Doesn’t it seem like Donald Trump has been president for longer than seven weeks?

The administration has accomplished so much in such a short time that it’s easy to forget “we’ve only just begun.” So far, most of the changes that are de-wokifying American life are coming in the form of executive orders.

I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. ... [But] I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

The most consequential moves — for example, protecting children from chemical and surgical abuse in the form of “sex changes” — need to be codified in laws passed by Congress.

Conservatives are celebrating the death of woke; I’m one of them. But if woke is on the wane, it is not dead. It may be in the process of dying, but actual death has not occurred. And its death may be much farther off than it looks.

Right now, less than two months into the Trump presidency, we’re seeing what I call an unveiling. Some call it an “extinction burst,” the idea that people act out their behaviors even more flagrantly just before the social environment changes enough to make their behaviors “go extinct.”

Whatever you call it, we’re seeing the depth of derangement in the woke minds of Democrats and leftists even more starkly than before.

The media is hyperventilating that free speech leads to Nazi pogroms. Leftists are gnashing their teeth over the deportation of noncitizen Mahmoud Khalil, acting as though he has a fundamental right to agitate against U.S. interests while he’s here as our guest (no concern at all for the effect of his agitation on their own countrymen, of course).

Democrat lawmakers shocked by the new reality that people are not going to call mentally ill men “women” any more just because they say they’re women are melting down in emotional tantrums in House committee hearings.

Inside the leftist mind

Here you are, a conservative, wondering just what these people are thinking. Why do they believe what they believe? Do they, in fact, actually believe what they say they believe?

I have these same questions, but I think I also have some of the answers.

Before a years-long process of changing my mind about politics and culture, I was one of them. The backstory that got me to being a leftist Democrat is a backstory shared by millions of people like me. It won’t describe everyone, but the generalizations I’m going to make are drawn from my own experience, and they do describe a large number of leftists and the woke-minded.

The first and most important generalization? Look into the past of any given leftist, and chances are you'll find some variation of ...

Fatherlessness

This is the single biggest factor that predisposes a child to mental troubles and leftist “people are victims of societal forces” ideology.

Not only is fatherlessness damaging to a kid’s normal ability to relate to the sexes, to regulate his emotions, and more, but it tends to coincide with single mothers with feminist attitudes. I never met my father, and my mother married a violent child molester by whom she had two more children.

She kicked him out after he tried to kill her, and the die was cast. To my mother, and by osmosis to me, all men were lazy deadbeats and scum. All the men in her life had victimized my poor, innocent mother, and nothing could be laid at the feet of her own choices.

Thus, the male feminist version of me was born, nurtured by those two companions of fatherlessness ...

Single motherhood and welfare dependency

One day in 1983, a college student stopped my mother on her way into the grocery store asking for her signature on a petition to end welfare fraud. My mother haughtily raised her nose, pointed at us three children, and said, “Do you see any welfare fraud here?”

At home, she’d scream at the television when Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens,” saying there was no such thing and that Reagan was an abusive scum for trying to reform welfare. We were taught that our poverty was the fault of the government and that the government was cruel to give so little to single mothers like mine.

Thus was born my anti-capitalist sentiment that would flower into protesting against “greedy corporations,” my support for absurdly high minimum wages, and more.

As I discussed in my recent review of Adam Coleman's forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," modern America gives single moms the “you go girl/slay kween” treatment. We’ve made them heroines who cannot be criticized.

Of course, spending your whole life feeling like a victim of "the system" lets you justify all sorts of ...

Bad adult choices

Children who grow up in neglect and abuse as I did are far more likely to gravitate toward the left because the left embraces victimhood, hedonistic behavior, and self-centered, narcissistic choices dressed up as “self-care” and “self-love.”

As a young adult, I took up the stereotyped behaviors of abused children, living a promiscuous party life, becoming an alcoholic, and blaming all of this on anything but my own choices. Naturally, I surrounded myself with similarly damaged people. Every single one of them, to a man or a woman, was a leftist, socialist, or proud Marxist.

Once you realize the emotional disorder that leads people to adopt these beliefs, you might ask yourself ...

Do they really believe what they’re saying?

Democrat/leftist beliefs are so extreme and absurd in the 21st century that it baffles non-leftists. It’s been eight years since I started changing my mind to what it is today (conservative, anti-woke).

Even though I can remember when I was one of them, today’s leftists have gone farther than I ever did. For example, take the beliefs surrounding ...

Transgenderism

Do they actually, literally believe that a man claiming to be a woman makes him a woman?

Yes and no.

No, not in a literal sense, even though they claim very loudly that they do. The emotional urgency of their claims is used to cover up the fact that deep down, they know it’s insane.

I know this because it used to be me. I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. So why did I say I believed it? Because I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

You see, children from abusive homes are forced into an adult role when they’re still little, trained to become emotional surrogate spouses to their damaged parent. So we grow up believing we are morally obligated to fuss and coo over any person who presents herself as a victim.

No, I didn’t believe these men were literally women. But I did believe I had a moral duty (it works as a religion because it is one) to say that I believed it and to act as if it were true. Fortunately for me, this cognitive dissonance was so severe that I didn’t keep this stance for long.

“Trans” was the first chink in the armor of my leftism. But rejecting it didn't mean letting of my conviction that ...

America is an exploitative, racist, misogynist hell

I’m afraid I did believe this in the literal sense. Looking back, I laugh at myself. How was it possible to believe that blacks in America were just as bad off after the civil rights era as they were during slavery? Given the reality that women in the U.S. can do anything they want for a career and enjoy absurdly generous legal protections and quotas, how could I believe we lived in a “misogynistic patriarchy”?

I'll tell you how: because the crowd around me believed these things.

Who made up this crowd? A disproportionate number of people with personality disorders. Pathological levels of narcissism, extreme emotional instability, and a victim stance toward the world.

Feminism and leftism preferentially attract the personality-disordered because they give mean, lazy, self-centered people excuses to act the way they do and blame their bad actions on outside boogeymen. Capitalism. Men. Colonialism. Heteronormativity. White people.

The point I’m trying to get across is that the beliefs held by people captured in a leftist frame of mind don’t, and don’t have to, have any relationship to reality.

You can’t break these beliefs by presenting objective facts, because these people don’t believe that objective facts exist. Or they do so only when those facts are convenient for their emotional goals.

This is why they get angry or tearful, or scream at you when you offer an article that questions their belief in vaccines, or in "the patriarchy," or in the idea that black people are systematically killed by police.

A deep part of their mind knows that what you’re saying is true, but that is intolerable. Therefore, they punish you with tantrums and reputational smears that get you kicked out of social groups or cost you your job.

Once you understand it as a social contagion, it's only natural to ask ...

Is there a cure for leftism?

The answer is also yes and no. Frustratingly, there’s no technique you can use on your leftist son, or wife, or best friend that will snap them out of it. Human mentation and emotion do not work that way.

We’re not dealing with ordinary political disagreements that we remember from a more collegial past. These leftists are in an actual cult. The same rules apply as do for any cult. They’re not tethered to facts, their commitment is entirely emotionally driven, and no presentation of facts will make any difference.

No one could have “changed” me from a leftist lunatic into a (I hope) saner conservative. I had to face the wall on my own, so to speak. I had to hit rock bottom, as we say of alcoholics.

For me, that came from a confrontation with the reality of how disturbed and morally depraved my own mother was, a confrontation that happened in 2016. A lifetime of abuse I’d rationalized away could no longer be excused. I saw my mother for what she really was — an unstable, vicious narcissist who exploited her loved ones — and my false but well-constructed view of the world started to crumble.

It kept crumbling. After I saw the truth about my family, I saw the truth about my chosen friends and political circle. Surprise! The same resentments, exploitation of others, false claims of being a victim when one is actually the perpetrator — all of these that I saw in my mother, I now saw in the social and political world I’d lived in all my adult life.

Becoming a small business owner dependent only on myself for my livelihood, and moving to the country, cured the last bits of anti-capitalism I had left.

As someone who made it out, I want the same for every poor brainwashed member of the leftist cult — especially people I care about. But experience has taught me that they have to want to be helped first.

In other words, when it comes to your leftist loved ones, the best practice is to ...

Be available, but don't tolerate abuse

Make it clear that you'll be there when and if they’re ready to talk. Be willing to explain your point of view, and offer them articles or videos that demonstrate why you believe as you do.

This may seem rather passive; unfortunately, it's really all you can do. You can’t make them have that final confrontation with reality. That either happens for them or it doesn’t.

At the same time, I urge you not to tolerate their abusive behavior. Expect the same level of respect and civility from them that you expect of anyone and that they demand from you (while giving you no respect in return).

If they won’t do it, stop talking to them. Tell them, “I will not be spoken to this way. We’re not going to talk until you’re willing to behave like a reasonable adult.” Then stop answering the texts, block their numbers, do not respond to attempts they make to engage you or provoke you.

They may be misguided, and many of them are indeed at least temporarily psychologically disturbed. But that is not an excuse for their bad behavior.

If we are to get society back on track, we conservatives have to be the adults who hold boundaries. Narcissistic, awful behavior needs to be objected to in front of others. We need to chastise those who take advantage of our loving feelings in order to treat us badly. We must dis-incentivize the greedy, grasping, histrionic emotional distortions of leftists if want this bulls**t to stop.

Good luck.