Why I am No Longer a Democrat
By Jesse “Hi-Rez” Friedman
My cousin was killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. Up until then, the media had trained me to be fearful of guns and to stereotype proponents of the Second Amendment as Southern, redneck racists. I grew up in a household where most of the world’s ills were blamed on Republicans, and my parents voted Democrat down the ballot.
“They are the empathetic ones who care about the little guy,” my mother would say.
However, my cousin’s death stirred up questions inside of me: Why do schools brandish “gun-free zone” signs when government buildings and Hollywood homes are protected with armed guards or security? Why does the media believe ordinary Americans must remain defenseless against unhinged psychopaths who shoot up schools?
These questions led me to a profound realization: the reason America has not been overtaken by a tyrannical government or foreign adversaries is because of our Second Amendment. In the event that we needed one, this country would have the most robust militia in the entire world. But despite having more guns than people in this country, we have not fought a single war on our soil since the Civil War.
In 1911, Turkey established gun control, and between 1915 and 1917, the government rounded up and exterminated 1.5 million Armenians. In 1929, when the Soviet Union implemented strict gun laws, 20 million were slaughtered over the course of the next 24 years. The same fate awaited 20 million Chinese, 100,00 Mayan Indians, one million Cambodians, six million Jews, and 300,000 Christians, immediately after the regimes of China, Guatemala, Cambodia, Germany, and Uganda enacted gun laws in the 20th century, respectively. The biggest mass genocides in history were always perpetrated by governments against the people.
I am currently banned from performing in venues across Germany, due to my political worldview that, according to one booking agent, is “too pro-gun and pro-Trump.” Imagine the irony of a country once responsible for the murder of one out of every three Jews on earth, not allowing me, an orthodox Jew, inside their borders because of my belief in a policy that could have potentially saved my ancestors in 1940s Europe.
I owe it to my grandparents who died in the Holocaust to protect my family. More importantly, as a law-abiding citizen, I owe it to the Americans who died so that I could be free. I would rather assume the risks that come with freedom than risk potential “peaceful” enslavement as a result of a zero-gun policy.
The first time I attended a gun show, I saw how gun culture in America is more diverse than any progressive political gathering I have witnessed. In the last few years, women, and specifically black women, have become the largest purveyors of legal guns in this country. They see how our institutions have emasculated men to the point of destroying the chivalry that once held our great society together.
The problem with guns is not the Second Amendment. It is the video games, music, and movies that glorify gang violence and the use of illegal firearms in virtually any scenario except that of self-defense. It is the agenda-driven media that cares more about white shooters than minority shooters, and white children occasionally killed in the suburbs than black children regularly killed in Chicago.
But these arguments are cultural and not fundamental. The deeper truth is that America’s founding fathers did not instantiate the right and duty of a citizen to defend oneself from the threat of another citizen. They instantiated this duty based on their clear-eyed, experienced understanding that governments have a monopoly on violence. The contradictory activist-push of simultaneously defunding the police and banning guns renders both citizens and law enforcement helpless in the face of a government flush with weapons. Such conditions are a recipe for disaster, as we have learned from history.
In a perfect world, I would be anti-gun. But I live in the real world. As long as any bad guy, whether a despotic dictator or a psychotic mass shooter can legally or illegally get a gun, I should not be denied the right to obtain my own.
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A relative is a retired law enforcement officer, who worked on international borders with multiple three-letter agencies, stopping human trafficking and drug smuggling (and more). He would completely agree with what this individual has written, based on intensive experience with a part of the world that most of us do not contact in our daily lives (or not consciously, anyway). On the other hand, a dear friend who is a barrister in Melbourne, Australia, has been shaking his head at our Second Amendment rights, but the way the Australian government treated its citizens/residents during the Covid Plandemic began slowly waking him up to the reason our Second Amendment is as important to a functional democratic system (constitutional republic for the U.S., of course) as it is. I, too, am a former Democrat. But initially not because of the gun issue - Trump's aggressive stance towards trafficking was the first thing to win me over, as a friend who escaped from Satanic cult abuse made me aware of this horrific issue. Thanks again, Dr. Malone, for giving voice to those whose views are changing in light of what we have witnessed these last few years.
Here is a vignette from Bari Weiss's Free Press this morning. This is exactly what put Germany on the path to the death camps:
Andrew Goldberg, the filmmaker, described how his 11-year-old was also targeted with antisemitic taunts. This past fall, he said, a fellow sixth-grade student at a public school in Westport, Connecticut, leaned toward his son as they were leaving class and said, “Hey, I have a fun camp for you. It has great showers. Camp Auschwitz.”
He then added that another Jewish classmate “has already joined.”
Months later, the same student jeered at Goldberg’s son in the hallways, yelling and laughing, “We must exterminate the Jews!”
But after Goldberg and his wife complained to the principal and superintendent of the school, the officials responded with a “support plan,” reviewed by The Free Press, which mainly recommended his son “try a new table at lunch.” Nothing in the plan referenced antisemitism.
Goldberg said he and his wife felt they had no option but to take their son out of public school and enroll him in a private Jewish day school. Through a lawyer, they asked Westport Public Schools to help pay their child’s tuition, and the district agreed—but only if the Goldbergs would sign a nondisclosure agreement swearing them to secrecy, he said.
The Goldbergs refused.
“We viewed this as hush money,” Goldberg said.
Westport Public Schools did not return calls from The Free Press for comment.
I live in Westport CT. The cowardice of the public schools, school board and Town officials is appalling. I am calling for the sacking of the richly compensated superintendent of schools and the resignation of the entire BOE. This is the madness that grips our leftist friends and will lead to grief and sorrow if not stopped.