Why Does Everyone Feel So Politically Homeless? - Ana Kasparian

What does independent and unaligned mean?

For me, at this moment in my jor- I guess journey, if you wanna call it that, is freedom. Not h- having this weird obligation to any political group, so I can actually explore the issues and not feel pressured to think in one way or another. You know, I thought maybe coming out as someone who's unaligned would maybe get the cultish individuals off my back, but that has not happened. It's kind of amazing, (laughs) because, you know, they've been very critical of me, and they've been pretty obsessed with claiming that I'm not pure enough to be considered on the left. And finally, I was just like, "Okay, fine. Then I guess I'm not on the left. I'm unaligned." 'Cause I'm certainly not someone that really fits in with the right either. It's just I have far more nuanced views of some of these issues. It doesn't mean that my policy proposals are completely different. It doesn't mean that who I am as a person is completely different. It just means that I have noticed some characteristics on the left that have essentially felt like ideological shackles. It has prevented me from, you know, allowing myself to dig a little deeper and maybe even consider whether the other side has a point. And so I just want to be in a position to do my job better than I had been doing my job. And in that journey so far, I've realized that, you know, I've had incorrect opinions and perceptions of Republican voters overall. I think that there are gradations. There are differences. It's not a monolith. I just feel a lot more in touch with reality and the world around me, and I love it. There's something very liberating about that, and so focusing on how good that feels has kind of helped me get past all of the bad-faith attacks I'm dealing with. Because ultimately, if you're an intellectually curious person, you're, you're gonna have a hunger for learning more, for exploring more, for talking with people who don't agree with you. And if you find yourself in this cultish mentality where your, you know, your social group is pressuring you to avoid doing that, you're gonna lose your mind, and I really was finding myself in that situation.

Why do you think everyone's so obsessed with labels? Why does it matter that you're from the left, on the left, now an independent, now a s- th- this person's a libertarian, et cetera, et cetera?

I can't speak for the international community, but certainly in the United States, I think that politics has substituted religion to some extent. People have almost, like, this religious zealotry (laughs) toward their political beliefs, and when that happens, it's really difficult to have a conversation with someone without it immediately devolving into allegations of bad faith, of, you know, lying, deception, all sorts of things. And so maybe that's part of it, but honestly, I didn't really notice this as an issue in America until Donald Trump was running for president and then after he got elected as president. And I am one million percent guilty of honestly allowing him to kind of break my brain for a little bit, um, because I saw him as such a significant threat. And to be clear, there are things about Donald Trump that I still consider to be very terrible, the inability to accept defeat, the inability to accept that he lost the election. You know, the Capitol riots get a lot of attention, but the Capitol riots were not as big of a deal compared to the fake elector scheme. That was the real plot to overturn the election. So those are things that I still believe. I s- I'm still critical of Trump. However, I do think that there is an orchestrated effort in legacy media to paint him as even more demonic, and it's unfair to him. And what it does is it makes his supporters distrust media overall. So when the media debunks something and they do it accurately, well, Trump supporters aren't gonna trust them because they have lost credibility for painting him.