Have you been canceled? Have you lost your family, your social circle, your job, your reputation?

I have.

People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a 'spree killer' who murdered women.

Just like the countless Americans who had their lives and livelihoods uprooted or destroyed over the past five years or so, my story is unique. But also depressingly familiar.

Today, I want to talk about how I came out on the other side.

Painful lessons

There’s no sense in sugarcoating the issue: It absolutely sucked. It was one of the hardest periods in my life, and I am not the same person I was before it happened.

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After seeing clearly for the first time how duplicitous, selfish, and downright evil humans can be, there's no going back. For me, it won’t be possible to trust other people, including loved ones, the way I did before.

But painful life lessons have their compensations.

What we call the woke left has been around for a long time. While the most egregious abuses by radical leftists occurred during the past 10 years, the problem started decades ago. You might say that the seeds planted in universities in the 1960s by leftist European Marxist intellectuals finally reached full flower by 2020.

With the alleged pandemic, those with actually fascist inclinations in their hearts made themselves known, and for many of us, that group turned out to include family and friends.

Spoiler: The liberals are the real authoritarians.

Closet Marxist

Back in the 1990s, I was studying at the most liberal of liberal arts schools, Sarah Lawrence College in New York State. If you haven’t heard of it, the school is hard leftist like Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and similar small colleges.

What I didn’t know when I attended was that it was Marxist, and so was I. The intellectual architects of postmodernism — the idea that there’s no such thing as the truth, that everything is only about oppressor and oppressed — were the mainstays of the curriculum.

We studied Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and many others. These “intellectuals” are the patron saints of the radical “queers,” “trans” activists, and other seething malcontents who believe all of their problems are because of capitalism instead of their own resentful laziness.

Among the libs

After graduation, I spent a few years as a newspaper reporter during the last period in which any semblance of actual reporting and objectivity was still valued. Then, I took a job at a nonprofit consumer organization. Yes, I entered the dreaded NGO sector.

The group I worked for was a consumer education organization focused on helping grieving people plan funerals and burials without going into debt. With the average American funeral costing $10,000 easily, financial heartache gets piled onto grief for many families. The mission was a worthy one, and I don’t regret my time working to better protect people in mourning from aggressive mortuary sales pitches.

But while the organization was officially nonpartisan, it was staffed and governed almost exclusively by Democrats and hard liberals.

That was “fine” when I was one of them, but if you’ve ever disagreed with a liberal, you know how fast a disagreement can turn into a bloodbath.

Growing up

By 2020 to 2021, I had changed my mind politically. Today, I’m a conservative traditionalist. The shock of watching transgenderism capture children, and the lying and hatred directed at conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular, pushed me to belated political maturity in my 40s.

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In 2021, I launched a weekly show called "Disaffected" with a friend and business partner. The show looks at politics and culture through the frame of warped personal psychology. In brief, I believe that the same narcissistic and unstable personal characteristics that drive domestic and child abuse (the same characteristics that ruled the home in which I grew up) drive the left.

"Disaffected" directly critiques transgenderism, anti-capitalist agitation, fake victimhood for attention, and warped states of mind such as Trump derangement syndrome.

Cast out

When volunteers and staffers at my job discovered what I put out in my private time, they engineered a coup from within. Satellite offices put out press releases calling me a misogynist and a bigot who was a danger to “trans” people and women and a public health menace for my stance against forced vaccination.

At the same time, my online friendship group circled the wagons and made sure my reputation was thoroughly trashed. People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a “spree killer” who murdered women. These were the people I thought of as friends.

At the end of 2023, I finally lost my job. It’s true that I resigned, but had I not, I would have been fired. My board of directors would not defend me, and only a handful of colleagues from two decades of working together sent any messages of support.

Fighting back

Did it hurt? Yeah. It also scared the daylights out of me. For the first time in 20 years, I didn’t have a steady paycheck. My name was ruined in the consumer advocacy field; there was no point in even showing my face in the nonprofit sector. Not only did these people cancel my job, but they made sure I was unemployable even though I was the top legal expert in consumer burial and funeral law in the country.

What to do? I spent a few months in despair and depression, but that can’t last forever. You have to put your life back together but in a new way.

Here’s what I did:

Lying and duplicity exercise me to the point of hot anger pretty quickly. I channeled that into exposing the abusive practices of the left even more acutely on my weekly show.

I launched a Substack blog to supplement the show and offer essays on topics that didn’t make it "on air."

After 20 years of counseling grieving people by phone on the worst day of their lives, I started a private coaching and consulting practice. Now, I offer private conversations and advice for those facing social and family ostracism in abusive or leftist (I repeat myself) households. Clients can come to me for affordable funeral planning, too.

When one door closes, another opens. I used to be a screeching leftist liberal, and now I write a weekly column for Align (hello).

Going from a biweekly paycheck with health benefits to working four or five freelance jobs is a hell of an adjustment. Work isn’t guaranteed when you make your living this way.

But that’s the price of actual freedom. And I am free today mentally, emotionally, and politically in a way I never had been before as an unreflective “Democrat from birth.”

Hard as it was, I wouldn’t go back.