I have always been a liberal, but because I grew up very poor, in a small town with a lot of black people and white people who actually got along just fine, it’s impossible to make me feel guilt over privilege. I’m immune.
So as long as it was about you know, sure, let the gays get married, has nothing to do with me plus it’s tied to benefits and rights so as long as churches aren’t being forced to participate, ok. Or well, I don’t mind throwing extra resources at black people to try to help them out, etc, for a while, but I always felt it should have limits, and expire, and come to think of it...I always did think it sounded ok to require women to get IUDs, or preferably have their tubes tied, to receive welfare. Didn‘t say it, but thought it. Am technically pro-choice, but find support for abortion rights incompatible with the accompanying liberal distaste for the death penalty. I think the only problem with the death penalty is unfair and inconsistent implementation. In theory, I fully support it, and in reality, in most cases, I do as well.
I am also of Scots-Irish Southern US heritage, which means I understand black people very very well, since as Thomas Sowell has identified, rednecks are rednecks whether they’re white or black. I don’t have to tiptoe around them like they’re some exotic creature.
Additionally I am adopted, and my parents were old as hell when they adopted me, which means that while everybody else had Boomer or even early GenX parents, I had Silent Generation parents. A dad who never made more than $27k/yr in his life, always doing manual labor, and a mom who saved grease to reuse later and didn’t believe in Tupperware when there’s perfectly good Country Crocks right there. This is how I know that black culture is just Southern Poverty culture, they’re just more likely to fight dogs than roosters. Trash stay being trash, you see.
So all this adds up to a certain amount of natural resistance to this sort of thing, as well as a latent Scots-Irish tendency to want to be left alone, for everyone to get the fuck off my property (literally as well as metaphorically) since I will absolutely never go onto yours, and to really fucking resent people telling me what to do - or more specifically, what to say, or not to say.
I began peaking on troons and SJWs on Tumblr. For troons, it was stumbling upon auntiewanda, then LarpsandtheRealGirl. I don’t even like lesbians in the sense that every lesbian I have ever met and known was a lesbian was offputting because in retrospect, they didn’t do the polite upbeat thing I as a southern girl expect, ie smile back when smiled at, and returning overtures in a pro-social way. I realize now maybe that’s a lot of autism and lesbians just not experiencing female socialization the same way I did. Anyway, so seeing thousands of absolutely horrific attacks from troons - whom I had previously assumed were all gigagays - demanding sex from them was a serious red pill.
Meanwhile, SJWs. I don’t write or read fanfic, my productive engagement with fandom is going to be criticism, not creation or curation. But when TFA came out, just seeing the absolute insanity that was that fandom over intersectional shipper bullshit...bloop.
Race, pretty sure I’m just peaking with everyone else over the past couple years, organically, due to the behavior of black people, politicians, and the media. It did start with irritation over fandom shit too, though. Go away and let me enjoy my content. This is my dance space. I don’t go into yours, you don‘t go into mine. I mean, come on in, as long as you want to dance to the same music, but...otherwise stay out.
Ultimately I‘m just a white Karen with a normal family and life, feeling like she’s no longer allowed to live and let live, and being fed the fuck up with the seemingly endless downward spiral of degeneracy.