's happened to all of us at times. Chances are it won't happen next time.

516 Libertarian here!

Though I have my sympathies with conservatism.

There was never that single moment.  Just a long drawn out series of either events or readings or what have you.

But I suppose the single most influential person was my college government teacher.  Yes, a college professor.  I've long forgotten his name, and the guy is probably dead by now, but he wasa WWII vet that spoke well of the issues and made libertarian arguments rather succinctly and forcefully.  Basically just introduced me to this whole new way of looking at government and the consequences of what it does.

It just sort of went from there.

517 Are you using spacing before each paragraph?

  THIS

instead of:

THIS

That helped me.

518 Oops, I guess it happened to you again. Out of curiosity, what browser are you using? This site seems to be most compatible with Firefox.

519 Cool! I'll give that a try...

520 Nope; same result.

521 Because there wasn't anything on the radio. Early in college I started working late/overnights at a pharmacy, driving home after my shifts, there was nothing on the radio I hadn't heard a billion times, or actively hated. I remembered that in Omaha there was an awesome station playing Jazz on AM, I had heard about when I was around 15, so I was flipping around and landed on KFAB, Michael Savage. I was always one of those kids who were liberal because it was anti-establishment, and republicans were always greedy old men. You can imagine my outrage at hearing Savage for the first time, but for some reason I kept listening. I became a devoted fan of KFAB, preferring Savage, the local hosts, and Coast to Coast A.M. and it started me thinking politically where I never really had before. It also cast into stark light my girlfriend's family, who are all the type I like to call uninformed leftists, like I once was. They, and I once upon a time, had no idea what was going on, but it was a Republican/conservatives fault because they are evil. They also embrace wholeheartedly the mentality that being a victim, in and of itsself is virtuous. It is blessed to be a victim, thus they, and my girlfriend were always victims of any little thing because it made them feel good about themselves. I hate this thought process. It was my disgust with this way of thinking and behaving that lead me eventually to here, and I've been mainly a lurker ever since. I'm starting to convert my girlfriend too. It's kinda funny to hear this woman who broke up with me on my birthday, November 4th, for not voting for Obama, actually be interested and intellectually opposed to the ideals her family espouses.

522 I'm using Firefox with NoScript.

523 coming to really understand individual responsibility, facts, and logical philosophical consistency in my teens and early 20s. Dabbled in more libertarian/social minarchist leanings but I happen to think that for a society to really develop into a civilization and withstand the test of time, the social fabric needs to be made of a durable fiber. Democracies dont last; confederacies centralize or collapse; libertine societies decay. the only issue that kind of remains has to do with kids, and it not being their fault if their parent(s) suck ass. and part of the reason I still hold onto it is that individual responsibility... that their parents' failure shouldn't bleed over onto them.

524 Regarding what the problem is with liberals, I've made quite a study of it in my time, and I think the core problem with most libtards (as opposed to "true believers") is a simple refusal to grow up.

Regarding "true believers," my observation is that most of them are but an epiphany away from conservatism, or at least libertarianism. 9-11 was just such an epiphany for many.

525 Ah, well; I'll worry about my formatting issues some other time. Good night, everyone!

526 I read the comment way upthread about when did one first learn the media lied.  It's a good question.  I was about 11 or 12, and remember the weekly Vietnam War body counts on tv while eating dinner.  The report would go something like, '10,000 North Vietnamese were killed this week, while 257 Americans were killed'.  I remember thinking at the time, 'If we're killing 5-10,000 of the enemy per week, and losing 'only' a couple of hundred, mathematically speaking the war should have been over'.  I did not know the meaning of the word 'attrition' as applied to war, but I was good at math.  It was only later I learned about Uncle Walter, his communist roots and his declaring the Tet Offensive an American loss.  But I just knew something was fishy about the weekly war dead numbers.

527 @dappershoes: Good work! Keep working on her, IYKWIMAITYD.

 BTW, this country has two major political ideologies. Isn't it a shame that so many of us had to wait until our twenties or later to even understand what the two rival belief systems are? Or that liberals wouldn't even know what it is they actually oppose, other than Republicans? Great job, educational system.

528 537 I'm using Firefox with NoScript.

Well then, as the kids say, I've got nothing. I'm using FF 3 with Ad Block Plus. Your problem has happened to me sporadically in the past, and I've seen it happen to others.

Perhaps one of the more Web-enabled folks here can put you some knowledge.

529 I grew up listening to Rush thanks to my dad, so I was already influenced by conservatives.  However, I do remember reading about some liberal program or another and thinking "I thought that was a good idea... when I was in third grade!"  I came to realize that liberalism is a childish philosophy.

530 BTW, great topic everyone. I need to get going, I never even got to the ONT! You guys kept me interested.

May there be many more of our type of stories coming before 2012.

531 541 I read the comment way upthread about when did one first learn the media lied.  It's a good question.

It is indeed. I was taught at an early age to view news reports from any source with skepticism. I soon learned how to correct for bias in the LA Times. As time went on, however, their game began to be selective reporting, and that's when I started looking for alternate sources of information such as National Review and The American Spectator. Also, growing up in Montrose, CA, we had the good fortune to have a vociferously conservative paper, The Ledger, that afforded us some perspective.

532 _{"What I want to know is why you were a leftist in the first place, what made you change, and who had the most influence on that change?"}

Maybe it just comes down to luck.  My neighbor-lady-from-hell (me about age 12) was a fundamentalist Christian loon, and she pretty much turned me against everything that anybody who talked like her liked.  It took decades to undo THAT shit. 
Holy crap, 546 comments?  Oh dear ...

533 537 I'm using Firefox with NoScript.

Posted by: Genetic Tunder at April 22, 2011 01:49 AM (mfQD5)

Try allowing scripts for:

minx.cc
mu.nu
mee.nu

534 Grew up in California, mom taught Special-Ed and dad was a corpsman in the Navy, so I was a pro-defense lib by default.  Loved America because even though money was tight, my life was pretty good and news from around the world showed how good it was to be an American. Libs always talked a good game about freedom and equality, but when I got out of the school, I noticed that liberals didn't really believe in equality and fairness, they believed in quotas, special rights and censorship. The biggie I noticed was the double standard: back in the 90s there was a Republican Senator by the name of Bob Packwood, apparantly he was a prominant voice in getting some equal rights legislation passed, but he also liked chasing the skirts- he was drummed out of office for sexual harassment. Shortly thereafter, all the Clinton skirt chasing came to light, and all the people who acted as if Packwood was the devil, started singing a new tune.  I haven't changed my beliefs much, just came to realize that liberals didn't share them.

535 Shecky @ 23 "James Earl Carter"

Jimmah!  He turned me from Liberal to Libertarian. 
Well, that and noticing that Libertarians actually took the "freedom of speech" thing and the "racial equality" thing seriously, all the time. 
Jimmah! turned me so quick and so hard that I didn't even pause at Ronald Reagan, nope, both times I voted for the Libertarian candidate. 
That seemed important and sensible at the time ...

536 I was born conservative. I honestly don't think I've ever embraced any liberal idea. Cute story: I met a conservative guy once who, the minute he found out I was a professional artist, assumed I was a lefty. He asked me how I felt about the National Endowment for the Arts. I told him artists should do the honorable thing: find a wealthy sponsor instead of sucking money from taxpayers.

537

526 Delicious Lead Paint - I'm here in Calgary - where are ya now?

538

I started out with a very "modern day" liberal mindset in my early 20's. Because I truly care about people and the human condition.  I wanted everything to be good in the world.  Idealism I think it was. Actually, that hasn't changed.  Of course, the MFM convinced me at the time that only the Democratic party thought the same way.  The Republicans were evil!

What turned me around is a unique circumstance.  I got a job as a courier, driving a van that had only AM radio.  I hated AM radio, but that's all I had. So I started listening to this guy named Rush and well......you know the rest of the story.....that's it!

539 I was never a leftist, but I blithely accepted many of the "prevailing" sentiments pushed by the media when I was a kid. You know the deal: taxes are necessary to help the poor, guns are bad, the Constitution is a living document, etc.

I loved studying philosophy early on, but ignored political stuff as "too boring." Ayn Rand changed that. I could never go full Libertarian, though.  (Too wimpy on national defense.)

I've decided over the years I cannot be a Conservative. I have too many fundamental disagreements with Cons to honestly be one. Nor will I ever be a Republican.  But I decided after 9-11-01 that until the left is pushed back to where they were in about 1950, I will vote only for Constitutional Conservatives. (I don't care who you Republicans nominate. I'm sticking to my plan.)

After the left is sent back to their hidey holes, I'll get back to fighting with the Cons.

540 When real life hits, most people get conservative.  Well, if you care about being independent that is.  The more you turn to other people or the government to live your life, the less independent you are.  Liberals don't understand that or just don't care. 

541 _{GnuBreed @ 54 "VDH is a liberal and so is Pat 'Warcock' Caddell, but only in the classic sense. They sound more like conservatives to us."}

Them and Lee Stranahan, who I'd never have found out about except for this here blog here. 
I think Stranahan has just recently come to the place that most of the (first 54 anyway) commenters came to, and that Media Matters was the shipload of bullshit that broke the camel's back. 
I wonder how often that happens.  Hopefully it happens a lot.

542 Farmer Joe @ 101 "_{basically, I was lied to about what liberalism was all about.}"

That, too.

543 I became completely turned off on Democrats during the Clinton Impeachment.  It pissed me off that the feminists had completely sold out their cause to support a pig like Clinton, just because he was pro-choice and those prosecuting him were pro-life.  I've never been much of a social con, but the intellectual dishonesty really bothered me. 

Once I saw how dishonest they were on that issue, the blinders came off, and I saw liberals for what they were....

544 My school district's attempt to indoctrinate children to sway an election made me a conservative.  Because I was one of those children. 

One day in an unnamed school district in California in May 1978, the teacher announced that we had a special lesson for the day, in which we would watch TV and be given a special assignment. 

The TV program featured the District Superintendent telling us young kids what would happen if our parents voted for Proposition 13.  We wouldn't have any films, we wouldn't have any recess, we wouldn't have any lunch, and we wouldn't have any vacations.  When we got home, there wouldn't be any water and there wouldn't be any electricity, and our parents wouldn't have any money.  And there wouldn't be any police or firemen.

When the broadcast was over, the teacher had us bring our desks in a circle so we could share our thoughts about Proposition 13.  Yeah, 11-12 year old children aren't exactly deep political thinkers.  "Mommy told me she'd get fired if Proposition 13 passed..."  "Mom and Dad said they're voting for Proposition 13, but I think they're wrong..."  "I don't know what Proposition 13 is, but it's mean..."

I didn't know much about political indoctrination, but I knew what stunk to high heaven.

And then we were given our assignment.  Write a letter to our parents telling them how to vote on Proposition 13.  And if we turned them in to the teacher, she would read them out loud to the class so those who didn't know what to say to their parents might learn some ideas.

I pretended to write while leaving the paper blank, and told the teacher that my letter was "private".

My epiphany.

545 GnuBreed @ 127 _{"The answer is she is evil, or she is completely clueless. I think it is a combination. "}

It's a self-reinforcing process.  She's in a business where she is rewarded for pretending to believe stupid things, and has been in it so long that she now actually believes them.  Her evil has made her stupid, over time. 

546 I became a conservative when I made a batch of cookies and they'll came out shaped like Ronald Reagan's head.

547

Pierre Trudeau and his Liberal Party's confiscatory National Energy Policy. Killed the Alberta oil industry overnight. My young bride and I lost our house and sold apples door to door in Calgary for that winter to subsist until we could find new jobs.

I hate socialists. They're a volatile brew of stupid and dangerous. Like Obama.

Get rid of that man as fast as you can and get back to the Constitution, friends.

548 When I was in my Twenties, I believed that there were such things as "honest" liberals, who sincerely believed in liberal tenets. I thought that such people in many instances wanted what I wanted, but were simply wrong-headed about how to achieve it. I mean, I was for the little guy, I believed in being kind to animals, I was all for removing the barriers to access to an independent life for disabled people.  Like Diogenes seeking the last honest man, I sought a liberal with whom I might compare notes and maybe show them a better way to get there.

Of course, I never found one. Over time, I realized what is now patently obvious, that for liberals their politics is their religion, and that their positions were absolutely logic-proof.

Now, things have gotten so dire that I no longer allow any benefit of the doubt. I simply assume that no liberal ever acts in good faith about anything.

549 "I grew up" is probably the best answer I can relate to.  Had a lot of idealistic views in my youth and slowly realized reality and idealism do not get along very well.

550 Rod @ 147 "_{When was the first time you realized your nice friendly local news media was shamelessly lying to you?} "

Not sure about that, but some time around 2002, some of my online liberal then-friends became frantic, frantic, to point out to me, Every Fucking Day, something that "Faux News" had supposedly lied about. 
This is despite them knowing that I didn't have and would not have a television in my house, ever. 
This is more particularly despite me never ever asking them which of the networks that I wasn't watching was lying to me the most. 
This was really really important to them, exclamation point, so much so that it was a tip-off that SOMETHING was seriously wrong.
So eventually I did look into it, online, and yeah, something was.  It was them.

551 Plus a few Vietnam vets helped educate me.  What I was taught in school and their real life experience were not even close to the same.  All you ever learn about are the protests and the free love.  The soldiers stories are what needs to be taught.  These men fought bravely and have been publicly shamed ever since.  It is really sad.

552 565 "I grew up" is probably the best answer I can relate to.  Had a lot of idealistic views in my youth and slowly realized reality and idealism do not get along very well.

Churchill is reputed to have said: "Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains."

553 I've been conservative all my adult life. My maternal grandfather was a big influence through his emphasis on fard work and saving for the future. (It was only a few years ago that I learned the story if his father and how he labored for decades to pay off debts he incurred due to the Panic of 1907.) My father's deep and abiding loathing of "Ol' Bag Ears" LBJ, Claude Pepper and all things Democratic played a large role. My reading into history and politics and the memory of the needlessly divisive campaign to have the NEA represent school teachers in my hometown played a role. The principled stands of two neighbors elected to city commission as they voted against "urban renewal" grants and went so far as to found their own newspaper in order to get their side of the argument published. My love of this country and our republican form of government. My deep and abiding dislike of the terms "fair", "fairness" and "social justice" and their perverse effects on human initiative and freedom. My wired-into-my-DNA desire for any and all whose business my conduct of my life is not to "get out and stay out of my face, now"!

554 @569 LBJ, Claude Pepper and all things Democratic played a large role.

Ah, Claude "Red" Pepper! My Dad's one apostasy (besides voting for Truman). My Dad loved Claude Pepper for one reason only: because he was a Social Security "notch" baby, one of a group of people in a narrow age band who because of flaws in the law received less than those born before and after. Pepper was the only champion for the notch babies, and my Dad appreciated that. I used to give him Hell for that! And for the Truman thing, too.

555 The difference between a liberal and a conservative is the difference that founded this country.  Since then, the terms have swapped meaning, a conservative of today is a liberal of the times that founded our country, and a liberal today is a conservative of 200 years ago.  However, the terms REX and LEX have not changed meanings.  They remain the same.  The terms mean (respectively) Law (capital L) and King. 

The Declaration of Independence alludes to this: "having been endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights".  The Declaration is founded, then on the principle that there is a Law that establishes human rights. 

The modern liberal denies that there is a Law--a law that sits outside of the congresses and parliaments, kings, priests, popes, presidents and any other form of human government.  This is the Rex POV.  A modern liberal believes that there is no Law (capital L), only law (lower case) and that which is established by men.

A perfect example is the Jim Crow Laws of 100 years ago.  When they were enacted these laws were just as legal as any other law on the books. It actually was against the law for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus.  This was the same sort of law as were laws against vandalism or robbery.  They were real laws. 

About 60 years ago, a combination of several factors (WW2 was a big one) caused a lot of people to re-think the legal basis of these discrimination laws.  In Brown v Board (and a number of other legal cases, laws, and other legal activities), we as a society decided that Jim Crow was illegal.  Our Constitution did not change, but our society did (for the better, I'm convinced).  A modern conservative (classical liberal) would say that Jim Crow was wrong because it was immoral.  A modern liberal (classical conservative) would say that Jim Crow was wrong because the Court cases ruled it so.

This is the motivational difference between the modern liberal and conservative.  A conservative says that there is Law, and this Law is encapsulated in our Constitution.  A modern liberal says that there is NO Law, only those efforts passed by Congress and signed by the President.  The Constitution is an impediment to a modern liberal, while it is the very basis of societal structure to a conservative.

556

I was an MP at Fort Benning "77-78.  I was young and bit liberal but not too strongly about it.  I had never voted. 

What made me a conservative was watching 3 Secret Service limos coming through the main gate at Benning, a chase car, lead car, Jimmy Carter's mother in the middle car.  She was going to OUR commissary/PX and OUR hospital for food, clothes, and medical treatment.

I was thinking why this woman who was very well off had to use our facilities, take our commissary and PX goods and get treatment at our hospital....Treatment and goods that our soldiers and their dependants would not recieve that day.

A few months later I ETS'd.  The next election I voted for Ronald Reagan.  Never regretted it.  Remember that thingy called the USSR?  The Warsaw Pact?  Too bad that we only had the one Reagan.....

557 Clubber @ 406 (406!!) 
_{" And don't burn the bridges of your relationships to family and friends due to political differences -"}

That, I'll candidly admit, is growing EVER more difficult.

_{"- 5 years from now they might hate Obama more than you do."}

If they're capable of THAT intensity of hatred, I don't want to be around them.  Hell, I already don't want to be around half of them.

558 Second epiphany.

My grandfather died a few days after I got a full California drivers license at age 16, by default I became the only licensed driver in the family, so I inherited his car--a 4-year old stripper 1978 Ford Granada.

The summer following my high school sophomore year, my high school nominated me for a week-long future Leadership Institute for underprivileged students, all expenses paid, hosted by the University of California Irvine.  Being young and dumb and from a poor family, I accepted.

ME:  "Where can I park my car?"
DESK:  "You're supposed to be underprivileged--what are you doing with a car?"
ME:  "It's the family car.  I'm the only driver in the family."
DESK:  "Why didn't you take the bus here like everyone else? "
ME:  "Why would I take the bus if I have a car?  And if I took the bus, nobody else in my family could drive the car.   What if there were a family emergency?"
DESK:  "YOU TAKE THE BUS LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE HERE!"

So I drove the family car back home and took a bus back to UCI.  Checked in and got assigned to a dorm bunk.

Next morning was the introductory seminar.  All I can remember was repetition of the phrase "white male privilege".  Since I was one of the very few white males in the lecture hall, other attendees were giving me the evil eye.

We were assigned an essay of how "white male privilege" had personally affected us.  I was going to write an essay on how nice it would be to take advantage of this "white male privilege" but I'd rather get into college by working hard and getting good grades and high test scores.

But I chickened out.  I took the public transit bus back home.  I drove back to UCI the next morning to let the Leadership Institute know that I was dropping out due to a family emergency.

559 My Dad found himself temporarily without a job during the Carter years. He heard in the news about a government job program; he hated such things, but he needed to pay the rent, so he swallowed his pride and called to inquire.

The first thing they asked him was, "Are you a minority?"

He said, "Yeah, I'm a Republican!" and slammed down the phone. I was so proud of him.

560 ;">The first thing they asked him was, "Are you a minority?"
;">
;"> ;">He said, "Yeah, I'm a Republican!"



I don't care who you are, that's funny right there!

561 _{^{This new comments thingy seems to have a new formatting bug...}} 

562



Well that much _worked...

563 @ 521 _{"And another conservative atheist."}

Yo.

564 Genetic @ 523 "_{I did double-enter between paragraphs, but the site still ran it all together into a wall of text.}"

Try double-enter, period, double-enter.

.

Clunky but effective.  Usually.

565 I've never been a leftist, at least not really.  Oh, when I was a teenager and didn't know ANYTHING about politics I used to call myself a liberal.  Why?  Because at that time I thought the word referred to someone like Thomas Jefferson, not Karl Marx.  Like I said, I didn't know anything about politics, or at least not contemporary politics, only historical politics. 

I was exposed to quite a bit of MTV which had an awful lot of leftist nonsense baked right into it.  But rather than swallow the nonsense whole and be corrupted by it, I worked to try and fit it into what I understood to be reality, not realizing that the people on TV weren't just wrong, but were deliberately lying.  When we are young we don't see the world as it is, but as WE are, and what I perceived in the leftist nonsense on MTV and from other sources was not the message they were trying to trick me into believing, but a reflection of myself and my own innate values, which are not those of the left.

I think that there are a lot of people who are leftists by default simply because they live in a microcosm where leftist nonsense is so pervasive that it is all they know.  Since these people are not leftists by nature, I suspect that the leftist nonsense they have been steeped in is something they're trying to make sense of in much the same way I did.  A lot of them go around using the preferred terminology of the left, but meaning something quite different when they do. 

The reason is that the left works to corrupt language.  They don't just use words to lie, they lie about the words they use to lie.  Lies within lies using terms that are themselves dishonestly re-defined in order to sow confusion.  They do this in order to cover up their evil intentions and to trick people into agreeing to things without understanding what it is they're signing off on.

The term "liberal" itself is the perfect example of this.  Once upon a time that term referred to someone who might now be called a libertarian.  But the left began using it to refer to their Marxist nonsense to the point that its true original meaning was all but lost.  Only when we use the word in a compound term like Liberal Democracy is its original sense still used. 

Another example is the word "equality."  The left loves to toss this one around, almost as much as they do "justice."  A normal person would interpret this words as a reference to a person's civil and political rights: freedom of speech, the 5th amendment, etc, etc, all of which are fundamental rights that can be guaranteed to all.  But that isn't what a leftist means.  When a leftist talks about "equality," they're imagining a world where failure is to be somehow magically prevented, and success punished, despite the fact that success and failure are almost always a manifestation of the character and abilities of the person in question.  People who make wise choices get what they want from life to make them happy.  People who make foolish choices don't.  Rinse and repeat over hundreds of thousands of individual choices by millions of individuals and you soon wind up with a normal distribution.  This outcome is inevitable because people are different from each other and some people make better choices than others.  Nothing can be done about this.  To try is foolish and ultimately destructive.

But leftists want to pretend that this is the result of systematic oppression or a conspiracy theory of some kind, which is pure insanity.

This is just one example of course, there are countless more that can be made.

My conclusion about the true-believing leftists, the Noam Chomsky set, is that they are either evil or crazy.  They're smart enough to know that what they are promoting is both untrue and inherently harmful, but they do it anyway.  Only someone who is malicious or insane would do that.

Does that mean that "conservatives" are angels?  Certainly not.  But the flaws and faults to be found in conservative ideas are of the sort that are normal when people of limited wisdom attempt to make sense of things.  We have imperfect ideas because we are imperfect beings.  But unlike the vile totalitarian notions that the left subscribes to, our ideas are an honest attempt to know and live with the truth. 

But to answer the original question, if you want to understand the left from the standpoint of someone who got off the crazy train, read Radical Son by David Horowitz, a recovered red diaper baby whose parents were low-level Soviet operatives and committed Marxists.  He grew up and became a somewhat well known member of the "New Left" Marxists back in the 60's.  But as time went by, his own experiences in life eventually overwhelmed his indoctrination and he the scales fell from his eyes.  Today he's a well-known conservative pundit. 

He grew up with the crazy in its purest form, tried to make sense of it, tried to make it work and to conform with reality, and eventually gave up because it just doesn't.  2+2 does not equal 5 and never will.  A less honest person might not have done so well. 

566 I don't care who you are, that's funny right there!

Yes, that's part of what I was proud of him for, aside from the spirit and the pride. It wasn't often that my Dad pulled a nifty like that, at least that I knew of. Then again, I understand he raised some heck in the Navy. . .oh, and once, he put a huge "Eisenhower for President" sign on his best friend's house. His best friend was Adlai Stevenson's local campaign chairman at the time.

Okay, I guess my Dad could pull a nifty with the best of them.

567 Getting married the first time.
Having another's life in my hands.
Realizing "everything costs something,"
and asking
"Who's paying for this?"

568 I'm reminded as I read through the comments of another thing that I'll add to my comment way up there somewhere is that I had picked up Ayn Rand's We the Living in my early teens thinking nothing more than "looks like a good read" at some lending library in Kirkland, WA. It made a  huge impression. It was a few years later that I went to Yugoslavia (when there was one) and that book was on my mind the whole time. The reinforcements just kept coming.

569 I guess I've always been conservative, also. The only conservative of five siblings and let me tell you, I took major shit during the Bush years. My mother had to invoke executive privilege at family gatherings on the political stuff because it was escalating to point-of-no-return hatred. Those were hard years. I am proud to say that my godson is the staunch conservative of his generation. He gives me hope.

570 Always tilted right on presidents but was over 33 when I voted for the first time in 2010 all "R".  (never thought I do that)  Next time I'm even voting for the party nomination.

I grew up under Reagan we liked him he was kind, serious, reasonable, and tough against obvious bad guys.  I also had alot of that BS in public school when I was being bullied (often 4-8 to me)  and all the lefty admins instantly played the "moral equivalence BS" while doing nothing.  I soon learned not to trust authority to come to my rescue over and over again.  Then one day during a period of some pretty frightening bullying we were shown a lefty movie in school where they talked about female bullying where a group of girls walked over to another girl and knocked her coat on the floor and walked away laughing.  Then the narrator said, "female bullying while being less physical can be just as hurtful."  That was the day I started doubting all the BS in indoctrination I mean education. I lived in fear for years while admins looked knowing who the bad kids were while doing nothing.

Older, never cared much for Bush-Clinton-Bush... then 2003 Iraq invasion.  At the time I watched CNN and the Daily show every day.  Because of years of childhood traumatic "things" I am allergic to emotional manipulation like some people are allergic to bees or peanuts.   When someone does that pattern of behavior puts me into red alert panic and anger mode.  Obviously I started watching less and less of CNN and Daily show and more and more of searching for honest news on the internet.  Soon I bought Hannitys book, because I was hungry for the untold story.  That wasn't my cup of tea it felt too much like the stuff I wanted away from.  Then as a lowly worker I got harassed by a bunch of rich out of state enviro wackos.  Then the unserious Kerry and obviously manipulative Michael Moore pushed me again toward the right.  (still refused to vote for Bush)  When I pointed out Moores lies the shrugged shoulders from leftists and then the justifying it for emotional reasons pushed me farther right again.

Thing is as a religion that is openly despised by the left and the right I never expected to prefer one party or culture over the other.  But beat all if those self righteous closet fascist Obama cultist lefties didn't all but demand I opposing the left in any and all ways I can muster.  Later thanks to Ron Paul I grew to marvel at the constitution/founders and the power of free markets. (not the socialist vs corporatist choices we have today)  Somewhere in there I was a union and their petulent childish whining and manipulating while stomping all over us younger union members killed off that whole "help the little people, view of unions"  I am still a fan of reasonable worker protections.

So i'm on your side more or less now and was pushed here against my will by the disgusting of the modern left.

571

The left believes that for the most part anyone who has material success in America, has it because of “luck” and/or societal inequities that favor one group over another.

 

On the “luck” front – they believe if you were born to a stable, middle class family, you were “lucky” and therefore grew up “privileged”.  In contrast, children born to inner-city single mothers were “unlucky”.  Therefore, according to this logic, you owe all of your success simply to your initial luck that gave you a stable home, money, a good education, etc.  Thus, you owe society and those born “unlucky” because your “success” is entirely fraudulent.  For instance – I only did well in high school because I came from a family with a nice house and enough to eat.  My high school education was decent because we were able to live in a nice community.  I only got into college because I was able to go to a decent high school. Etc.  If you believe that everything is based on the initial “luck” of birth, then nothing is truly earned.

 

Part of this thinking is that whites kept everyone else down for so long, that all white people who are in the middle class or above today owe their success to their ancestors keeping minorities and women down.

 

This, of course, entirely discounts any work your parents or their parents did to earn their money, or their adherence to values that were then instilled into you.  It also discounts the fact that the vast majority of todayÂ’s middle class is only 2^nd or 3^rd generation middle class.  That all “whiteys” did not come from a long line of privileged people who kept minorities and women down.

 

The other operative thought is that rich people are only rich because of the way society is set up, and the laws we have, etc.  thus, according to this logic, rich people (or anyone with a modicum of success) completely owe their success to society.

 

Based upon the above logic, nobody really “earns” their success – they only were lucky in birth or some other way.  Thus, it is only fair to share that success with those who are unlucky.  This also explains why they donÂ’t see that things like moral values, belief in hard work, traditional family units, and the like generally lead to success.  They believe for the most part it is just “luck” (except of course when it comes to themselves – then it is earned, of course).  Thus their belief in taxing everyone as much as possible and redistributing.  If the middle class and above only have what they do because of luck, then it is only fair to redistribute it to the unlucky.

 

They also generally donÂ’t believe in inherent abilities, such as intelligence.  Which explains the almost religious attitude toward “education” – they honestly believe that every child can be Einstein if just “educated” properly.

 

Generally the left do not believe in the idea that parents who work hard and become successful should be able to pass on wealth to their children, b/c that is not earned by the children.

 

Finally, the left generally believes that the world can be made perfect if we just find the right combination of laws and regulations.  That there would be world peace, everyone would be middle class or above, and everyone would be happy.  Which explains their belief in government.  If just the right people were elected and allowed to do what they wanted, we would be back in paradise.

572 402 Posted by: mistress overdone at April 21, 2011 10:14 PM (2/oBD) Ah, yes, Berkeley. Same planet, vastly different world. Land of violent wish casters: "We want it to be that way and we won't hesitate to grind you into dust if you don't agree!" I recall being both appalled and amused when the campus was overrun by Cesar Chavez's UFW seeking leftist solidarity on one ballot initiative or another. Ron Dellums, who didn't flinch in the slightest to tell the rest of us how to live our lives while his own son was a convicted criminal. A post doc in our group who lived in the flatlands near San Pablo Avenue had the seats stolen from his VW Beetle for no apparent reason (why not take the whole car?). I actually did move to El Cerrito for one year until our landlord gave us the boot because he had been renting out the house to two groups in violation of local zoning ordinances. To spend an extended amount of time in Berkeley is to witness liberalism in the full glory of all its failings ... without exhibiting the wisdom to admit that it had failed.

573 For me, it was Clinton Lewinsky.  I actually voted for Clinton in 92 and 96, thinking little of Bush I or Dole.  To show that I am rational, I also voted for Reagan twice and Bush I in 88, thinking nothing of Dukakis.

But then Monica came along and knocked the scales from my eyes. Clinton was so manifestly guilty of perjury yet the Democrats rallied to defend and protect him in a way I simply could not understand or agree with. Not one Democrat stood up ands said "the King has no clothes" (pun intended)  It caused me to question all my assumptions about politics and the conclusion I came to was that, for the Democrats, the only issue is power.  They have no principles. They are only about gaining and holding political power.  The Democratic party was no different or better than a Mob family.

574

On August 5, 1962, at the age of 16, I was on a church group field trip to the Shrine of Chautauqua in Pennsy.  Over the radio came the news that Marilyn Monroe had died and immediately the 'church ladies' started throwing the words 'whore' and 'slut' around.

For the first time in my life I contradicted an adult not my parent.  I told them she was a young girl, dead from lifestyle choices, and their attitude was not Christian.  They were miffed, but shut up.  I left the church and never went to another.

What does this have to do with being a conservative.

I realized that I could think for myself.  I realized that 'authority' figures didn't have the answers and were prey to their own prejudices.  I became more aware of ulterior motives and subtext.

The natural resulty of which made me a conservative.  I'm also pro-choice for the same reason.  A reasoned decision, not a knee-jerk moral one.  So sue me.

575
Oh, and Henry Hyde's (RIP) "Catch the Falling Flag" speech for impeachment hit me like Saul on the road to Damascus.  They ought to play that in every high school civics class.  It would help end the Democratic party as we know it.

http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/~dewolf/hyde-imp.htm

576

     I was super-leftist!  I listened to Amy Goodman.  I was in the NAACP.  I went to a leftist college (Morehouse) that was surrounded by other leftist colleges (Clark and Spelman)in a leftist city (Atlanta).  I went into the ultimate leftist profession, teaching.  I wanted to "teach the truth".  I was leftist because of the cultural habits of the Black community where everybody is democrat or left of that.  There, Republicans and conservatives are racists, and so is capitalism.  U.S. history is naught but the history of white folk enslaving and oppressing Black people.  Nothing more.  Europe is that continent that unleashed white folk and racism on the planet.  The history of Europe is a history of imperialist oppression, colonialism, and the exploitation of non white folks.  Period.  All this sets up a platform upon which ancillary leftist causes can be stacked.  Feminism, anti-war in any case or situation, universal health care, total and complete government funding of anything that helps "the people" (socialism), 100% taxation of the rich, you name it and I was for it simply because it seemed compatible with the idea that Black and Brown peoples were victims of a global conspiracy concocted by Europeans who wanted to use capitalism as a means of exploitation and genocide.  Uhuru sasa!

     But then I taught U.S. History.  And I taught it in the ghetto.   I taught directly out of the NYS curriculum and a 11th grade history/ civics textbook from AMSCO.  This is important because I had HUGE gaps in my knowledge regarding U.S. History.  This is why my only concept of history was slavery and Jim Crow.  As those gaps started being filled, I started to readjust my view of history.  Teaching in the ghetto led me to "unromanticize" it, and see it for what it was.  They were not the oppressed masses.  Instead, it was largely a collection of good hard working folk who were enduring the tyranny of irrresponsible knuckleheads who were destroying opportunity and my beloved Black community.  And these knuckleheads (thugs, stupid irresponsible parents, the lazy and shiftless) were enabled by something more insidious, guilty white liberals and Black folks who thought as I had described in the first paragraph.   And as I evolved in my thought, I came to despise those activist guilty white liberals for they were extraordinarily condescending to Black folks.  In so many ways, those kinds of whites never saw our humanity.  We were merely tools and a justification for their cause.  I'm not trying to place all white liberals in a box.  Most of them are chill though we often disagree.   Its just those Rosie O'Donnell (bull dyke) and Paul Krugman (effete male) activist types.  And that is the entire story of extreme  lefist thought and its effects.  The white liberal who drinks craft beer and votes for Obama is cool with me, and we are cool in our disagreement.  And we can still talk baseball over an IPA.   Its just those motherfuckers that get government jobs and quietly plan for their anti-capitalist revolution.  I cannot tolerate them.  But I digress....

     So I was evolving.  Was there slavery? Yes.  Was the Constitution a racist document?  No.  In my mind, slavery and Jim Crow are contradictions to the ideological foundations that form the basic concepts of the Constitution as well as the founding of America.  With this understanding, I ventured off the reservation of the popular thought of popular Black culture.  I became a moderate democrat.  I really could not completely let go, at first.  Two things gave me the necessary shove to the right.  Ghetto culture and 9-11.  I saw how we, Black folks, inflicted the wounds which we attributed to racism.  And I also saw how the socially liberal government interventions, in most cases, perpetuated these wounds instead of resolving them.  Additionally, I saw how this entire construct victimized Black folks who were doing the "right thing".     Then came 9-11.  In 2000 I voted for Ralph Nader over Al Gore.  In 2004 I voted for Bush.  9-11 caused a HUGE reassessment of my view of Western cultural traditions in relation to the rest of the world.  In my youth, I argued that Anti-American thought, and Anti-Western thought for that matter, was justified given the legacy of imperialism.  That's is a fair point in some respects BUT, as I evolved, I had to ask a fundamental question:  Which society is more just?  Those founded upon a tradition of western liberalism (I mean liberal in the true and historic sense) or those who replace colonial rule with socialist collectivism.  Or put simply, would I rather live in, say, Israel or Iran?  America or Cuba?  In answering a question, I chose a side.  Yes, the whole Palestinian thing in relation to the founding of Israel is foul but which society is more just?  Ideology and theory are nice but practice is a completely different world.  In practice I'd choose Israel, and I started to structure my system of belief around actual practice.  Theory and ideology is nice for a coffee house discussion but nowhere else.  To be true to myself, I had to believe in that which I do not a series of abstract concepts that are impractical.  So I became a republican.  But the story of my evolution is not over.

     That whole Constitution thingy appealed to me.  I became strict in my interpretation of it and grew curious about that whoe "libertarian" thingy.  Another shove took place.  I was a Fair Tax devotee and when Bush was elected, I really thought dude was gonna reform the tax system but he didn't.  This made me see the GOP as a collection of politicians no different than the democrats.  What I mean is that both the GOP and democrats are politicians who increase the size of government for their own pet projects.  Government expansion is government intrusion and it both costs money and inhibits freedom.  Welfare is just as insidious as No Child Left Behind, and the illegality of marijuana is just as hideous as the Progressive sentiment that led to prohibition.  So now, I have gone from Ralph Nader over Gore to Ron Paul over George W. Bush.  This is one helluva journey I'm on. 

577
My Dad used to boast that he was the only Catholic Irishman in America who voted for Nixon in 1960.  Couldn't stand Kennedy. He identified with Nixon's genuinely humble background.  Dad was a bear to live with the first week of  August in 1974.  Thought Nixon had been well and truly screwed by the media.

I remember him snarling about what a pass the Kennedy's got from the media.  And that was before any of us really knew the real facts.

578 The day Reagan got shot. I was standing in line at a Wendy's and these 2 young co-ed's were sniggering at the news because they "didn't like him, anyway". I didn't ever want to aligned with that train (wreck) of thought. I never looked back.

579 Once I looked at my first paystub I was transformed from Left to Right.

580 Well you start with the lefturds don't have rational, reasoning, functioning brains. Then it's easy.

581

Posted by: Al From Bay Shore at April 22, 2011 08:23 AM (QdRRH)

Welcome, Al. Great piece!!!!!!!!

^{...(but quit so goldamned smart, the folks here are morons)}

582 I started as a conservative but by the time I got to college I began to think something was wrong with me. All the with-it kids and even the college professors seemed to lean left. So, in time I began to "ape" their beliefs. I noticed that patriotism and any belief in universal rules were often ridiculed.

Yet, I like consistency and some anchor to reality.  Do you recall Woodstock? I wasn't there but I saw the movie and during one poignant scene they're all chanting to make the rain go away (using that awesome brain power liberals and leftists supposedly have). The rain did not listen and I knew it would not. Gravity will not give you a break. You do not change the nature of something by holding hands in a circle and singing Kumbaya. I can dream of flapping my arms and flying to the moon all damn day but it's still a dream. It's not real.

As the leftists got stranger and more divorced from reality, I found myself acting one way but thinking another. The final meltdown came with Jimmy Carter. I came to a point I could not say even as a lie "well, he means well and he believes all the right things".

Jimmy Carter simply sucked. And he didn't suck just because he was incompetent although that was a big part of it. He sucked in no small measure  because, I realized, all the things the liberal/left believed in was a pile of bullshit.
But I think I project something onto Jimmy Carter, perhaps a bit unfairly. He began to represent the bankruptcy of left. I was a little angry at myself and at others like me who had gone along to get along when I knew the truth but one has to admit that Ol' Jimmy made himself an easy target.

Never again. I began as a conservative, I returned to those roots and I will not depart ever again. Liberals and leftists are simply wrong and some of them suspect it which is why they get shrill and intolerant when "challenged".

583 Good stuff, Al. Thanks for coming.

584 Watching the Berlin Wall come down make me think Reagan wasn't quite the idiot I had previously thought he was. After a few years of DC life, I also began wondering just what my tax money was paying for. A fortune was spent on their schools and the schools sucked, the roads were filled with potholes, the place was the murder capital of the US - yeah, just one more example of what happens to communities organized by Dems.

585 Pol Pot. Prior to our exit from Vietnam, the MSM were rabid about anything and everything in their aggressive protest of our involvement in Vietnam. I was a middle-class suburban naive teenage white girl who had hippie aspirations, so I was rabidly anti-war, too. After our exit from Vietnam (oh, that sweet, sweet thrill of victory and power!) came Pol Pot. I was shocked that what the "hawks" had predicted had come true, and I was horrified by the brutal, relentless genocide of the Cambodian people. But the MSM? Its silence was deafening.

586 Lots of great stories here from a lot of lurkers.  You hiding morons really should post waaaay more often!

587 You hiding morons really should post waaaay more often!

Posted by: Tami at April 22, 2011 09:11 AM (VuLos)

Agreed.

588 Is there a way to occasionally bump this thread? I have SO many friends that are conservatives but don't know it. They believe the Lie, so they vote Dem. I'd like to show them this and I'd like to see more.

589 Dammit. Misspelled my own nic. again. Time to clear cookies.

590 9/11 was the catalyst that woke me up.  The internet was the tool that taught me what conservatism actually is.  Beslan was the last straw that made me see how hateful liberalism is and how liberals are impossible to reason with.  That kind of hate is beyond reason.

591 After voting for Clinton, twice, I finally became a conservative when, after working 132 hours a week in residency, I had to write a big fat  state income tax check to the state of North Carolina because my wife dared to work hard as well.  I now live in Texas for obvious reasons. Most college kids are liberals until they pay taxes and realize how much of that is wasted.  The Berlin wall was  also an eye opener - I was always told that we need to accept that the Soviet Union will be here forever and Reagan disagreed - 1989 was magical.   I had cast my first vote ever for Bush the elder but then Clinton had to throw a football on the side of the road with Gore and I was back to my college lib stupidity until the tax day cometh.

592

The Laffer curve is what did it for me.

After I learned about it, the scales fell from my eyes.

593 I was never a leftist but I got the usual left-wing indoctrination in college and generally leaned left-of-center for a long time.  I voted for Clinton twice and Al Gore in 2000.  What pulled me out of it was the shock of 9/11 and the incomprehensible response to it by the left.  I understood immediately that we were at war with an ideology that wanted to destroy us while the left blamed America for it and trotted out the usual tropes about poverty and inequality. I turned hard to the right and have never looked back.

You need to understand that liberalism for politicians and activists is a means to acquiring power, but for most liberals it's about making them feel good about themselves.  It doesn't matter how disastrous liberal policies may turn out in real life, liberals really believe that they are doing what's best for society.  This belief provides the illusion that they are smarter, more tolerant, and more caring than others even if they never actually lift a finger to help another person.   It makes them feel better about themselves and that has a powerful allure.

594 "I'm still very much a Catholic too, because it's always struck me as funny that liberal Catholics accept the "we're all sinners, we are all flawed human beings" bit but don't see how that means we have to be careful in not giving government - run by those flawed human beings - too much power just because they are SUCH smart folk. " I've noticed that too - also the tendency to confuse "charity" with "taxation." Funny, though, because every poll shows the more conservative a person is the more likely he or her butt is to be found sitting in a pew on Sunday. Catholics - once a reliable Dem block - are now split down the middle like the nation as a whole. And it's the lapsed ones and the Christmas and Easter Catholics who are the most likely to be libs. Older priests (the ones ordained in the Vatican II era) and Sr. Pantsuits tend to be pretty hardcore "social justice" types in my experience. The JP II generation of younger priests tend toward conservatism - not just politically, but litgurically as well. A return to the "smells and bells" rituals of the Church rather than all the lame crapola we had to put up with in the '70's - ugly felt banners, interpretive dancing, Godspell songs in mass and so on. Catholic libs have to recognize the absolute and increasingly blatant hatred secular leftists have for the Church in particular and Christianity in general. It doesn't matter how much free trade coffee my parish sells for the relief of a poor village in Mexico. It doesn't matter how much is given to the local food pantry - the leftists will continue to hate and mock Mother Church with a passion. It's not really about abortion, or the sex abuse scandals, or the Church's failure to accept homosexual marriage as a good. Fundamentally, it's about tearing at the pillars of Western civilization - and Christianity is the biggest pillar of all.

595 Two main events pushed me here, they happened around the same time.  I was 14 and had my first real job off of the farm on a factory farm (yes, I was moving up in the world).  My first real pay check, watching the government take a big chunk of what I earned because I was young, white, male, and a dependent.  So much for all men being equal.  And then watching them take even more when I worked overtime. 

Second point happened around the same time.  I finished Brave New World, and realized that no matter what the Utopian promises that could be realized through just a few more tax dollars, it would all fail anyway.  

It was a pretty potent one two punch. 

596

Also, having to pay into the state retirement fund when I was a state employee in my early 20s. It wasn't optional, I didn't earn any interest, and it would go away completely if I left before 5 years was up. I had no intention of sticking around for 30 years to get any of it back.

I realized several things at that job: 1) the pension program was a form of legalized theft, and 2) it was exactly like social security, 3) state employees take five times longer to do anything than private sector employees.

A light went off.

597 I grew up. Went conservative after serving in the Navy, got a wife and kids, and followed the liberal media long enough to realize all the lies.

598

In terms of foreign policy, as Ronald Reagan said, I didn't abandon liberalism, it abandoned me--on the Soviet Union, for example, and Israel.

 

In terms of domestic policy, I studied economics (No, it doesn't have that effect on everyone).  Before that, I found it difficult to believe that taxes could affect how much the economy produced, or that welfare had much effect on labor supply.

 

By the way, I once had a sociology professor who talked about what a "humane" society would be like.  Someone asked for an example, and he suggested North Vietnam.

599 BTW for the above I notice with noscript I often get spacing issues here.

600

I donÂ’t describe my politics as “conservative” so much as “American.”  They are not far from the socio-political views of my departed grandfather, who was a rank and file Union member and voted Democrat, which I suppose is a comment on how far left the Democrats went in the time between.  For context, my grandfather dropped out of the 6th grade to go to work delivering ice.

 

The Section 8 housing voucher program that absolutely destroyed my childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia in the 80s (and during my childhood) certainly accounts for why I find leftists so despicable.  It was pretty much a “greatest hits” of Leftist posing and contempt for the little people that they pretend to represent. 

 

For those of you unfamiliar, the Section 8 program “subsidizes” housing for the “underprivileged” by paying rent directly to a landlord directly for a Section 8 qualified renter.  The renter is supposed to pay a nominal contribution, and my recollection is it was somewhere in the ballpark of $100 per month or so to stay in the program.  But the “subsidy” is actually a significant premium over the market rent, meaning that a landlord who secured a section 8 “tenant” could get great cashflow without the headaches of collecting rent, and really didnÂ’t care if the “tenant” paid the “contribution” or maintained the home.  In sum, you had a situation where the government was encouraging investors to buy houses in stable, residential neighborhoods, and to secure Section 8 “tenants” in order to more or less receive cash direct from Uncle Sam.  The “tenants,” of course, were the dregs of West and North Philadelphia, stroking the Lefty “diversity” fetish when transplanted into monolithically white neighborhoods with specific ethnic flavors.  What you got for your tax money was extended or multiple families living in small rowhomes, drifters in and out of the houses, unsupervised children roaming, property/drug/violent crime increasing exponentially.  The “program” was administered by local corrupt political cronies (friends, no doubt, of the landlords) who did not enforce the programÂ’s requirements as applied to the “tenants” and their behavior.  Complaints made to those responsible for enforcing the program were greeted with accusations of racism directed to those people who had worked their lives to buy homes in a lower-middle class neighborhood and raise decent children.  Then began the cycle of lower property values, stable families leaving the neighborhood for Bucks and Montgomery Counties or parts of South Jersey, who in turn were replaced with more “tenants” and undesirables lowering values further, and so forth.     

 

The long and the short of it is that what we had were stable, lower-middle class neighborhoods with low crime, where a house was affordable for families where one parent had a steady job.  They spared the City government millions of dollars, with most or substantially all sending their kids to the Catholic Schools, and people organized their lives around the parish and took care of one another – in sum, an “community” arising of its own – you know, what Leftists are always trying to use government to accomplish.  When the neighborhoods died, their institutions died, and a way of life died – and eventually you lose touch with people from the neighborhood that moved to Jersey.

 

A few years ago Ezra Klien and Yglesias were blogging back and forth about “housing policy” and stating that Section 8 was a success, and I instantly felt the white hot hatred of a thousand suns for the arrogant pricks. 

 

So, you might imagine, I have a severe distaste for government meddling, cronyism, the arrogance of lilywhite liberals pushing notions of “diversity” that they themselves donÂ’t have to live with and never will, race hustlers, pro-criminal “compassion,” people who think that you can learn everything you need to know in the Ivy League, political correctness and the racism accusation club and so on and so forth – you know, your modern Democrat party. 

 

601 When I was the in the sixth grade I found the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in the back of my Social Studies book and read them. I remember thinking that sounds like a good way to do things and started becoming aware of all the ways we weren't doing it the way it was written. It was later in life that I realized a lot of Conservatives got it wrong just about as often as liberals. Too often the choice comes down to which version of statism you prefer. I generally despise them both as groups though there are individual exceptions.

602 Grew up in Massholechusetts, attended public schools, went to college (liberal arts) in NY , so yeah, I drank the kool-aid.  Became conservative as a result of working in IT from the 90s on.  Full of people (Soviet Jews, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Chinese, Ethiopians, etc.) whose families had come to the US fleeing communism.  Their vocal contempt for anything smacking of socialism/communism was a revelation to me.   

603 College.  More accurately, college students.  There was the corrupt student government that invalidated an election because the Mandatory Student Activity Fee was voted down.  There was the Blackworld student newspaper's racism against white people.  There was the Press student newspaper's Anti-Semitism.  There were the feminist's anti-male tirade.  The leftist students wereare all about hate.

604 The big differences between  a liberal and a conservative is that when a liberal visits the zoo they look at the apes and say its not right to keep our next of kin behind bars ata zoo while a conservative knows that darwin was a cracked urn and a fabricator as well

605 I really didn't know where my politics leaned until the 2000 election. I came across the radio during the Bush/Gore recount what I thought then a raving lunatic named Michael Savage. But the more I listened to him, the more I agreed with him. That's when I realized I am a conservative.

606

It hasn't been a single event for me as much as it is an ongoing process of seeing the natural versus the contrived and the imposed; altruism versus quid-pro-quo arrangements; and people who can give me sound, practical, principled advice rathen than telling me "what's good for me."

My life so far has been full of people who sought control of aspects of my life. They justified this ambition as knowing what was best for me. Certain levels of ignorance and compliance on my part buys me certain levels of privelege and security. I found this everywhere -- in family, at jobs, in social settings and with the most casual of acquaintances. They exist in the arena of government and public policy, too, and they're all on the left. Despite their claims of having my best interests in mind, it seems they only want that control over me and others, for whatever social, psychological or economic needs they seek to fulfill. I want nothing to do with any of them.

My life has also been blessed with a few people who have offered me guidance without accepting responsibility for my life or accountability for my actions. Here's the funny thing: These people are typically less close to me than the controlling people and have nothing to gain from my success, yet they take more satifaction and pleasure in my accomplishments.

There's never been that epiphany moment for me that showed me the two different sides and which one was right. It's been the compilation of maybe thousands of little things, and I still see both sides in action every day.

607 Trav @ 621 "^{In the meantime can somebody please explain pudding, honey badger, and sock puppet?} "

Pudding:
Something into which one dips one's balls, at moments of great triumphal delight, such as last November's election outcome. 
Honey Badger:
The ne plus ultra of indomitable predator mammals.  "Honey Badger don't give a shit" about hundreds of bee stings, cobra venom, larger predators, nothing.  NOTHING.
Sock Puppet:
Temporary fake identities adopted by comment-thread posters, usually for comic effect.  In fact, "Stoop Davy Dave" might not be my real name. 

608

I was never a leftist, always been a Republican and fiscal conservative.  My father was a doctor and very conservative.  He hated JFK, supported the war in Vietnam, and stuck with Nixon until the bitter end. 

I was pro-abortion in my youth though, and very pro-gay-rights.  I had a gay roommate for a while and ran with a gay crowd in college.  Most of them were apolitical, just having fun and partying a lot.  Later in the 1980s, when I had about 10 friends die of AIDS, including that former roommate, I changed my mind about the lifestyle. 

I think it was during the Clinton years that I realized that the Left was slowly corrupting American culture and morality with abortion, gay rights, sex education and contraception at younger and younger ages, etc.  Their goal is to distract us with consequence-free sex while they enslave us in spirit and economically.   They want us to think the ultimate moral value is "to be left alone" and "have control over our bodies."  They think while we're doing all this fucking we won't notice how they have fucked up our Republic, trashed the Constitution, destroyed the free market, and hooked millions to the government dole.

609 Spurwing @623, see my story at @547.
That was you, wasn't it?

610 595
My Dad used to boast that he was the only Catholic Irishman in America who voted for Nixon in 1960.  Couldn't stand Kennedy. He identified with Nixon's genuinely humble background.  Dad was a bear to live with the first week of  August in 1974.  Thought Nixon had been well and truly screwed by the media.

I remember him snarling about what a pass the Kennedy's got from the media.  And that was before any of us really knew the real facts.

Posted by: JFK's Adrenal Gland at April 22, 2011 08:31 AM (u+8qs)

Boy, can I relate to that!  My dad was not Catholic, he was Jewish, and the Jews hated Nixon as much as the Catholics did.  He got up and walked out of Temple one night while our stupid liberal Rabbi was yapping about Vietnam.  He bitched all the time about the Kennedys, and the fact that Old Joe was one of the biggest anti-Semites in history and a bootlegger.  He always thought Joe bought the election for JFK

611 I was raised in a politically leftist house, mostly because of my mother's very outspoken treehugging feelings-based liberalism.  My father was a libertarian sleeper agent, always instructing me in the ways of rigorous thought without overtly bringing up politics. 

The benefit of my mother's ways was that I was exposed to a great deal of other people, cultures, religions, and ways of living.

Unfortunately I was practically a commie until my last year of college, when three things happened that brought forth my father's subversive teachings in full power:  I started making enough money, not to survive, but to pay taxes.  While I struggled to pay for food and shelter, often skipping food to pay for rent, I just happened to live across the street from a subsidized housing project, where the "poor" lived extremely well on my dollar, yet had the funds to pay for high-end electronics, handbags, liquor, and drugs.  And still stole my clothes out of the laundry.  My liberal-instilled sympathy meter went all fubar. 

I often drove from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and the only radio station that would follow me the entire way was AM 600.  Without knowing it, I was listening to and agreeing with conservative pundits.  Especially on the immigration issue.  Having done some traveling overseas, I knew that no other country would let me waltz in and start making demands, yet somehow it was OK for Mexicans out of some strange sense of guilt.  My logic centers started to buzz with objections.

I happened to have an extremely racist roommate.  Who was black.  The good part of my upbringing, and my knowledge of biology told me that we're truly all more alike than different, yet here was someone who (although actually raised in Africa and who's parents immigrated in the 1980's) blamed me personally for the sins of my great-grandfathers (who had also immigrated after the abolition of slavery) because of the color of my skin.  A reasonable discussion could not be had, she refused to believe I could try to understand, and insisted on being treated like a perpetual victim, although she was an able-bodied and very intelligent woman, from a wealthy family, in a very tolerant part of the country, in one of the best schools in the nation, in a nation where success is always just at hand.  She was a victim.  Having had this up-close taste of victimhood, I began to notice it in lectures, in textbooks, and in other students.  The rational whispers of my father refused to let me buy the schlock these pushers were selling. 

During this time I was also fortunate enough to meet real victims.  A woman who, as a child, had hidden in a garden in Chile while her impolitic neighbors were forced into a trucks by men with guns, never to be seen again.  East Germans who displayed pieces of the wall in their living rooms, but still instinctively whispered about politics.  Rwandans, Ethiopians, Croatians, and Tibetans.  People who lived in dirt floored huts in their homelands, who lived with starvation and land mines, now running successful businesses and embracing the American Dream so ridiculed by those lucky enough to have never experienced the alternative.

Despite my mom's wackyness, I had been raised to value personal responsibility, and to see each other human as a worthy individual until proven otherwise.  My scientist's mind could not tolerate willful stupidity, and my value of responsibility could not tolerate those that would not even attempt to slough off the mantle of the victim, rather cocooning themselves in excuses and hiding from even the slightest discomfort that comes with the will to proverbially walk, rather than perpetually kneel. 

Thus, I am a conservative. 

612 I realized I was a conservative when John Kennedy ran for President and people of that day were pretty much like they are today... they were voting for the good-looking young man with the attractive wife.  No logic involved, just good-feelings and dreaming.  I was only 17 and too young to vote, but learned thinking must be involved in electing a President.  Dreaming is nice, but does not address real problems. I decided to be an adult.

613 I consider myself a libertarian, and if some of you talked to me you'd likely consider me a 'Libertarian.' Does that mean I actually want everything I stand for? I got my political stubbornness/purity from the NRA's stance on the 2nd amendment. The NRA knows it's a slippery slope so they desire NO infringement on the right to bear arms. Does that mean that the NRA actually thinks that anyone who can afford a 50 cal automatic, grenade launcher, tank, or even small arms bombs should be able to have them? Does the 'average' NRA supporter? Maybe we should start using 'nra' and 'NRA' to distinguish those who want 'sensible gun control' and no limitations at all. Given an inch here, compromise there, and soon you have a 2011 USA.

614 Early life experience always forms our views. For me it was being force bused into a black school for my own good. Explaining to Liberals that they had condemned me to having to fight off groups of three to ten Negroes on a daily basis for no other reason than the colour of my skin never seemed to click with them or how the latent, instinctive dislike for Negroes that the experience instilled in me was somehow "good" for me is a question which still vexes me to this day. Secondly, spending my late childhood in Carter's America pretty much sealed the deal.

615 Attention management, attention management:
Clean-up needed on aisle 631.

616 Al from Bay City's account was top notch. As a south side guy from Chicago, I know how the game is played.

617 this is a test,,,,before i answer the question, what made me a conservative.

618 I mentioned in a previous posting that I self-identified as a "liberal" when I was a teenager, in large part because I had no idea that the term itself had been corrupted by Marxists and their fellow travellers.  I thought a liberal, no joke, was someone like Thomas Jefferson.  In truth someone like him IS what the term originally referred to.  It wasn't until I was in my early 20's that I started to realize that the people who called themselves "liberals" had nothing to do with my understanding of the term, and could in fact be more accurately described as ANTI liberal.

Something else that I was confused about as a youngster was the political philosophy behind people like hippies.  I was born in 1972, and lived in a socially conservative upper middle class suburb of Nashville and in an equally well to do area in northern Virginia, so actual hippies were not something I ever saw, at least not in their 60's regalia.  But I did get to hear near-historical descriptions of the cover stories and propaganda that they created to describe their ideas.  Based on this, and without knowing anything, I assumed that their philosophy was libertarian in nature.  I know that sounds absurd today, but that is because we are wise not only to their lies, but the way that they twist language to promote those lies.

This goes back to something I mentioned before but didn't fully explain.  There are many people who think they are leftists, but really aren't.  They are "leftists" by default because that is what they have been spoon fed.  The euphemistic language that the left uses to promote its nonsense can, when you don't know what they are REALLY saying, be interpreted in a completely innocuous way.  The left uses terms to refer to the antonym of what that term actually means, with "liberal" being the most obvious example.  This is a key part of their deception and why their lies are so insidious.  Someone, particularly a young person, who is unfamiliar with the twisted meanings the left dishonestly imbues into words, can parrot their nonsense and think that they are saying something VERY different from what cognizant leftists actually mean when they says those things.  The left hides its lies by lying about the meanings of the words it uses.  This allows them to say one thing and really mean another.  Of course people do get wise to their deception, at which point they choose NEW words to lie about, and attempt to re-invent themselves as something else.  A perpetually emerging "New Left" will claim to believe in different ideas than their predecessors, when in fact Marxism is what ALL of them have always believed in and always will, they just abuse different parts of the dictionary to hide that fact.

This is why so many young people seem to be leftists.  It isn't that they're actually leftists in terms of their character, but that they haven't lived and experienced enough to realize the way that leftists abuse language itself to tell their lies.

It isn't that people tend to become more "conservative" as they grow older, but that they realize that the things they have always known and understood in their heart are more accurately described as conservative or libertarian.

619

  I'd always considered myself an "apathetic liberal," though 15 years ago a quiz told me I was "libertarian," which I assumed at the time meant liberal.
  I worked at a liberal weekly paper which was being bought out by a group of "conservative businessmen." I stuck by loyally, the idea of keeping alive an alternative news voice to the Big Daily Paper being more important than any partisanship.
The "conservative businessmen" turned out to be a big joke and ran the paper into the ground. They were "fringe bankers" -- loan sharks, bail bondsmen and crooked auto mechanics who never ran a straight biz. Mostly repubs with a few democrats, it would be more accurate to describe them as Dixiecrats.
  I had a mini-epiphany: Surely if half the country is conservative, they had to be smarter than these yahoos.
Some books that slowly turned me: "The Shadow University" about PC on campus (I live in a college town), books by Richard Mitchell about dumbing down of English departments, and some Horowitz stuff.
  In fact, I'd always been fascinated by the "dumbing down" of things since I was a kid (assuming it was the Evil Right Wing who wanted a stupid populace). With the internet and a voracious reading habit the last 10 years have opened my eyes. Early on, I would go down the Arts & Letters Daily blogroll and just read any and all sites, left or right. Over time I just went back to the sites that just made more sense. Plus, blogs came around, which I devoured.
  After voting for Clinton twice, I voted libertarian in 2000, being disgusted with politics AND media at the time.  9/11 definitely sped things up.  Here I thought was the liberals' perfect enemy: Anti-rational, misogynist fundamentalists. The cognitive dissonance in the liberals around me (and in the media) that followed was just astounding to me.  The more I read and tried to stay informed on issues, the more I noticed liberal arguments to be illogical/over-emotional and condescending, good intentions notwithstanding.
Tired of race being injected into everything.
Sick of the media talking to me like I'm a 9-year old. (I work in advertising, so I'm quick to recognize appeals to emotion, reason, etc.)
  Another eyeopener is just looking around today at the social ills from shitty/liberal childraising. MAJOR pet peeve.
  The odd thing is that over the years I really haven't changed much of my views. I'm still reluctantly pro-choice (but anti-Planned Parenthood), anti-PC, and so on. Quizzes still say I'm a moderate libertarian/centrist.
  But one thing's for sure -- I'll probably never vote democrat again.
Maybe I just grew up.

Kudos to Warden and Ace for providing this opportunity.
--Dr. Varno

620

Grew up in a conservative Catholic household where my father prides himself on having never voted for a Democrat. I always enjoyed engaging my dad in debate (playing devil's advocate) even though I agreed with almost everything he believed in. I just liked to stir the pot taking the other side ... just because it's fun to be rebellious. The problem with arguing for the other side is that  Liberalism always = oppression, hypocrisy & ideology. Conservatism always = logic, reality & common sense.  Common sense consevatism wins every time.

College didn't change my way of thinking as I became more of an outspoken proud rightwinger. Although I did have a moment where I might have been sympathetic & swayed to the pro-choice mindset only to realize the stupidity of that thought. Life was great & I really wasn't worried about my country. 911 happened, but I was confident that Bush would protect us.

Fast-forward to 2007-2008 I woke up thinking WTF is happening to my country? Who are these people ? WTF happened to the MSM? OMG while I was sleeping my country was being hijacked by the Left in every direction. How did this happen? How could I not see it? I can't let the next generation destroy this country. This was my wake-up call. So I immediately started to re-educate every intern that works at my company.

Thank God for Rush, youtube, blogs, FNC etc.the left can no longer get away with their lies.

Also, I am proud to say that the rest of my siblings have never voted for a Demonrat, as well as my nieces & nephews attending college. 

621

I was raised by a conservative. fought his philosophy for years. As a young las in the 70's , trying to be independent, began to realize how ludicrous organizations like NOW really were...they weren't fighting for my rights or ideals.   Quit wasting my time, and moved conservative in the early/mid 80's.

Never looked back.

  Am currently 'indoctrinating' the Wee Pitch. wish me luck.

 

 

622

Why was it 9/11 that broke the ice? Just wondering.

'Cause after 9/11, in the run-up to Gulf War 2, all the awful ugliness of the Left really came out into the light of day.

I'd never realized how much hatred there was for the USA, especially from the European Left, but also a not-insignificant amount of self-hatred from the home-grown lefties.

At the time, I wasn't really sure where I was politically, but I pretty quickly decided that I was on the side opposite those douchetools.

623

ok, my test worked...i am new here...i did not register...couldn't find a place to register.  my wife posts here a lot and this question fascinated her, so she asked me about it.  she knew i started out as a lib and luckily morphed into a conservative. the most important thing about your quesion is the fact you describe yourself as not having the ability to think the "other way"...you are not wired that way...your own description of your inabiltiy to think like libs do.  in a way you answered your own question. there are several reasons why i morphed to the "dark side".  but the biggest culprit of all is my ability to be introspective.  it is also the reason you already know the answer to your own question grass hopper...the fact that you have consciously attemtped to think like a lib, to understand the way they think so to speak, proves you have the gift of introspection.  it's so ironic you say you can't think like them, but you have made the attempt...this abiltiy to look inside and take your own moral temperasture.

and this my friend is the gift most liberals do not have.  luckily a few, like myself do look inside...and convince ourselves somewhere along the way we have been wrong.  liberals quite simply do not possess the greaest of all human traits...the good old gift of introspection.  they woud never ever return the favor and attempt to figure out how and why you believe the way you do...and due to this lack of simple human understanding they really are what they acccuse us of being.  they simply  do not possess that very imorptant element that drives the human's abiltiy to make real moral decsisons.  they are truly wired one way and there is no way out for them.  they can not question themselves..

at their very core, they take the  simplest and easiest way out...they are right and you are wrong..period...case closed....end  of story.  they love to uses the word nuance when describng us as the simpletons...makes  'em feel real good inside.  nuance is just another word for "rationalize" when they use it,  but they don't see it that way...they can't..

the great ronald reagan started me on my journey from die hard lib to conservative...the idea of lower taxes started appealing to me...and i was the biggest of libs believe you me...i was part of the class envy gang...but, in the end it was my own ability to take stock in myself and really listen to another point of view politically.   which brings us right back where we started..true libs just can't do that...their all consuming narcissism will not allow it...a psychologist told me once that the true narcisstic personaltiy can not be treated...there is just no way...

 

624

My grandparents were Russians captured by the Nazis and forced into slavery at a labor camp in Dusseldorf during WWII.  After the war it took 8 years for Didi to get him and his wife to the U.S., but he never quit trying and they finally made it.  Didi worked at a steel mill in Gary, IN for years and learned English on the job, Baba kept the house up and raised the girls.  After they retired Mom would take us kids to the grandparents' farm every 4th of July and Didi would get pleasantly drunk and sing "God Bless America" in broken English as loud as he could.  And then he would cry.  Tears for his family he left behind in Russia, and tears of joy at the miracle of living in this great country.

The 2 greatest things I learned from my Didi were (a) hard work leads to success in life, and (b) living in America is a gift from God.  And oh by the way, the U.S. Military kills Nazis and Communists so that's awesome too.

In high school I started "learning" things that I couldn't believe were true -- the military is evil, soldiers laugh as they stomp on babies, the U.S. is fundamentally flawed and needs fixing (lots of fixing), most Americans are ignorant racists (and don't even realize it!), poor people are oppressed victims of evil, racist Capitalist assholes, etc., ad nauseum.  Internally, I debated the bullshit coming from the aging, fat, former hippies who never did shit in their life except teach high school with the simple wisdom of my Didi.  Argument over.

The day I joined the Navy was the proudest moment for Didi.  It was so emotional for him and we cried together.  He told me it was honorable, and that word meant something.  It wasn't a throwaway compliment.  In contrast, my high school social studies teacher who marched on weekends with some fuckknob nuclear disarmament coalition called me a baby-killer, I shit you not.  Fuck her.

After all that, well, political persuasion was pretty much a foregone conclusion...

625

I grew up in a conservative household.  My mother's family had been hard-core Dems - her grandfather had been a big union sort and her mother and uncles and aunt were all Dems, and she had started out the same - even helped the Robert Kennedy campaign - but eventually hit a disillusionment point that she described as "you cannot solve problems by throwing money at them" and swung Right.  So by the time I was aware of politics my parents were both rabidly anti-Communist, and social and fiscal conservatives.  I didn't disagree really but I thought they were over the top in some of their views.

 

I went off to college, and flirted with the Left-mostly in the form of Feminism.  I'm a woman and all the emoting was fun, but a couple of things convinced me that Feminism was fatally flawed.  The disgrace of Packwood - and the fact that the feminists were defending this scumbag - apparently it's okay to mistreat an actual woman or two so long as you vote in a "woman-friendly" way?  And the Clarence Thomas hearings - I was expected to support Anita Hill, not because her story was consistent and believable, but because she was a woman.  The group-think, group-identity politics was just wrong.  Abortion too - I read a book discussing the ethics thereof and ended up with a very anti-abortion take on things, which is of course verboten.  Oh and the "Take Back the Night" march - take it back from who?  If you don't like something and want a change then you are  trying to shame the wrong-doer - as in civil rights marches against bad voting laws so the target is the lawmakers both politicians and voters, right?  But if you are unhappy with violence against women - who are you trying to influence with the march?  Rapists?  It was just so stupid.  Perhaps I should have realized it earlier because when polygamy came up in one of our sit-in-a-circle and discuss women's oppression classes I wondered out loud (now that I am thinking of this it must have been Heinlein's influence--I've always loved sci fi) why polygamy was necessarily oppressive to women - wouldn't it depend on the women?  If you are making your own money and have your own house, why not join up with other women friends and choose a man to be the father of your kids?  Stunned silence to that idea...

 

Anyway after I resolved that foray into Leftist thought and re-found my faith in God, I have just become more conservative and at this point most of what I read and discuss are all in the conservative/libertarian realm, except for what the popular culture inflicts on all of us, of course.

626 Wow lotta posters here! Too many to read, I read a good percentage but then gave up, I hope I don't beat a dead horse ... :-)

Excellent topic, Warden. Your example - the two kids with the McDonald's cookies - is a perfect retelling of The Ant and the Grasshopper.

My guess, however, is that a savvy liberal would turn this around on you, because this story as allegory is, to a liberal mind, narrow minded and misleading. Ergo ... (this is the devil's advocate point of view)

Jamie had rarely eaten cookies, much less been given a box. She didn't know anyone who would give her cookies, she had no way of procuring them herself. No, if she was going to get any cookies, she'd have to get lucky (win them in a raffle), be devious (trick someone into giving her cookies - if she were an adult and at least had looks she could marry into cookies, I suppose), or be a thief.

Hey, she could partner with The Hamburglar, come to think of it. :-) But seriously, think of the scene in Band of Brothers where the little Dutch boy is given some chocolate by the American soldiers - he'd never tasted it in his life.

Jeff, on the other hand, hadn't gone a day in his six years of eating solid food without being given a box of cookies. He didn't work for them, his mother gave him, gratis, a box every single day. With a bow on top.

So on this occasion, the mother gives Jeff a box of cookies. Not Jamie - just Jeff. It's not who you are, or what you know - it's who you know.

But then, recognizing Jamie's situation, she asked Jeff to share some of his cookies with her ... not all, not even more than half - just to share some of what he had.

This of course is just as simplistic and is misleading as well - and is a different scenario. Just a thought ... I'm as conservative as the next guy, but I realized long ago that two people can look through separate windows into the same house - they're seeing the same stuff, but from completely different angles. Hey, that's a fable, too: Blind Men and an Elephant, right? :-)

Cheers ... good topic!

627 I grew up relatively poor in a wealthy area. The rich kids were hyper liberal while my parents worked and I held odd jobs. They had total contempt for me, endlessly picked on for being poor and wearing hand me down clothes, yet they were the first ones to state that minorities should be allowed to have lower grades for admissions, more scholarships, etc.. When I pointed out that I was in need of scholarships, they laughed, my parents were obviously dumb morons and I didn't deserve to go to college. They were also horrible to the minorities in our school who I was closer since we lived together. They basically showed the contempt learned from their parents towards all those who were struggling for a better life, while at the same time criticizing those same people for being too stupid to realize they are champions for them. By the time I left highschool I hated anything liberal, funny thing is I didn't know dirt about democrats/republicans until years later when I picked up talk radio while working as a landscaper. Rush Limbaugh was saying what I have always dealt with and experienced and it dawned on me how so many of us are shut out of the mainstream by liberal ideology. One thing I have always experienced is, I have never met a hardworking, honest liberal in my life. Maybe they exist, but from my life, they are the epitome of cutting corners, getting theirs, taking credit and doing as little as possible while making the most noise.

628  I hail from a dying rust belt city and my parents, a couple of  '60s new left-ish types, depended on relatives in the democratic machine for their civil service and teaching careers. I reflexively voted democratic when I turned 18.  Then I spent a year of study abroad in a little village in a third world hell hole of a country.  Remarkable people there, but their living conditions were deplorable and unneccessary, the direct result of malign neglect from their "socialist" government.  After being in the village for about two months, I caught a ride to the capital with a group of short term academic tourists, who had visited the village for a couple of days and were heading back to the airport.  As we got to the capital's outskirts, a McDonald's appeared.  I could barely control myself w/ excitement at the thought of a QP w/ cheese.  But the academics, nearly in unison, began decrying American corporate imperialism which was destroying indigenous cultures.  They'd just spent two days in that shitty little village with condescending smiles on their faces watching people eat dirt, but they were able to screw up some real rage against a McDonald's.  By the time they dropped me off,  I was a conservative.

629 What made me a conservative/libertarian? Simple: my first paycheck.

630 I think this can all boil down to the simple rule of....All humans are born "liberal", they BECOME "conservative" By the grace of God.

631

Have been conservative all my life.  Why?

1. My dad always reminded me that "Government never does anything well and is always wasteful, ineffective, and ripe with fraud".

2. My mom always said to be sure the "horse comes before the cart".

3. Being a nurse I know that bleeding hearts bleed to death.

4. Knowing all the atrocities of communism.

5. Adopting my daughter.

6. The absolute experiment that is (has been) the USA compared to every other country that has, is, or will ever exist.

7. Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton

8. Every time that Obama says/said "We are going to fundamentally change the USA".  No political words have ever scared me more than those.

 

632 My college girlfriend was an Elementary Education major. Absolutely brainless but she sure could ... well... she's probably on top of her union by now.

633 Lurk-de-lurk,

I am liking your grampa.

634 Interesting how many people cite one particular incident that opened their eyes, while for others (like me) it was an accretion of events over the years.  As CJ #355 said, for too many who call themselves conservatives their "entire political philosophy hinges on the outrage of the day."  That's why I said (Sheila #261) so many of you have so far to go yet.  I find that Al's journey resonates with me more than many, yet Y-Not throws typically liberal shaming language like "pathetic bigot" when I mention being surprised and disturbed by the ghetto behavior I saw from the first Black students I met, or the utter uselessness of most Black foreign governments. 

Too many here (and at other movement conservative sites) are right liberals, shutting off thought and debate and comment if any particular tripwire is touched.  "Racist!" they shout.  If Al can move from typically angry-Black male victimhood to Rand Paul, surely some of you can open your minds just a bit and accept that there are other legitimate opinions, to the right of yours, without immediately screaming "Nazi!"

I strive to treat everyone I meet with a certain measure of courtesy, and I appreciate the same in return, or good service, or an educated individual, regardless of race.  By the same token, however, I have read and learned enough to be convinced of HBD (human bio-diversity) and the heritability of far more than most are willing to admit, particularly "g" (intelligence/IQ).  If one can inherit one's intellectual ability from one's family, and race is family writ large, than you connect the dots.  There is also such thing as a bell curve, folks, and I'm not throwing around terms like all or everyone.  I find Thomas Sowell a brilliant thinker and writer - period.  I like some things Alan West says and does, and I strongly disagree with others (his defense of affirmative action).  Too many of you cite West as the right's version of a "magic Negro," where he would seem perhaps merely a standard good guy were he White.  And for those whose instinct is to immediately throw out the standard response "My race is the human race," bully for you.  Go ahead and enjoy being a "citizen of the world," and I will continue to be an ethno-nationalist. 

Dagny, you had so many good comments - I love how you're raising your son.  My older one, too, has to learn the value of the dollar a bit more - he's working and in the National Guard (quit college because he's just not ready to settle down to that yet, despite his extraordinary IQ), yet he's more likely to get another weapon than buy himself food or gas.  Momma, you made some great comments about the standard airhead American woman of today, and then Ken made an excellent rebuttal by mentioning the "rich heritage of American women."  I blame feminism, in conjunction with leftism, for the airhead-slut combo that is so prevalent among today's females. 

Excellent and interesting comment thread, on the whole.  More, please.

635 I became a conservative witnessing President Reagan fix what Carter had screwed up. So much for the senile old actor the media portrayed. There is no longer a Reagan, but there is Ryan/Rubio 2012.

636 43 and 66, I read Orwell and Heinlein as a teen too They were big influences. I used to spout that re-distribute the wealth crap but deep down I think I always was conservative. As I get older I'm becoming more and more Libertarian in most things. How did I become Libertarian? Too many years of government meddling in my affairs. Now as a self-employed business owner I'm even more concerned by govt. meddling, so I'm even more inclined to be Libertarian.

637 Family has a long unbroken line of military service (like back to WWI), myself included.

National security is job 1 of the feral government, IMO, and the liberals of my adult lifetime suck at it, except as a diversion for a sex scandal.

My family (at least since immigration in the late 1800's) were never slaves nor slave owners. We have no sense of entitlement and no sense of debt owed to anyone but my family and children.  White guilt?  What for?

Parents instilled a strong sense of responsibility and integrity.  I have had a job since I was 14 and put myself through college and then some.

Agnostic although raised southern Baptist.  I respect a person's right to believe and express their beliefs.  I don't get bent out of shape when they do.  Those ninnies whining about separation of church and state and establishment are drama queens.  They can grow a spine or suck it.

Fiscal conservatism is my second priority and should be the second priority of the feral government.   But at the present, nobody seems to be that great an option.

638 Oh and I have shared this here before (in another thread).

I was once arguing a point with a liberal and pointed out how his argument contained a logical fallacy (be a rookie logic student at the time).  He called me Spock and merely replied that there was no such thing as logic.  Can't do much with that.

So I guess I am conservative, because I do believe that there is such a thing as logic, and because I believe that the highest form of human communication is logical argument.  I am a scientist after all.

639 @84 "But the intensity and hatred I have for the Left comes from those years in college being insulted and called a racist, sexist scumbag by these arrogant rich-bitch left-wing fuckers."

- - -

One of the best such stories I heard was from the wife who, at the time, was attending a leftist law school.  There was some poor sole lecturing her about how evil hunting was (she grew up on AK venison and salmon rather than beef and pork) and how immoral she was, while the chick was sitting there eating a chicken sandwich with her leather boots and handbag.

Another story I will never forget: Same law school; years later.  We had just finished watching a short film that was intended to have us discuss our differences about which of the three people/groups was more deserving of scarce charity resources (Vietnam vet with a drug alcohol dependency; a couple fallen on hard times with job loss and terminal illness; or a welfare mother with kids from three different fathers). 

You should have seen the look on the faces in the room when I spoke out against the thrice-knocked-up mum, because "she had done it to herself! Three. Separate. Times!"   

It became obvious to me that these folks have never really made any sacrifices in their lives.  They have never been hit with the reality of living paycheck to paycheck, working for every penny you have, or working for an asshole, because if you don't you don't eat.  And as a result, you get the whining and bitching after the return from the two weeks in Paris.  This is an obvious generalization with all faults that they bring. 

But still, I think that conservatism is more associated with reality of people living real lives, not the protected trust fund pseudo-realities where everyone else must be racist if they don't agree with you that affirmative action is a good idea.

640 @116 "Conservatism isn't just about being gung-ho to kick Muslim, or Communist, or whatever ass."

Nope. Them's the perks.

641

I became conservative in a four step process.

1.  I was raised by alcoholics and that taught me I had to be self sufficient, nothing was guaranteed for me.

2. My parents managed to pay for one semester of college by selling some of my Dad's guns.  After that they could not offer me any financial help.  The semester they paid for, I barely got Cs.  After that I had to work three jobs and take out student loans in order to go to college and later law school.  Once I had to pay for my own school, my grades went way up because it was my money I was spending.

3.  I converted to Judiasm, but strangely it made me more conservative and not liberal.  I could not believe that things that "liberals" said about Jews and Israel.  I truely had never been faced with bigotry until then.

4.  I thought I was a fiscal conservative, but liberal in every other way, until September 11th.  That was it for me, the transformation was complete.

 

642 You ask why 9/11? 

I cannot speak for others, but for me it merely cemented what my priorities were and what I thought the priorities for .gov should be.  It did not create anything that was not already there - for me.

I spent my young adult life in the military, watching clinton squander the peace dividend and cut loose many career-oriented military men, because it was politically expedient.  I was fairly apolitical at the time, though I was reading books by Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Bertrand Russell out of personal interest.  At about that time I had stumbled upon libertarianism almost by accident when I picked up Reason magazine back in the '90s.  When I met my wife to be in the late '90s and described my political persuasion as libertarian, she looked at me in horror and cautioned in hushed tones that perhaps I was not aware of what that meant.  She felt I was more of a conservative. 

However, since my early days with libertarianism, I had always bemoaned the problems inherent in the two-party system.  In 2000 I voted Nader mostly as a token statement of this displeasure.  Then 9/11 happened. And like many others, I am sure, it rocked my world for several weeks (and still does) and made me reevaluate my priorities at the time.  Never again!

As an aside, I find it curious that military life, on the inside, is often what I view life to be under the most perfected of liberal utopia's.  No slight to the military.  But it has your top-heavy caste system where the superior has absolute authority to determine your fate and most if not all associated aspects. And people are expected to be part of the collective rather than an individual.  On one particularly long patrol (submarine) I was reading 1984 and listening to Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger.  You could not create a better mental stimulation to nurture the loathing of the state that Orwell had envisoned.  That, more than anything, was probably the defining moment that breathes life into my aversion to strong federal control and big government that seems to be central to all the liberal fantasies.

643

For me it was a long and winding journey from liberalism to conservatism. I grew up with liberal Democrat parents, went to a liberal liberal arts college replete with liberal ivory tower professors, and lived in liberal San Francisco, all of which made me reflexively associate liberalism with intelligence, tolerance, and compassion. Finally, after 20 years of being an adult, I had to allow myself to acknowledge what I had seen rather than what I had been told: the leftist compassion for the less fortunate is more often than not driven by guilt or envy and hatred of the more fortunate, the leftist intelligence is more often than not driven by naive and egotistical notions of elitist utopianism, and the leftist tolerance is more often than not a one way street driven by hedonism and moral relativism.

644 Oh, and conservative chicks are smarter, and by extension, teh hot!

645 For me, it is because I hate black people, and because I like to bite the head off of orphan babies.  And since conservative are keen on killing muslims all over the planet, it keeps hell stocked with fresh soles. So gotta support the cause and stuff.

646 The one thing I see in the comments is that Liberal is nothing whatsoever to do with liberterianism looking at the Dems they are libertines, it is a socialist agenda with absolutely now morals at all. Perhaps the nail in their coffin would be to promote the real meaning of Liberal, dont get me wrong, Im free market all the way.

647 Grew up in a union household and just sort of adopted the leftist views of the rest of my family (I'm the youngest of 6 kids). I basically assumed that anyone who thought differently was just evil and selfish. The first inkling of my future conversion to the right was deciding to join the Air Force after high school, which totally baffled my family. But it wasn't until a few years after my four-year hitch ended, when I took a job driving a delivery truck and discovered talk radio, that I began to really examine the political stances that I previously just took for granted. Rush was a big part of it, but the guy who really opened my eyes was a WXYT (Detroit) talker named Mark Scott, whose show aired just before Rush's. That dude was amazing. He introduced me to Ayn Rand, Spooner, Hayak, Mises and Austrian economics in general. He kick started my conversion from basically a socialist to libertarian.

648 I was raised by parents who never met a Democrat they didn't like (Depression era parents). Had to watch the Nixon-Goldwater debates in fifth grade and to their GREAT disappointment, I voted for Nixon in the fifth-grade mock election.  We discussed politics in our household and they couldn't refute my arguments.  Forced busing, druggies in my hometown, and the anti-military Vietnam years just cemented my conservatism.
Listened to Limbaugh back in the early days when he first went national in the late- 80's early-90's.  When he was FUNNY.
Parents are STILL Democrats, but in the end, they raised three kids to be staunch conservatives.  They still can't figure that one out.

649 @519 May God forgive me: I can do no else.

650 The thing is that most honest people seem to be conservative, not in the political sense but the value sense, I argues long and hard with my bosses brother when I was in my late teens he was rabidly socialist, a student/unemployed and lived in a squat, he later got a well paid job, that converted him quick smart!

651 I converted in stages stage one: the realization that some on "my side" were hypocrites.

I was a hippie kid, a little young to be a full-blown freak but an aspirant. I did the drugs, I read Rolling Stone (when it was a newspaper without staples) I saw Jimi Hendrix live and hitchhiked everywhere and all my friends were freaks with black-lights and day-glo posters. Politically I was a default leftist but I knew nothing - looking back I was a parrot of whatever was cool to believe. But to those who weren't there, things weren't nearly as politicized as they are today. It's actually much worse now. I remember getting all worked up about the Kent State shootings but that was about it. I was more interested in music, drugs and women.

In an effort to straighten my life out I joined the merchant marine. I had to go to a union school. They did some real indoctrination about how great unions are and I recognized it as such, but it didn't faze me much politically. They cut my hair and marched me around military-style along with all the other trainees. No problem. I was shipped out from San Francisco. I had a free night, and I'd never been there so I went to the renowned Fillmore West to see the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. This had to be around 1970. I was in the foyer in between shows, crew-cut and wearing my union-issued jacket with the letters SIU (Seafarers International Union) on the back, knowing no one and feeling a little out of place, when some hippie, straight out of central casting - long hair, handlebar mousestash, fringe jacket and bell bottoms, started mocking me publicly for having short hair. I forget what he said exactly, I was shocked and embarrassed. I left. As I did he said "Yeah, Southern Illinois University creep " or some such thing. That was when I realized that some of these people were real nasty hypocrites.

652 Great posts everyone by the way! I read every one.  Some are really compelling stories. I wish I had time to continue writing about my journey and hope this thread stays alive.

653 @438

Good on you Dagny.   Stick with it, make him own his mistakes and his successes and he will thank you for it in the end.  Bail him out once, and you've taught him there are no consequences to his actions.  I have met many people in my day who have dropped out, pissed away scholarships, etc. because they were not serious.

I wish you and him the best, and hope that you can get through to him.

654

Raised by two conservative parents. My mom took me and my siblings to church every sunday. But truly became conservative around 28, yes still lived at home with mom and dad and grateful for every day spent with them. Listened to Rush with my mom over morning coffee before work, and realized how much I owe this great country.

655 Based upon my experiences, I have found that conservatives are much nicer people. They are usually very all-inclusive, and are less prone to bouts of, "So, where did you do your undergrad" comments. Living in the Bay Area really showed me the hypocrisy of the left. I'd go out to dinner with so-called liberals friends, you know those people that claim to be for the little guy, and they would make fun of the waitress. These are people that vote their "social conscience" but then look down on people that do not have the trappings of wealth or status - or education. If a person didn't go to the right college then they were a loser. It really bothered me because I had made my conversion by this point in time; however, I never forgot it. It would appear that being a liberal Dumbocrat means never having to say you are sorry. Somehow, they must think they are forgiven their snobbery and shallowness because they pull the lever for the liberal left. I am sure there is a special ring of Dante's hell for people like this.

656 I have a self-employed friend who says the way to make everyone in this country conservative is to end payroll tax withholding.  He says if everyone was made to write a tax check to the government every quarter the the Democrats would go the way of the Whigs inside five years.

657 Caring about my family

658 Parliament of Whores by P.J. O'Rourke did it for me.  50 cents at a garage sale. (Sorry, P.J.)  Its a side-splitting conservative manifesto:  "Giving money & power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."  That ought to be carved over the door of every government building in Washington America.

659 @678

We'll take them too.

660 Interesting to read all the stories (or at least skim them.)

I have to admit I have some extra admiration for the black folks who converted from left to right-wing. Anyone who comes from a lefty family has to endure some non-trivial pain if they become conservative - but black people have to endure that whole "race traitor Uncle Tom" attack which seems especially vicious. I imagine conservative Jews have some similar issues -- although there are now many prominent conservative Jews, and the Prime Minister of Israel is himself a huge right-winger. And Irish Catholics back in the 60s had some of this, but now there are tons of Catholic right-wingers now and have been for decades

My girlfriend in my early 20s was black and her family didn't like that I was white, but they really didn't like that I was right-wing. She was a smart, insanely attractive artsy hippie black chick who did yoga and nude modeling for the art school and dug smart, geeky white dudes. And at the time I looked and dressed like a lefty, and was in a band, so I guess I tricked her. Eventually she married a left-wing dude who looks like a quarter black version of me - he makes Obama look like Wesley Snipes. They do very well since he is very smart, and a dream Affirmative Action candidate.

Not sure why her family hated me so much. Partly because they were big into the whole "we're black victims" thing (even though she wasn't). I don't remember saying or doing anything rude to them, but my body language probably just made it clear I didn't buy it. At the time my roommate was the son of a Chinese immigrant who escaped Mao's Cultural Revolution (his dad literally escaped from a collective farm in the middle of the night when the older folks started dying, he was young and still had some strength and decided to give it a shot rather than just starve to death where he was. He managed to scavenge in the countryside and eventually made it to the coast and Hong Kong, and eventually America.).

And I knew Russian immigrants whose families had basically been slaves back in Siberia. So my sympathy for - "pity me, my family was enslaved 150 years ago"- was pretty small since I personally knew people whose family were enslaved, not 150 years ago, but 20 years ago. It wasn't their great-great-great-grandfather -- it was their father forced to work on a farm against his will. It just was in China and Russia instead of Alabama.

661 My friends Dave and Cathy brainwashed me into being a conservative after I voted for Al Gore in 2000. It was easy to brainwash me since I was a liberal. Reading President Reagan's "In His Own Hand" radio addresses from the late 70's (published after he was President) sealed the deal for me.

662 Awesome testimonies; I'm still reading through them all. I know I'm late to the party but been on vacation (and still am so bear with me as I try to type via a phone), but I too wish to share. Growing up in the 60s/70s, I remember hearing the concept of justice being blind and that resonated for me as the only true and fair method. But then I'd hear politicians talk of preferencial treatment for certain groups or special classes and knew that was bullshit and violated the very core of what they said they sought for those groups. Something cannot be made more fair by making it less fair for someone else.

663 In high school I learned to hate myself; in college I learned to hate my country. Hence, I was a rabid radical liberal. As I matured and gained a sense of responsibility, accountability, and accomplishment, I didn't hate myself so much anymore. And as I saw more of the world and read more history and started to appreciate the unique place our country holds in place and time, with its liberating ideals of limited and self-government, I didn't hate my country so much anymore. Hence, I became a conservative.