"A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life."

The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted 'joy,' the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech...."

Writes Evan Barker, in "One Year Ago Today I Ruined My Life" (Substack).

"In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: 'fascism doesn’t look good on you'....  I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town."

Adding tags to this post, I had to stop a while to remember what was my tag for the inane nonissue of Kamala's joy. It was "how does Kamala feel." Let me publish this post with that tag so I can click on it and see what that looked like in real time. In retrospect, it looks awful.