"What made you left-wing until you were about forty, Thomas?"
The short answer?
Because I believed it was the only decent thing to be.
I grew up in a home where people voted left. In a broader family that did the same. And in an environment where everyone around me - musicians, creative souls, crooked existences - were left-wing. Not necessarily politically conscious, but culturally. Instinctively. That was the good company. That was "the warm hearts". It was connected to compassion, love, justice. And it was the language I learned to understand the world through.
Later in my life - late twenties - I moved into another circle - the personal development world - and here it was almost religious -
Universal love. Singing bowls. And fluttering white Buddhist-light clothing combined with a peculiar castrated form and variant of "Peace, love and understanding". Humanism without God, but with cosmic customer service. You voted left, naturally. You also fought for freedom and tolerance.
You believed.
I believed that too.
So I voted as one did when one was an empathetic, awake and reflective person.
And I was completely certain that the others - those on the right - were either cynics, idiots or just cold and unenlightened.
That's how the world was.
That's how it HAD to be.
But something slowly began to slip.
Already in 2008 (I was 34) when I became self-employed, something began to happen. A quiet, almost invisible awakening. I began to understand tax, VAT, fees, the self-employed's conditions - and how the system is actually put together.
But even there I was still caught in the hypnotic script -
"I pay my tax gladly" I babbled with a thousand-kilometre stare and no rooted understanding of why or what was actually reasonable. Because naturally you did. That's what good people did - and said. So I parroted and nodded along, even though something deep inside was both troubled and beginning to wonder.
It only picked up pace when I saw the migrants moving through Europe in 2015. Thousands and yet hundreds of thousands of people moving on foot up through Europe. Men of fighting age, without papers, without understanding of - or interest in - the cultures they were stepping into.
It wasn't the kind of migration our hearts had been trained to understand as "help". And they treated it so strangely it was nearly incomprehensible, if the desire was to help as many as possible.
It was something else. Something far more complex.
And potentially catastrophic. For Europe.
And then the strange thing happened -
People - not just a few, but many - here in Denmark and in the West generally, began competing to undermine their own societies' structures and principles.
They bowed their necks, apologized for their existence, put their own values up for sale, and publicly smashed their own borders - literally and symbolically - in the attempt to appear as the good ones.
It was like a moral theatre piece, where you got points for how much of your own culture you could renounce.
They broke themselves in half - emotionally, morally, culturally - and documented it. Wrote long posts where they reproached their own fellow citizens. Made videos with tearful apologies for being white. Shared hashtags about "opening hearts and homes", while they lived in gated suburban villas. All to signal to as many as possible that they were among the right ones.
The inclusive.
The morally superior.
And in the middle of it all - as an extra giant wake-up call - came the completely absurd witch hunt they started on an American presidential candidate who his entire life had supported the Democrats, given money to Hillary, been part of New York's cultural elite, the media class and all entertainment shows for a handful of decades, and who had hardly ever read an actual conservative manifesto. Who wanted to pull back toward the political center, which I myself had just discovered had disappeared from under my feet.
But because he challenged power, because he spoke without filter and didn't bow his neck to the holy script about globalism and victim hierarchies - he was from one day to the next painted as Antichrist. Nazi. Racist. Fascist. Rapist. A threat to the world itself.
The whole thing was so theatrical, so staged, so obviously scripted, that something in me broke.
Or perhaps it was something that broke free.
The bubble of unreality burst. And I could stick my head outside and say -
"WTF!?" 🧐
From there it really began.
I began asking the question -
"What if it's not them who are wrong?"
And it was there - around my 40th birthday - that I first stumbled across profiles like Lars Seier and Lars Tvede and others. Two names I (in my earlier understanding) would have dismissed as heartless capitalist archetypes. Sorry, guys. 😅🤷🏼♂️
But to my great surprise... I agreed with almost everything they wrote.
It was a shock.
How could that be possible?
Instead of closing my eyes - as many unfortunately do - I chose to follow my Love of Truth.
For if there was one thing I had learned - from precisely those steps that came before, which were about healing myself - it was that precisely by looking honestly and curiously at what you don't understand even though it feels uncomfortable - it most often leads to Freedom. Inside. And outside.
So I began to dig. Read. Listen. Investigate. As my creative, curious and knowledge-hungry being has always done.
And - again - to my great surprise I discovered that there existed an entire intellectual and spiritual landscape I had never had access to before - hidden from me, solely because it lay to the right.
A language for responsibility. For the individual's weight. For consequences. For the deep connection between freedom and obligation. For gratitude rather than bitterness. For hierarchy - not as tyranny, but as necessity.
It was like getting eyes in the back of your head.
I saw how everything I had learned in psychology, sociology, therapy, the mind's structure, hypnosis, trance, meditation - about shadows, inner structures, humanity's darkness and longing for meaning - suddenly became concretized and anchored by the thoughts I found among thinkers I had previously mocked or feared.
Helped along by people like -
Jordan B. Peterson - who with surgical precision connected psychology, mythology and morality together.
Douglas Murray - whose cool calm and clarity made it possible to see the madness without becoming angry yourself.
Jonathan Haidt - who understood how morality functions as deep evolutionary structure – not just as taste.
Thomas Sowell - who with breathless rationality took apart victim logic and economic fallacy.
Roger Scruton - who wrote about beauty and tradition with a warmth I had NEVER connected with conservatism, but which made this connection blazingly clear - including why Beauty is disappearing from our world these years.
Dave Rubin, Bari Weiss, Eric Weinstein, Heather Heying, Ben Shapiro, Victor Davis Hanson... and... Charlie Kirk... - each with their angle on truth, freedom and civilizational responsibility.
And naturally Freemasonry's utterly wonderful symbolic world, which in the same period really got under my skin, from which I cannot share concretely.
And suddenly it stood clear to me -
It wasn't hatred or narrow-mindedness that drove them.
It was LOVE!??
For what has been given to us. For our culture. For order. For the future.
And it led me... of all places I had never expected to land...
to Jesus.
To God.
To a reality I had NEVER EVER considered as an adult, and which I - hand on heart - NEVER NEVER NEVER EVER had seen coming.
But it made sense. In a way nothing else before had. Impossible to explain rationally. But here I am.
Simultaneously - in the outer world - I saw how the left wing moved away from the folkish and healthy. Away from the worker's dignity and the child's security. Into an academic, hyper-moralizing, reality-denying superstructure, which increasingly became... and is... tyrannical.
Identity over individual.
Feelings over facts.
Power pretended and articulated as care.
And I realized that both wings were deeply invested in illusions.
But the illusion that in these years is truly smashing society's foundation - it's not the right-wing one. It's the left-wing one.
The one that speaks of freedom, but acts in control.
The one that speaks of love, but shames.
The one that speaks of diversity, but stifles every deviation.
As a creatively freedom-loving person it felt like being cut off from parts of the spirit that always wants to express itself through my hands, thoughts, voice, conscience and reason. Like a violation of the Truth, Love and Freedom all good is built around.
I became free when I saw it.
Not because I "became right-wing" - but because I stopped believing in the wings as the solution.
And yes. In today's Denmark, being honest means you're automatically pushed to the right, and that becomes the picture painted of you.
And I live with that.
I actually think every freedom-loving, -thinking and -oriented person should live with that.
And say what they believe is true.
Regardless of what anyone says.
Good Wednesday evening, friends ☀️❤
