How a liberal became a conservative

In reply to the entry, “What happened to a Good Samaritan who failed to heed John Derbyshire’s ‘racist’ warning,” John Dempsey writes:

About thirty years ago a friend and I were fishing off the old Dumbarton Bridge on San Francisco Bay, or a half-mile portion of what remained of the old draw bridge. When we were leaving for the night around 2:00am, I spotted a person lying in the middle of the road as we approached him in our vehicle. I began to slow down. Immediately, my friend told me, “Don’t stop.” Afraid that I might not be able to avoid hitting the person, I began to slow down anyway. I then spotted three black men come up from the side of the bridge and onto the road from where they had presumably been hiding. As I sped up the person in the middle of the road did a barrel roll out of my path.

My friend had lived in the area for a number of years and knew well Derbyshire’s point (10h). Myself, a young man from small town USA, might well have ended up bloodied and beaten, or worse, were it not for his savvy. The lesson of that evening went unlearned as I remained a clueless liberal for almost another twenty years. It required 9/11 to awaken me to reality.

After that day in September 2001, knowing nothing of Islam, I began to study it. What I found was obvious to anyone but the liberals, and George W. Bush. When he made the statement that Islam was a great religion of peace, and that the attacks had enraged Muslims all across the world when they were actually dancing in the streets on that day, it put me over the edge. I thought: how can anyone, especially the President of the United States, say such things? What is it in their worldview that would convince them of this? That’s when reality began coming together and when liberalis ultimately became discredited to me. I realized then that there are things in this world which are inherently incompatible with each other and that if we were to survive as a nation, we must look to our past and begin anew to act in a discriminate manner in all our affairs.

I found VFR right around the time that you took it over from Mr. Kalb and have been reading you both ever since. Today, the deeper I travel into conservative thought, the more truth I seem to uncover. Thank you for what you do every day in leading me toward that light.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 03, 2012 09:02 PM | Send