Cancel culture destroyed my life; here's how I built a new one



Have you been canceled? Have you lost your family, your social circle, your job, your reputation?

I have.

People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a 'spree killer' who murdered women.

Just like the countless Americans who had their lives and livelihoods uprooted or destroyed over the past five years or so, my story is unique. But also depressingly familiar.

Today, I want to talk about how I came out on the other side.

Painful lessons

There’s no sense in sugarcoating the issue: It absolutely sucked. It was one of the hardest periods in my life, and I am not the same person I was before it happened.

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  Corbis/Getty Images

After seeing clearly for the first time how duplicitous, selfish, and downright evil humans can be, there's no going back. For me, it won’t be possible to trust other people, including loved ones, the way I did before.

But painful life lessons have their compensations.

What we call the woke left has been around for a long time. While the most egregious abuses by radical leftists occurred during the past 10 years, the problem started decades ago. You might say that the seeds planted in universities in the 1960s by leftist European Marxist intellectuals finally reached full flower by 2020.

With the alleged pandemic, those with actually fascist inclinations in their hearts made themselves known, and for many of us, that group turned out to include family and friends.

Spoiler: The liberals are the real authoritarians.

Closet Marxist

Back in the 1990s, I was studying at the most liberal of liberal arts schools, Sarah Lawrence College in New York State. If you haven’t heard of it, the school is hard leftist like Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and similar small colleges.

What I didn’t know when I attended was that it was Marxist, and so was I. The intellectual architects of postmodernism — the idea that there’s no such thing as the truth, that everything is only about oppressor and oppressed — were the mainstays of the curriculum.

We studied Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and many others. These “intellectuals” are the patron saints of the radical “queers,” “trans” activists, and other seething malcontents who believe all of their problems are because of capitalism instead of their own resentful laziness.

Among the libs

After graduation, I spent a few years as a newspaper reporter during the last period in which any semblance of actual reporting and objectivity was still valued. Then, I took a job at a nonprofit consumer organization. Yes, I entered the dreaded NGO sector.

The group I worked for was a consumer education organization focused on helping grieving people plan funerals and burials without going into debt. With the average American funeral costing $10,000 easily, financial heartache gets piled onto grief for many families. The mission was a worthy one, and I don’t regret my time working to better protect people in mourning from aggressive mortuary sales pitches.

But while the organization was officially nonpartisan, it was staffed and governed almost exclusively by Democrats and hard liberals.

That was “fine” when I was one of them, but if you’ve ever disagreed with a liberal, you know how fast a disagreement can turn into a bloodbath.

Growing up

By 2020 to 2021, I had changed my mind politically. Today, I’m a conservative traditionalist. The shock of watching transgenderism capture children, and the lying and hatred directed at conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular, pushed me to belated political maturity in my 40s.

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In 2021, I launched a weekly show called "Disaffected" with a friend and business partner. The show looks at politics and culture through the frame of warped personal psychology. In brief, I believe that the same narcissistic and unstable personal characteristics that drive domestic and child abuse (the same characteristics that ruled the home in which I grew up) drive the left.

"Disaffected" directly critiques transgenderism, anti-capitalist agitation, fake victimhood for attention, and warped states of mind such as Trump derangement syndrome.

Cast out

When volunteers and staffers at my job discovered what I put out in my private time, they engineered a coup from within. Satellite offices put out press releases calling me a misogynist and a bigot who was a danger to “trans” people and women and a public health menace for my stance against forced vaccination.

At the same time, my online friendship group circled the wagons and made sure my reputation was thoroughly trashed. People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a “spree killer” who murdered women. These were the people I thought of as friends.

At the end of 2023, I finally lost my job. It’s true that I resigned, but had I not, I would have been fired. My board of directors would not defend me, and only a handful of colleagues from two decades of working together sent any messages of support.

Fighting back

Did it hurt? Yeah. It also scared the daylights out of me. For the first time in 20 years, I didn’t have a steady paycheck. My name was ruined in the consumer advocacy field; there was no point in even showing my face in the nonprofit sector. Not only did these people cancel my job, but they made sure I was unemployable even though I was the top legal expert in consumer burial and funeral law in the country.

What to do? I spent a few months in despair and depression, but that can’t last forever. You have to put your life back together but in a new way.

Here’s what I did:

  • Lying and duplicity exercise me to the point of hot anger pretty quickly. I channeled that into exposing the abusive practices of the left even more acutely on my weekly show.
  • I launched a Substack blog to supplement the show and offer essays on topics that didn’t make it "on air."
  • After 20 years of counseling grieving people by phone on the worst day of their lives, I started a private coaching and consulting practice. Now, I offer private conversations and advice for those facing social and family ostracism in abusive or leftist (I repeat myself) households. Clients can come to me for affordable funeral planning, too.
  • When one door closes, another opens. I used to be a screeching leftist liberal, and now I write a weekly column for Align (hello).

Going from a biweekly paycheck with health benefits to working four or five freelance jobs is a hell of an adjustment. Work isn’t guaranteed when you make your living this way.

But that’s the price of actual freedom. And I am free today mentally, emotionally, and politically in a way I never had been before as an unreflective “Democrat from birth.”

Hard as it was, I wouldn’t go back.

Had an abusive mother? Then you understand the left's anti-Trump insanity



For a second time, someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. And for a second time, the media tried to convince us it never happened.

This is life in what I call our Cluster B society. And it’s getting worse every day.

Why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions had the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

But it’s nothing compared to what awaits us if we elect Kamala Harris president.

Coffee talk

What we know as “domestic abuse” has gone public and feral. More specifically, Cluster B personality disorder dynamics (extreme narcissism, manipulation, sociopathy, emotional instability) have taken over public discourse.

For the last couple of years, I've been discussing this on a weekly show I do with my friend Kevin Hurley, "Disaffected."

My mother first helped me understand our national dysfunction.

It was 2016. I was holding a spoon over my coffee at 8 p.m. in her kitchen. The spoon was a survivor from childhood, one of the original set we had with a trailing vine motif.

It had to be lowered to the counter very carefully. Lower it too fast, and it would make an audible "click" when it hit the counter. Lower it too clumsily, and it might fall and clatter as each end bounced up over the other.

It had to make no sound. Or my mother would scream.

I was 41 years old, terrified to let a spoon make an audible noise lest my mother turn her profane tirade on me. At the moment, it was aimed at her husband: the “retard,” the “brain-damaged a**hole” who “couldn’t do a godda**ed thing right.”

That moment turned my life. It was a cusp. I was 41, but I was also 7 years old, holding my breath and hunching my shoulders, hoping I’d be too small and quiet to notice.

Ka-chunk!

It wasn't exactly her kitchen. She lived there, but I owned the house. I bought it to rent to her so she could have a place to retire in impoverished old age. In just two years, my mother’s derangement had turned my days into a choice between becoming a Valium addict or washing enough of it down with my nightly vodka to make sure I didn’t wake up.

”This has to end. This has to end right now, or I’m going to die.”

I called my sister. What’s wrong with mother? What is happening to her? Why is she making up stories about things that never happened? Why is she lying to my face and accusing me of things I never did? Is it Alzheimer’s?

“Josh, she’s not going into dementia. I think our mother is a narcissist. I think she has a personality disorder,” my sister said.

I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on Cluster B personality disorders.

A remarkable thing happened. I was watching as a lifetime of “crazy” and “disconnected” maniacal behaviors slotted themselves neatly into categories. Like an industrial packaging machine, my memories were self-organizing into slots, into a taxonomy. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.

I found the key to understanding the kind of childhood that most people think only happens in low-budget, made-for-TV movies. My mother’s swings from elation to despair to rage. The lying. The claims that everyone from her brother-in-law to the grocery store manager had it in for her. The screaming in her children’s faces as she shook our shoulders and bellowed, “Why are you doing this to me?!”

Fast-forward to a time closer to today. When I discovered the source of my family’s derangement, I also discovered one of the sources of our current cultural crisis.

Cluster B nation

Cluster B. The emotional instability and self-victimization natural to borderline personality disorder, the grandiosity and insatiable vanity of narcissistic personality disorder — why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions have the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

Because they do. It started on the extreme left, the woke left, my former political and cultural home. But it has metastasized. It’s not just the “extreme left” that acts like an emotionally dysregulated autocrat any more. It’s the mainstream left.

It’s mainstream American culture. The White House. MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times (supply your own infinite series). It’s our teachers, our cultural leaders, our doctors, our universities.

We are living in a Cluster B world, and if we don’t wake up to that fact, it will be our undoing.

Gaslight this!

The mainstream media did its best in the hours right after the attempt on Trump’s life to make it "not real." It did it with plausible deniability. Headlines said things like, “Incident at golf course near Trump,” or similar constructions.

The media will allege and assert that it was merely being cautious and careful in the immediate aftermath because fog of war, etc.

This is not true. The media is deliberately working to disappear the fact that someone was trying to kill Trump again. The media wanted to make sure Americans did not have the normal emotional reaction to and investment in a presidential candidate being targeted for murder.

This is gaslighting, and it’s something I’m finding very difficult personally. You might even say it’s triggered me.

Like you, I find words like “gaslighting” and “triggered” tiresome. But I am using these terms in their true, real, and original sense. These phenomena exist; they are still real phenomena even though the words have been co-opted and abused by the left.

Look what you made me do

Only after the government and the FBI had to admit it was a second assassination attempt (oh, the irony) did the media come clean. But then it shifted tack and started blaming Trump himself for his own targeting.

This is evil. It’s what the word “evil” means. It’s pure Cluster B abuse. It is exactly parallel to the way abused children are blamed by their parents for causing their own abuse.

This was a constant feature of my childhood. My mother would blame me for “making” her lose her temper with me. I would not only be punished for my original infraction, but I would then be punished for “making her” get violent or abusive with me.

Yes, even as a child of less than 10 years old, I knew this was morally insane. I never did not know it. It infuriated me and made me despair. I prayed to God to make her stop and to give me justice.

Justice did not come. As happens to every child with abusive parents, when the home life became too dangerous to ignore, I was placed in kid jail. Children are institutionalized, put in juvenile hall, or put in corrective homes for wayward kids for the actions of their parents. Children are punished for the literal statutory crimes their parents commit against them.

Kamala dearest

Donald Trump is being so punished today.

And Kamala Harris, as we saw at the debate, is the current instrument of that punishment: a brazen, shameless liar who deliberately provoked him with the specific purpose of putting him on defense while he knew no one would check her.

That histrionic smirking, the hand poses with her chin on her fingers, the Hillary Clinton-esque derisive smiling headshake. It's disgusting.

If this country elects Kamala Harris, it will be electing a facsimile of my mother.

Man up?

Some men will accuse me of whining. They’ll interpret this as me saying that the only problem with the debate was that Kamala Harris was being mean to Donald Trump and that the purpose of my essay is to generate personal, little-boy sympathy for him.

I understand. These men are tired of the feminization of society, just as I am. They are tired of men being subordinate wimps to manipulative women. They are tired of seeing men pushed to “show their feelings” as if men have the same emotions as women. They are rightly tired of grown adults — but mainly other men — acting like little boys and failing to carry themselves as adult men.

I’m with them. We agree, though some of them incorrectly think that I disagree with them.

Because such men are so reactive against feminization, they go too far, and they start excusing actual substantive mistreatment by women of men. They focus only on the man’s reaction. Their only criticism is for a man being insufficiently stoic. All the time. In every situation. No matter how outnumbered he is. No matter how demonstrably rigged the legal system is.

This is going way too far. It’s going so far that such men are not actually acting like brothers in arms to men targeted this way; they are replicating the very same abuse dished out to these men.

The injustice of all of this is intolerable. No man today, no matter how ripped, how based, how stoic, how masculine, has the power to exist outside a feminized system that has made male-specific abuse and disempowerment legally and culturally enforceable.

If you’re one of those men I’m talking about, you’re not man enough either, no matter how highly you think of your abilities. You, too, are constrained to some degree within this system.

Unburdened by restraint

The point is that Kamala Harris is a dangerous psychopath. She gets away with it in large part because she is a woman. She benefits from the false perception that women cannot be as dangerous as men.

If she is elected, Harris is going to practice psychopathy on all of us. Not just Donald Trump.

I point out the narcissistic abuse so that you can see it and understand how it works and how dangerous its effects are.

I do not do it so that you’ll feel personal sympathy for Donald Trump. I do it so that you’ll understand what Kamala Harris is going to do to you, your family, your children, your legal system, the tax structure, and everything else she will be able to destroy if she is given more power.