This past week, citing COVID-19 Comedian turned “Left-wing political influencer Jimmy Dore has vocally outlined his reasons for leaving the Democratic Party. Dore has focused heavily on COVID-19 and articulated a view of rugged and dare I say selfish individualism that completely undermines the arguments of community that has throughout my lifetime been a staple of being on the left.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has used the claims that Democrats forced vaccines on people and bizarrely as an environmentalist that CO2 emission emphasis is bad policy to justify his backing of Donald Trump. This argument about climate change and CO2 I have noticed more and more on what I call the alt-left as they try and align their new world view to oppose anything the Democratic Party stands for.

Tulsi Gabbard a failed Presidential candidate and someone whose views on foreign affairs have always been extreme now lauds Donald Trump as the candidate of peace (of course he is, since he sucks up to any authoritarian dictator that opposes our liberal values).

Echoing Dore, Sanders and Gabbard are a legion of Twitter influencers I followed and engaged with during Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign for the White House. They have actually abandoned what Sanders himself stood for and continues to stand for yet claim somehow the Democrats have “changed.” They have also developed an obsession with “free speech” which allows them to align publicly with the likes Elon Musk and Donald Trump while attacking Democrats for restricting speech.

But where the **** does this come from? Social media has allowed any Johnny or Jane with wild opinions who spout conspiracy theories to gain a huge audience without filter and without the responsibilities of attribution or facts that professional journalists live by, These conspiracy theories and advocacy of doctrinaire of “free speech” are in fact what has polarized our country, poisoned our body politic and led us to where we are today.

These influencers who have shown through the years they don’t understand power, how the process of legislating works AND even more pathetically yet attribute the worst motives to anyone who has a D next to their name who actually attains power (including those who are ideologically to the left like AOC or Sanders) have now thrown in with Donald Trump.

Truth be told, the Democrats have not nominated an actual progressive for President since Walter Mondale and haven’t had a liberal-progressive President on domestic policy since Lyndon B. Johnson. Nor have they had a non-hawkish President since Jimmy Carter. The party might take more in corporate donations now than I am comfortable with and now done as much on protecting our fragile ecosystems as I’d like but to claim somehow the Democrats are worse than the GOP has taken a major realignment in their heads.

This is where I come back to the principle of individualism vs community. The view of rugged individualism where people want to be left alone to do whatever they want and yell and scream about “free speech” is the embodiment of Reagan Republicanism – yet these same people accuse the Democrats under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris of becoming a “Reaganite party” and use the term neoliberal to describe anyone and anything they don’t like.

A key component of the left throughout my lifetime was community and self-sacrifice for larger goals. “We not us,” was a common refrain, but now the alt-left is in “look at me, woe is me” mode as they advocate for the restoration of Trump and the destruction of the very principles they once claimed to care about.