A Letter From a Former Hollywood Liberal

Dear Democrats in Los Angeles,

Mind if we have a little heart-to-heart?

Oh, I hear you. “You’re a Trump supporter. You don’t have a heart.” No, I’m not offended. If I can deal with high school friends who think I stink like sweaty socks from a boys’ gym locker because of my politics, I can deal with you. After all, I was you.

Yes, I was a Hollywood liberal. What’s more, I know what a lot of you were feeling deep down as you watched rioters torch and trash your city, attack your officers, shut down your freeways while waving the flag of a foreign country. Worse, I know there’s a check in your soul when you watch your Democrat leaders egg on the violence.

Why? Because I’ve been there.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Maxine Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat congresswoman, did more to make me a Republican than Rush Limbaugh.

It’s 1992. The trial of the officers charged in the Rodney King beating was underway in Simi Valley. Day in, day out, Waters and other Democrats were pouring gasoline all over the L.A. Basin. “No Justice! No Peace! No Justice! No Peace!” Justice did not mean a fair trial with a jury reaching a reasonable verdict. Justice meant all four LAPD officers being found guilty. Anything less, Auntie Maxine implied, meant war.

“What are you doing?” I shouted at the TV. “You’re going to blow this whole place up!”

Sure enough, the verdict came down. The match Waters lit flicked onto a city she’d saturated with fuel and rage. By the time the riot was over, 52 Angelenos were dead, over one billion dollars in damage had been done, countless businesses lay looted, gutted, and destroyed.

I’ll never forget the dispiriting drive down the 405 looking toward downtown and seeing a dozen plumes of smoke. Or the middle-aged black man tearfully pleading with looters in South Central, “This is your grandmother’s drugstore!” I also remember being in a bookstore at Harvard several months later and seeing a full shelf of books glorifying the Los Angeles “rebellion.”

The L.A. Riot was no more a “rebellion” than Zohan Mamdani is an African American. Something in me broke looking at that bookshelf. “I am not one of these people.” To my shock, I realized I meant one of these liberal Democrats. Like Maxine Waters and the elites at Harvard who were not just arsonists, but sociopaths celebrating gangbangers hitting innocent white truck drivers in the skull with cinder blocks.

Fortunately for Democrats, 1992 was also the year of Bill Clinton. I could tell myself I was that kind of Democrat. I told myself this with increasingly less conviction for about a decade. What choice did I have? The thought of voting Republican was inconceivable. I was still the family Democrat, but by now my only defense was “C’mon, I get paid to make fun of both sides!” I was also still in Hollywood, where you’d have an easier time admitting you’re a pedophile than a Republican.

You know this is true. Two cars are in a parking lot in Santa Monica. One has a NABLA sticker. The other a MAGA sticker. Which one is getting keyed? Yeah. You know I’m right.

It’s now 2004, post-9/11. I’d just spent two years working for a counterintelligence expert, learning how dangerous the world is, how dangerous holes in the border are. I’d seen illegal immigration begin to deteriorate my part of the Valley. The presidential race between George W. Bush and John Kerry was heating up, and to my horror I found myself leaning toward Bush. A Republican. (Makes a face.) Then came a lunch with several of my comedy colleagues at the Rainbow on Sunset. They were talking enthusiastically about Kerry’s chances. “Not everyone here is voting for Kerry,” I muttered.

Our saleswoman from San Francisco spit at me like the demon in “The Exorcist”: “When did you become a Republican?!” She was so full of venom, I couldn’t stop myself. “When some a******s flew a plane into my sister’s building.”  

The truth was more complicated, but not nearly as effective. I was not even a registered Republican yet. But again, the thought. “I am not this.”

Which gets to my question today: Do you want to be the kind of person who loses their mind if someone you know has a different view on politics? The kind of person who puts Diego Abrego Garcia over the victims of his MS-13? The kind of person who is happy seeing cement blocks thrown down on your LAPD officers? Happy seeing fireworks launched at federal officers? Cars burned, businesses looted, federal buildings you pay for under violent siege? Illegal immigrants blocking your freeways, waving foreign flags while taking more of your money?

Or does it make you a bit sick?

Are you someone who stands for little kids getting their sexual organs destroyed, but won’t stand for a little kid with cancer? Someone OK with Jews being attacked in Westwood with the Democrat elites siding with the antisemites?

That’s what the “D” next to your name represents now.

My hunch is many of you realize the “D” no longer reflects who you are and are wrestling with the distasteful fact that you’re more in line with the party you have long hated. I tell you again. I’ve been there. When I switched my registration, I felt I was filing for divorce from my old self. Trading in my Redskins jersey for a Cowboys jacket. My hands were shaking like Luca Brasi was holding a gun to my head.  

And then? “That didn’t feel so bad.”

Trust me. It won’t feel so bad.

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