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On Nov. 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States — and Brandon Straka, a gay man and artist living in New York City, posted a video of his reaction to Facebook. “I was devastated. I voted for Hillary, and I was one of those people who was going on social media, crying, making videos,” says Straka.

Almost two years later, Straka posted another video that has since gone viral and spawned a movement. [...] created the #WalkAway campaign in mid-June of 2018, a social media movement that encourages lifelong liberals and Democrats to “walk away” from their party and explore conservative politics with an open mind.

For Straka, the left practices tolerance and diversity in a superficial way, with no regard to individual thought or personal belief: “If you express an opinion that’s outside of what is their ideology, there is no tolerance and there is no diversity.”

“I don’t think that being hostile towards heterosexual people helps gay people,” he says. “I don’t think that being hostile towards men empowers women. I don’t think that being hostile towards white people empowers black people.”

Having grown up in a small town in Nebraska, Straka knew a lot of people who voted for Trump. “I was really on a quest to try and understand why did they vote for this man who was a racist, who was a bigot.” A friend who is a lifelong conservative contacted him, sending a link to a YouTube video titled “Debunking That Trump Mocked the Disabled Reporter.” Straka was skeptical: “I almost still sort of had that liberal rage inside of me, that sort of thought, ‘I can’t wait to watch this and then tell her how stupid she is for being brainwashed by this idiocy.’” The video was a compilation of footage of Trump performing the same flailing hand gestures and rambling voice that he had enacted when imitating a disabled reporter. Brandon was shocked. “It became clear to me that he didn’t mock that man’s disability whatsoever. Yes, the man was disabled, but what he was really doing was making fun of the fact that this person who happened to be disabled was caught in a lie. You know, it blew my mind.”

As Straka dug deeper into the media’s coverage of Trump, he discovered more inconsistencies that disturbed him. “I even found footage where there were groups of black people who went to Trump’s rallies to support him,” he says, “and when [the media] got there, they actually framed up the shot to cut the black people out so that it appeared there were only white people there. … I started to see that I had been incredibly unkind and judgmental towards all of these people in the country who I thought were horrible people, because the media had made me believe that these people were terrible people, when in fact it wasn’t true.”

When he reached out to liberal friends and family, asking if they were aware of how the mainstream media was manipulating the public’s perception of Trump, he found himself shut out. “People were starting to disengage with me, they were starting to cut me off in real life, they were starting to cut me off on social media. There were all these different things that people were saying about me in order to be able to justify that I had sort of walked away from the camp and walked away from the groupthink.”
[...]
In early July, media outlets reported that part if not all of the movement is fictitious, that the #WalkAway campaign created “fake ads” using models to portray supposed members, and that according to the Hamilton 68 site, run by the bipartisan Alliance for Securing Democracy, the hashtag is connected to Russian bots. Straka says it’s not true: “They have always had the option to go to the #WalkAway campaign page on Facebook, look at the real testimonials of real people, but they chose not to do that. No one ever reached out to me for comment, no one ever reached out to me to ask for my perspective as the founder of the campaign.”

Since launching the #WalkAway campaign, Straka has also been accused by people online and in real life of being a member of the “alt-right”: Several weeks ago in a New York City camera store, he was asked by a salesman if he intended to use the items he wanted to purchase for “alt-right purposes.” “I was taken aback,” he recounts, “and I started laughing and I said, ‘Alt-right?’ And he said, ‘Well, aren’t you with the #WalkAway campaign?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, I can’t sell to you.’”
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https://www.yahoo.com/news/unfiltered-left-practices-tolerance-superficial-ways-231505016.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/unfiltered-left-practices-tolerance-superficial-ways-231505016.html

Labels: Oleg Zabluda, WalkAway

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