Why I don't trust the Democrats anymore

Trump is bad, but if you look closely, the Democrats are WAY worse.

In 2016 I was angry that Trump won. In 2020 I was relieved that Biden won. And in 2024 I was relieved that Trump won.

I didn’t vote for him — I would have had a guilty conscience voting for him, because he is the single biggest asshole in the history of the human race.

But over the past 8 years, the colossal corruption, hypocrisy, and stupidity of the Democratic Party has become more and more obvious to me.

How to read this article

I have a folder on my computer called “How People Feel”. Anytime somebody expresses some strong emotion about something in a social media post, I’ll take a screenshot and add it to this folder.

From my “how people feel” folder

I keep this folder because I’m a marketing copywriter by trade. Marketing copywriters sell stuff for a living. And if you want to sell stuff effectively, you need to know how people feel.

People make decisions with their feelings, including buying decisions. People don’t buy insurance to be prudent, they buy insurance because they’re scared of losing their house or their car or their life savings. People don’t buy sports cars to go from point A to point B, they buy sports cars to feel more masculine and because they think it will make the people around them love them. Et cetera.

Same goes for voting decisions. If you’re choosing to vote for Trump or Kamala Harris, you’re not gonna look at their platforms or compare them based on what they’ve said on “the issues”. You’re gonna choose based on how they make you feel.

If you have a visceral reaction to Trump and he makes you feel unsafe, you’ll vote for Kamala. If you’re mad at the world and you want to shake things up, you’ll vote for Trump. If Trump makes you feel squeamish but the Democrats make you angrier (like in my case), you probably won’t vote, and if you do vote, you’ll vote for Trump.

You might justify your decision to yourself afterwards with reason. “Trump is a convicted felon, so I voted for Kamala.” “The woke mind virus is out of control, so I voted for Trump.” But that “reason” comes from primitive emotions buried deep within your subconscious mind.

(You can argue about whether people are stupid for making decisions that way, but that’s beside the point. People DO make decisions that way. Even the people who think they make decisions “rationally”. Saying you want humans to make decisions with reason instead of emotion is like saying you want humans to poop out of their mouths — it’s just not how we work biologically.)

If you’re the Democratic Party, then you (hopefully) want to reform yourself to appeal to people like me so you can win the presidency back in 2028. In that case, look at this article the way you would look at a focus group. You might not agree with everything I’m saying, but if you can understand how I feel, it’ll help you put a better marketing message together next election cycle to win back swing voters like me.

Over the past 9 years the Democrats have completely failed to listen to anybody outside of their own echo chamber. Except for Joe Biden a little bit in 2020 — that’s part of the reason why he won. If you guys want to be taken seriously by the rest of the country, you need to burst your bubble and start listening to people like me again, even if you don’t agree with me.

Anyways. Without further ado. Here is why I am mad at the Democrats.

Social Justice

A lot of people have a visceral reaction to social justice. They can’t tell you why it’s wrong, but deep in their gut they know there’s something wrong with it.

I am one of those people. I never really trusted it, even before I knew how to argue against it.

I went to left-leaning schools where social justice was popular. I always thought people who put a huge emphasis on saying their pronouns and not offending minorities were being dumb. But I went along with it because I didn’t want to get cancelled.

I had a teacher my Senior year of high school who caught wind that I thought social justice was bullshit, and she tried to indoctrinate me into believing in it. She was constantly telling me about how oppressed women and people of color and gay people were. She gave me homework assignments where she made me “question my straightness”.

She also had me read a Ta-Nahesi Coates book, Between The World And Me. Between The World And Me read to me like an angry rant.

Coates had some interesting stuff to say, and it helped me to understand how he and other Black Americans felt about race relations. But Coates did not offer a single positive solution in the book that would actually help Black people. He was just trauma dumping. (Just like the author of this article is doing right now! Haha. You can call me a hypocrite if you want.)

Coates led off Between The World And Me by talking about a white woman who gave him a funny look. In Coates’s mind, getting a funny look from a woman must be racism! He never considered that the woman might simply have been having a bad day, or she might have been an asshole who hated everybody, or she might have just been socially awkward. In Coates’s mind, every funny look he gets from white women means racism.

The book got even weirder after that. Coates said that he felt America deserved 9/11, and that police officers should allow themselves to be killed by black criminals so that those black criminals can get a fair trial.

(I read that Coates was given a MacArthur “Genius” award. Some genius!)

Later that year I read this article written by a gay Republican. He said that people judged him a hundred times more for being a Republican than they did for being gay. The comments section was full of angry liberals telling him that he was wrong: he was, actually, as a matter of fact, counter to his own lived experience, more oppressed for being gay than for being a Republican.

I heard about angry riots happening at University of California, Berkeley, about a mile away from where I grew up, when Milo Yiannopolous came to speak. They wouldn’t even let the dude talk. As opposed to the ‘60’s, when UC Berkeley had angry riots in favor of freedom of speech.

Before I started college, I was asked to read a fantasy novel that was full of extreme left-wing values. The values were so obvious that they made the book hard to read, even though the plot was really interesting.

The author of the book came to my school and delivered an angry speech about how there weren’t enough Black women in video games. Then she came to a class I was in the next day and delivered another angry rant, where she said that she did experiments where she deliberately bumped into people on the street.

Then a conservative speaker was scheduled to visit the campus. The Student Union released a statement where they made baseless attacks on the speaker’s character, quoting him out of context to deliberately change the meaning of his words. My memory fails me but I believe the speech ended up being cancelled.

Fast forward to 2020 when the Black Lives Matter riots were taking place. I listened to one of my favorite sports podcasts, where they had a Black friend of theirs on to “talk about what was going on in America”.

He said that the riots, looting, and violence were completely justified. In his view, all White Americans did not deserve property rights as long as a few hundred Black people per year were getting killed by police officers. The hosts of this podcast, men who I normally respected, agreed with their guest and told him how wise he was.

I kept giving the social justice people a chance. They kept saying that I needed to “educate myself on their perspective”. So I kept reading their books and listening to them talk, hoping that if I just understood them a little bit better, I would get it.

Needless to say, I never “got it” — today I think social justice is a moral dead end, and there’s nothing to “get”.

The final nail in the coffin

This is gonna sound completely irrational — and it is irrational. I try to be a rational person, but I’m a person, and some things get me emotionally riled up — like, for example, American football.

So the final nail in the coffin for me was when Jon Gruden, the head coach of my NFL team the Raiders, got forced to resign because of politically incorrect emails he had written 10 years prior.

I didn’t like the emails, but I felt prepared to forgive Gruden for them and move on. The vast majority of Gruden’s former players felt the same way. A number of them have spoken publicly in his favor, while to my knowledge only one (a paid ESPN host) has said anything bad about him.

Regular people supported Gruden. But the media turned on Gruden, so Gruden was out. He hasn’t coached in the NFL since then.

What really made this sting is that it clearly wasn’t justice. The NFL collected over 65,000 emails in the investigation of the Washington Redskins. It’s widely believed that those emails contain massive evidence of much greater wrongdoing. Only 6 of them were leaked — and all 6 of them made Gruden look bad.

The NFL obtained these emails in June, when no NFL games are played. Someone — most likely the NFL — held onto these emails in October, then leaked them in the middle of the NFL season. The leaks begun while the Raiders were in first place in their division.

So they clearly weren’t doing this out of a sense of justice or a desire to root “racists” out of the NFL. (You can’t convince me that Gruden’s emails were the only bad emails in those 65,000.) This was a deliberate attempt to hurt Jon Gruden and/or the Raiders.

After this, I realized what social justice really is. Social justice is not a genuine attempt to make the world safer for underprivileged people. Social justice is a weapon. It’s a weapon that powerful people use to destroy their enemies’ reputations and protect their power.

The social justice people purport to be kind. They claim they’re good people trying to make the world a better place. But when you peel back their masks, you can see their dark side pretty easily.

More from my “how people feel” folder. When you peel back the masks on the Democrats you can see that they aren’t actually kind people. They’re mean and hateful.

The social justice people have achieved nothing for women, minorities, or gay people in the last 15 years. (If anything, they’ve stoked racial tensions even further!)

They’ve also created an intellectual climate where everyone is afraid to tell them how wrong they are, even when they’re wrong enough to hurt innocent children.

Take the trans issue. Some people legitimately have gender dysphoria, and I have no problem with adults who want to transition, take hormones, have surgery, be referred to by their chosen set of gender pronouns, et cetera.

But the social justice people want you to think that if a 14-year-old questions their gender identity even slightly, they should start taking puberty blockers and get irreversible surgeries at age 14 — even though most people who question their gender at age 14 grow up to identify as the gender that corresponds to their biological sex.

If you tell them, hey, maybe 14-year-old kids shouldn’t be getting irreversible elective surgeries, they’ll call you a bigot and try to get you fired from your job.

A healthy culture would just forgive Jon Gruden and move on. Nobody is perfect and everybody makes mistakes. Pretty much every major world religion has some mechanism for forgiving sinners, because if you don’t forgive sinners, you eventually run out of people in your good graces.

But social justice cannot forgive. The whole point of social justice is to destroy people’s reputations and create a culture of fear where you can’t say anything against its agenda. If social justice forgave people, it would lose its power.

I think by now most people have realized that social justice is not actually trying to make the world a better place. Social justice about virtue signaling. It’s basically a status game where you get points and climb the social ladder by trumpeting more and more extreme versions of social justice values, ideas, and policies. Even if those ideas and policies have disastrous real life consequences. (More on that later.)

The Media

It was fairly clear to me in 2016 that Donald Trump shouldn’t be the president, because he was an asshole.

If the left wing media stuck to calling Donald Trump an asshole, I would have taken them seriously. Instead, they tried to call him a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, and a whole slew of other extreme sounding terms that they couldn’t really back up.

They tried to call Donald Trump a racist for banning Black people from his dad’s apartment buildings 50 years ago, on the orders of his dad. And for making a bad joke one time about not wanting to hire a black accountant. I smelled a rat.

I remember MSNBC trying to say that Trump was illiterate. I remember them getting psychologists on to say that Trump was mentally unstable. I remember them criticizing him for every little thing he did, from cutting taxes to playing too much golf.

The left will find any excuse to complain about Trump, even saying that he plays too much golf.

Every single day, the left wing media had some new, even more preposterous story about Donald Trump. Eventually I started tuning them out.

Then in early 2021, I read Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk. I didn’t have an opinion of him before that, but after reading Vance’s book I thought the dude was a hero. He took his huge fortune from PayPal and risked it all on 2 business ventures that were incredibly unlikely to succeed, just because he thought having viable electric cars and space travel was crucial for humanity’s future.

That’s the Elon Musk I read about in Ashlee Vance’s book, that’s the Elon Musk who goes on the Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman podcasts, and that’s the Elon Musk who longtime Tesla and SpaceX employees talk about. That’s also the Elon Musk that the left supported up until about 2019.

If you watch the news, you’ll hear about a different Elon Musk — a fictional supervillain whose life is based loosely on the real Elon Musk. This fictional supervillain wants to turn America into a fascist dictatorship.

This fictional version of Musk seized control of Tesla in a hostile takeover after the company already had become successful, then became rich by stealing the ideas of his employees.

They get you to believe this by saying that Elon Musk “didn’t found Tesla”. This is technically true: Musk joined Tesla 6 months after it was founded. The “founders” of Tesla spent those 6 months looking for investors. Around the same time Musk decided to start an electric car company. His friend told him, “you should team up with these other guys who are starting an electric car company” — and so he did.

The media’s version of Elon Musk grew up in lavish wealth, and had everything handed to him as a child. They paint this picture by saying that Elon Musk’s dad “owned a diamond mine”.

They don’t mention that Errol Musk’s net worth fluctuated throughout Musk’s childhood, and that he did not actually buy his half of the diamond mine he owned until Musk was in high school. They do not mention that Musk was violently bullied as a kid. They also do not mention that Musk did not take any money from his parents when starting his companies, and that he slept in his office and showered at the YMCA while starting his first company to save his limited money.

Elon Musk, a socially awkward tech founder who the left wants you to think is a literal Nazi.

This version of Elon Musk is a hard core MAGA Republican who wants to turn America into a fascist dictatorship, even though he voted for Obama twice. 2 years ago he said on Twitter that Trump should “ride off into the sunset”. And that on the Lex Fridman Show in August 2024, when asked about why he was working with the Trump campaign, he said something along the lines of “sometimes we have to work with people we don’t like”.

As I write this, the media is trying to tell us that Elon Musk deliberately did a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. Even though Elon Musk would have absolutely nothing to gain by deliberately doing a Nazi salute. In fact, even if Elon Musk was actually a closeted Nazi, he would have nothing to gain by deliberately doing a Nazi salute!

I’m not going to say that I agree with everything Musk has done over the past 2 years. He’s made some horrible content moderation decisions at Twitter. His ties to China make him incredibly untrustworthy, especially for a role in government.

But the way the left-wing media is treating him is absurd. They’ve made up lie after lie about him in order to get stupid people angry enough to click on their articles. If you read between the lines, you can see that the journalists are the real bad guys, not Musk.

And they don’t do this to Trump and Musk — they’ll do it to anybody. Media outlets have posted dozens of negative stories about Dave Portnoy and his company Barstool Sports. If you ask Portnoy’s employees, former employees, business partners, former business partners, and anybody else who’s been close with him, they’ll all tell you that Portnoy is a good guy. Even the ones with no reason to lie. But if you ask the left wing media, they’ll tell you that Portnoy is literally the devil.

The worst came in late 2021, when Business Insider published a story that Portnoy had sexually assaulted 2 women. They said that they had been working on the story for 8 months, and that they had interviewed every single woman in Portnoy’s life to put the story together. Translation: they talked to as many women Portnoy had known as they could get their hands on until they found the only 2 who were willing to speak ill of him.

The Insider piece on Portnoy was dropped the day that Penn National Gaming, Barstool Sports’s parent company, had an earnings report due. And somebody took out a massive short position against Penn National Gaming the day before.

I don’t follow the news closely. But anytime I see a news article and think, “hmm, that seems wrong”, and then I look into the full story, I invariably find out that yes, the news article is completely wrong.

For example, after Trump talked about Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating dogs and cats, the media came out with tons of stories saying “there have been no credible reports of people eating pets in Springfield.” What they don’t mention is that people did, in fact, go to town hall meetings in Springfield and complain that Haitian immigrants were eating ducks from the park. And that a woman elsewhere in Ohio had eaten somebody’s pet. Trump wasn’t lying, he just got some details mixed up.

The left wing media never outright says something false. But they still find clever ways to lie to you. Read anything they write, then do 15 minutes of Google searching, and you’ll probably find something they’re not telling you that completely invalidates the whole narrative they’re trying to push.

California

At this point you might be saying, “sure, Theo, I agree with everything you wrote so far, but what does that have to do with the Democratic Party? These are just a few extremists within the party — the Democrats as a whole are still better than Trump, right? Surely Kamala Harris would still be a better president than Donald Trump, right?”

I don’t think so. I’ve seen what has happened to my home state of California over the past 5 years.

In 2020 I walked down Figueroa Avenue in Los Angeles, from Century Boulevard all the way downtown. Figueroa Avenue goes through some shady areas. But in 2020 I didn’t see anything that bad.

In 2024, I walked down Figueroa Avenue in Los Angeles, from Century Boulevard all the way to the Staples Center. I almost got shot by some guy out of his mind on drugs spinning a gun around in his hand like it was a toy. I also saw dozens of dirty-looking prostitutes standing on street corners.

I remember walking through a touristy area of San Francisco in 2020, months after the Black Lives Matter riots. Dozens of businesses had wooden boards over their windows.

In California they do not prosecute petty crimes anymore. You can go to a store and steal stuff, and nothing bad will happen to you. Because the Democrats who run the state are afraid of getting criticized for “harming minorities” if they enforce the law.

Social justice isn’t just some fringe left-wing ideology. Every single Democrat has to kiss the social justice people’s asses, even when the social justice people are obviously wrong. Otherwise, the social justice people will destroy their careers.

The result is that the Democratic Party’s policies are completely out of touch with reality. For example, if you do not prosecute petty crimes, people commit more petty crimes. This is why every single place in the world prosecutes petty crimes — except for places like San Francisco, because they’re too afraid of being called “racist”.

I’m a digital nomad, and I travel the world full time. In the past 5 years I’ve been to over 20 countries. And other than really dangerous places like Peru and Colombia, the place where I feel the least safe in the entire world today is San Francisco.

If you gave me a choice between going for a walk by myself at night in Mexico City and going for a walk by myself at night in San Francisco, I would choose Mexico City, and it wouldn’t even be close.

California democrats are not just stupid when it comes to crime. They’re also stupid when it comes to economics.

Last year, the state of California passed a new law that raised the minimum wage for fast food workers to $20 per hour, which is almost certain to cause layoffs and put people out of work. For some reason no one can explain, there was an exception for fast food companies that also had “bakeries”, which as of the passing of the law included only Panera Bread. Coincidentally, one of Gavin Newsom’s campaign donors owns many Panera Breads.

They do the exact same thing with real estate. The real problem in California is not that wages are too low — wages are higher in California than anywhere else in the country. The real problem is that the cost of living is too high. They shouldn’t try to fix poverty by raising the minimum wage, they should try to fix poverty by lowering the cost of housing.

They should just build more housing, because that’s how you bring down pricing. It’s basic economics: increase supply, price goes down. But anytime they try to build new housing, all the “progressive” landowners in California rally against it because it would hurt their property values. (“Progressive” people stop being progressive once it hits them in the wallet.)

In California, the Democrats have no opposition. They can do whatever they want. They can pursue their agenda with impunity. And under Democrat rule, California has become a terrible place to live.

I judge political parties by their results, not their intentions. You can say whatever you want about how bad the Republicans are — but states controlled by Republicans are good places to live. States controlled by Democrats are overwhelmingly not good places to live. That’s why people have been moving out of Democrat-controlled states to Republican-controlled states en masse.

Should we really put the same idiots who run California in charge of the whole country?

A brief conclusion

Every so often in American history, the parties switch sides. During the Civil War, the Democratic Party defended slavery. Then 100 years later, they fought for civil rights.

Most people miss the evolution of these parties’ values over time. Like the frog boiling on the stove, they don’t notice the change. If the Democrats were the good guys when you were growing up, you probably think they’re still the good guys today.

I don’t think the Democrats are the good guys anymore. They always had their issues, but over the past 9 years, their corruption, hypocrisy, and stupidity has become obvious to everyone willing to see it.

I really hope the Democrats can get back to being the party of honor, kindness, and compassion, like they at least sort of were when Obama was president.

But today, the Democrats are the party of corruption, hypocrisy, censorship, and stupidity. The Republicans are terrible, and the Democrats somehow managed to be even worse.

I hope they get their heads out of their asses soon.

Hey! Thanks for reading.

A note to my long-time readers: I’ve got tons of stuff going on this year, so until further notice I’m only doing an article every other Monday. I hope I can get back to doing 3–4 a month for y’all soon, I really enjoy writing them, but I have to make some sacrifices right now so I can focus on making money!

If you’re new around here, welcome! My name’s Theo. Most of my articles aren’t political rants, so if you only wanna hear about politics, I’m not the Substack for you. I write more about human psychology and long-term trends in society.

If you want a taste of that, you can check out this article:

If you want to read more about American politics, then first of all, what’s wrong with you? Go touch grass! And second of all, if you really want to, you can read this article:

You can also hit the purple “subscribe now” button below:

Happy trails!