Having grown up in a small town in Nebraska, Straka knew a lot of people who voted for Trump. “I was really on a quest to try and understand why did they vote for this man who was a racist, who was a bigot.” A friend who is a lifelong conservative contacted him, sending a link to a YouTube video titled “Debunking That Trump Mocked the Disabled Reporter.” Straka was skeptical: “I almost still sort of had that liberal rage inside of me, that sort of thought, ‘I can’t wait to watch this and then tell her how stupid she is for being brainwashed by this idiocy.’” The video was a compilation of footage of Trump performing the same flailing hand gestures and rambling voice that he had enacted when imitating a disabled reporter. Brandon was shocked. “It became clear to me that he didn’t mock that man’s disability whatsoever. Yes, the man was disabled, but what he was really doing was making fun of the fact that this person who happened to be disabled was caught in a lie. You know, it blew my mind.”
As Straka dug deeper into the media’s coverage of Trump, he discovered more inconsistencies that disturbed him. “I even found footage where there were groups of black people who went to Trump’s rallies to support him,” he says, “and when [the media] got there, they actually framed up the shot to cut the black people out so that it appeared there were only white people there. … I started to see that I had been incredibly unkind and judgmental towards all of these people in the country who I thought were horrible people, because the media had made me believe that these people were terrible people, when in fact it wasn’t true.”
When he reached out to liberal friends and family, asking if they were aware of how the mainstream media was manipulating the public’s perception of Trump, he found himself shut out. “People were starting to disengage with me, they were starting to cut me off in real life, they were starting to cut me off on social media. There were all these different things that people were saying about me in order to be able to justify that I had sort of walked away from the camp and walked away from the groupthink.”
For Straka, the turning point had come. As he sat down to write what he calls his definitive manifesto, it dawned on him that perhaps he could create a video campaign that would inspire others such as himself, former liberals who no longer identified with the left’s ideology, and also conservatives who felt their image had been misconstrued by the media, to tell their own stories their way: “Maybe it’s time for the silent majority to become unsilent.”
I will note his Facebook page had 165,000 members as of the day before yesterday.