yahoo | 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. “I became a liberal because I am against racism,
I’m against judging people based off of their sexual orientation or
their gender. But what I started to see happening more and more all the
time were these very same behaviors sort of in the reverse of what is
stereotypical.”
It
was this disconnect that led Straka to create 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.”
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