PROFILE: #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka discusses his political journey

Nearly every week sees Straka and his core group staging events in locations across the country, inviting people to cast off the veils of the Democrat party, rub the sleep from their eyes, and take a cold, objective look at the ideology behind the movement, the untruths told in service to keeping people in fear.

"Liberals keep people afraid," Straka said, "they want to keep people in a state of fear because then they're easier to control." It is that fear, and the ignorance that causes it, that led Straka away from the party and ideology he had always called home.

As a gay man with a life in the New York arts scene, Straka had been a liberal who accepted fully that subscribing to the selection of leftist positions was the only way to secure rights for the LGBT community and for minorities. There was a platform, he said, of ideas that, if you were on the right side of things, you had to agree with. And he did agree; he didn't question it until one day, he did—and the whole structure of the liberal belief system began to fall apart. The #WalkAway Campaign was born.

A movement of liberals who can no longer tolerate the left, the #WalkAway Campaign bills itself as grassroots, intended to encourage those who have become dissatisfied with their representation in the Democrat party to give up their allegiance.

A glance through videos of those who have already walked away shows that the reasons for doing so are varied, and the circumstances different, but each origin of their walk away story has a similarity. Each person discusses the moment that they began to have a doubt in the progressive ideology to the left.

Founder of #WalkAway's Brandon Straka had this moment too. In 2016, he voted for Hillary Clinton. Her loss was devastating, and as it was for so many people, it was even a bit unfathomable. People were confused as to how this could happen. There was such a surety among Democrats that Hillary Clinton would be victorious in her presidential aspirations, especially against someone who they perceived as a complete clown, like Donald Trump, that they were completely gobsmacked by the loss.

Straka was one of these people. He assumed that Trump was a racist white supremacist homophobic warmonger who was intent on destroying American democracy. He posted videos to Facebook where he was in tears, horrified that the country could have betrayed its core values so deeply as to vote for a racist, homophobic, bullying man. Straka found that he had to get to the bottom of what had happened, of how the media and liberals could have got it so wrong.

So he set out on an investigation to find out how this horrifying nightmare could have come to pass. He reached out to his network on Facebook, telling people that he couldn't how anyone could vote for Trump, a man who had mocked the disabled and was completely hateful. While his goal was to figure out what had made other people commit this ballot box violation, it was his own belief system that ended up in doubt.

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One voice of dissent reached out to him. A woman he had known from back home in Nebraska shared her understanding that the widely-spread video of Trump mocking a disabled reporter was, while not fake, taken completely out of context. The claim in the video was that Trump specifically was making arm gestures to make fun of a man's disability. But was Straka's friend showed him was a video compilation of all the times Trump had used those gestures—not to mock one reporter, but to add emphasis and make fun of indecisiveness, capitulation, and weakness.

Straka watched the video again and again, and finally he realized that, whether he thought Trump was behaving admirably or not, his gestures had been misconstrued. The narrative that Trump was specifically making fun of one guy was untrue. And it made him start to wonder what other lies he'd been told that he and his peers on the left had taken as straight gospel.

"I was living in New York, and I'd been there a long time, I was in the arts community and everyone thought the same," he said. "It wasn't just one view, if you had one idea, you had to have all the other associated ideas, too, and you weren't supposed to question it."

As he continued his exploration of just what made Trump so electable and and how the liberal left had been so mistaken in thinking that he had no chance to win, he uncovered more and more lies.

"They told me Trump wanted to kill gay people," Straka said, "and that's just not true."

He began approaching conservatives, telling them what he'd heard about their political leanings, asking them if they had animosity toward the LGBT community. He found that they did not.

"They embraced me," he said. "The anti-gay sentiment that used to be on the right just isn't there anymore." The people he spoke to told him those ideas were outdated, and not representative of themselves or their views. It was surprising to him, a continued eye-opener.

In fact, Straka and his colleagues with #WalkAway were recently invited to the White House, where they shot a video talking about their experiences and interest in backing Trump, and abandoning the party of the Democrats. Of his time at the White House, Straka said it was "a gorgeous experience." He felt welcomed, and it was a welcoming that

"Alot of what happened was with the conversations surrounding diversity, and I'd find that when you talked to people privately, everyone thought it was crazy, but in public or groups, people would go along with it. No one wanted to be called out and risk being ostracized."

But that diversity that was being called for by the liberal side was diverse in word only, Straka found. There wasn't room for people with opposing views, instead, everyone had to be in lockstep, spout off the same opinions, or risk losing their friends, work, and community.

Straka realized he had to create his own community, and make a space where it was okay for liberals who were disaffected, disenfranchised, to go. But lots of people, it turns out, lots of vocal people, don't like that. And as #WalkAway picks up steam, so too does the backlash against it.

For being a gay, Trump-supporting man, Straka was harassed and assaulted by BLM activists in Washington, DC, after leaving the RNC and making his way back to his hotel.

"I'd seen homophobic attacks before," he said, "but this was the first time they were coming from the left."

#WalkAway's most recent stop, in Dallas, found a group of counter protestors. A large group followed Straka and his colleagues away from the event, shouting at them and harassing them, not giving up pursuit even when they found themselves in front of a Dallas police station.

"The police didn't do anything," he said. Police appeared to be on the side of the BLM activists, and didn't have much concern for the threats they were delivering to Straka and his group.

This mob that harassed and assaulted #WalkAway in Dallas is part of a growing trend of street mobs interrogating, threatening, and screaming at civilians who are not involved in protest movements. In Rochester, DC, Pittsburgh, and San Diego, we've seen diners at restaurants bullied away from their tables. In Seattle and Portland, protests have left the city centres and moved out into the sprawl.