This is Diana’s story—a former liberal with a big heart—guest blogger

My story   . . .

I went to the most liberal university in my very liberal state and got myself a degree in sociology. I was a full believer in socialism and Bernie was my hero in 2016. I devoted my working life to helping people. My first job out of college I worked with families involved with the child welfare system hoping to help reunify them with education and advocacy. That system was a little messy and I felt like I could do more to help people so I began a job working with the homeless just before Trump was elected. More on that in a minute . . .

At this time I was studying the results of a socialized healthcare system in countries like the UK and Australia because as a supporter of universal healthcare I wanted to put my money where my mouth was and get the full story on how it would affect Americans. I wanted to be the open minded person I claimed I was. What I learned is that people were losing rights to make their own healthcare choices such as seeking alternative treatment for a child with a terminal illness. Police were barricading hospitals keeping people in. Overall the quality of care for patients was not as good and people had a lot less choices to sum it up. Only good thing was it was “free” if you don’t count the high taxes. I could certainly provide some examples to anyone interested in learning more about that though. Anyway, I realized what a disaster it would actually be for America and I couldn’t support it. I did what all grown up girls should do and admitted I was wrong. Hillary was a war criminal and my formerly leftist self would never have supported her anyway so I did the next best thing and voted for Donald Trump on 11/6/16. The next morning when I learned he had won I was overcome with a sense of RELIEF that I don’t know where it originated. I felt it was a sign.

Continuing on with my work “helping the homeless”. So I worked in a program that would essentially pay for people (anyone that could claim they were homeless) to get an apartment and pay their rent for a short time until they got on their feet. Except that never really happened. We would pay rent for people who flat out refused to work and make a living until they ended up either being given a permanent housing voucher (which they knew was coming) or they got evicted and would come back through the program again later. The program worked in a “collaboration” with other agencies in the area. But this “collaboration” was very political. You weren’t allowed to point out that the program was essentially wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars per MONTH. You were however asked to lobby at the capitol for more funding for these extremely poor performing programs. It was all a dog and pony show. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t have hard feelings for the homeless. But the ideas that most people are fed about homelessness is actually a fraction of what it really is. The really vulnerable homeless people that required quality help were mostly addicts and severely mentally ill, but this comprised maybe 15% of the people we were serving. The rest were capable people who just kept making poor decisions and expecting more and more money to pick up the pieces. The most important lesson I learned here is that subsidies and vouchers and other types of government help don’t solve the problem of poverty. It enables and perpetuates it. This is something I never would have understood before, when I was walking around with my Feel The Bern hoodie on.

The last straw for me was seeing how the liberal media demonized each and every thing our president does! Even good things like criminal justice reform that they could have no basis for criticizing, they just simply don’t report on it. It’s disgusting. I didn’t really like Obama--he was a war criminal and a phony to me but if he did something good I gave him credit for it. And seeing all my friends and family who supposedly believed in love and tolerance and understanding, demonizing people who voted for our president. I volunteered for my state GOP this past year and I was called racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-women’s rights, etc. JUST for being a registered Republican! People suddenly just seemed so deranged to me. I could go on forever about this really so I’m gonna stop here but I plan to make a blog post about my walk away story and will link it here when I do!