12 October 2025

"My Path from Liberal to Conservative" - a guest post by April Wilson Smith, MPH

Please welcome a member of our own JiP reading community—April Wilson Smith, MPH—as the author of this week’s guest post! April writes the Change Anything with April Wilson Smith, MPH blog here on Substack. She is also a contributor to The Aeon Chronicle, an alternative news publication. She lives with her black rescue cat in a deep-blue city in the Northeast.

Personally, I was fortunate enough to have grown up with old-school liberal values in a Reagan Democrat household, but also in a very conservative culture. Consequently, I never drifted further to the Left than being a moderate. But I know that many of our readers here spent years as liberal Democrats. Then something changed.

April’s essay describes what changed for her.

---

My Path from Liberal to Conservative

by April Wilson Smith, MPH

From “I’m not with her!” to “I just changed my registration!”

I went through several stages on my journey from liberal to conservative. After a lifetime of voting Democrat, starting with the first Clinton election in 1992, I began to move first away from the Left, through the center, and all the way to voting Republican in 2024 and changing my voter registration shortly thereafter. In talking with people who have been on a similar journey, I’ve started to detect a pattern of stages that I will describe here. Of course this experience is not universal and may not even be typical, but see if some of it resonates with you.

Stage One: “I’m not with her!”

Do you remember how Hillary Clinton supporters wore campaign buttons that said, “I’m with her”? The first stage of becoming a conservative is the realization that you no longer agree with the Democratic Left orthodoxy. Here are some points where people may have begun to have these inklings that they just weren’t quite…with her, whoever she may be:

• When Secretary Clinton called those who supported Trump “deplorables.” No one likes to be called names, and many of us do not like large swaths of the country to be labeled thus.

• COVID-19: lock downs, mask mandates, school closures and vaccine mandates moved many people to consider that they were not with the liberal establishment.

• Any number of incidents of Woke wackiness. People from all over the country have told me stories of DEI indoctrination in their workplaces that turned them off permanently to the Left. Sure enough, people do not like being interrogated about their “internalized racism” when they just want to go to work and do their jobs. Others were disciplined or fired for using the wrong pronouns. Men told me that they were afraid to even speak to women for fear of sexual harassment accusations. Parents saw their kids return from school or college wearing keffiyehs or stating that they had changed genders.

• A personal attack. My first big moment, which I discussed in The Aeon Chronicle, was when I was verbally attacked on the sidewalk for saying in a private phone conversation, not a public statement that biological men in women’s sports makes no sense. My best friend was sexually assaulted in a grocery store parking lot and quickly became a law-and-order conservative. People who were cancelled for Tweets or Facebook posts moved away from the Left fast. Victims of antisemitic violence and intimidation often, though not always, have realized that the Left is not their friend.

• October 7 and the days (and years) after were a pivot point for many of us. As a lifelong, non-Jewish supporter of Israel and the Jewish people worldwide, I was horrified at the Left’s glorification of Hamas’s brutal massacre and the characterization of rape, murder, torture and hostage-taking as “resistance.”

Stage Two: Reading things the Left doesn’t like

(Does that make me a “centrist”?)

Two friends introduced me to The Free Press at the same time. While I liked a lot of what I read, I had trouble believing some of it. For example, I thought their coverage of “trans education” in the schools must be exaggerated. How could this be true? It sounded so absurd.

Then I started to hear from friends all over the country that their school-age children were being taught that they could change their gender on any given day when they came into class, and that everyone had to respect their “new pronouns.” That made me more inclined to believe other things I read in The Free Press and other venues I had not read before.

As Substack grew, many of us started to build a community of people who were reading some of the same things we did. We met through comments sections, followed each other, and ended up with vibrant communities like the one here at Jotting in Purple. We discovered that others like us were moving away from the Left, but we weren’t ready for the “c” word: conservative. “Centrist” seemed so nice and moderate, even sane. Not like the crazies we were trying to escape on the Left, but certainly not the people we had been taught to fear on the Right.

Stage Three: Some conservatives are nice!

I never realized how homogeneous my social circle was until I started to meet real live conservatives. My first well-known conservative friend was Mark Judge, whose name you may remember from the Christie Blasey Ford fiasco. Ford is the woman who accused now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault and claimed that Mark Judge was in the room at the time. Mark and I met through an article on a different topic, but after I read his book The Devil’s Triangle and got to know him, I realized that a) the Left was willing to go to lengths that I did not find ethical to get what they wanted, and b) a conservative could be kind, moral, agree with me on many things, and not be dogmatic on the things we did not agree about. I found Mark to be much more open to discussion and debate than my liberal friends, who treated my reading even The Free Press as an act of treason.

Stage Four: My liberal friends are losing their minds!

Back in February, a liberal friend told me in a panic that Medicaid and Social Security were gone, because Trump. I had just researched this myself: I read the memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget, which clearly stated that Medicaid and Social Security were not in danger.

When I told this to my friend, she said, “Do you know how dismissive that sounds?”

I was quite confused. I was simply stating facts. Yet there was an emotional overlay that seemed more important to her than what was actually happening.

At this stage, every check of social media sites where liberal friends are posting reveals growing hysteria and hostility. These people are losing their minds! If you try to speak to them about the issues calmly, you are met with sarcasm, misquotes, and accusations about your character.

Stage Five: Finding (hidden) fellow travelers

This is the part where friends come to me and say, “I can’t talk to anyone but you about this, but…”

Out comes the list of liberal ideas that they dare not question in front of their other friends and family members. They don’t support unlimited immigration. They are concerned about crime and don’t feel safe in places where they live or work. They aren’t so sure it’s a good idea for children to take hormones and have their bodies surgically altered forever at an age when the kids can’t even decide which outfit they want to wear that day.

Saying any of these things in liberal company is like inviting the Spanish Inquisition for Shabbat dinner. Prepare to suffer.

We start to find each other and talk amongst ourselves, but we are afraid to “come out.” We are still calling ourselves “centrist.”

Stage Six: The last straw

I hit this point just before the 2024 election. I was so disgusted with the Democrats’ appeasement of far-Left anti-Israel elements within the party that I was done. The antisemitic graffiti in my neighborhood, the keffiyeh-wearing “protesters” setting both the Israeli and American flags on fire in the center of my city, the gun violence that made me afraid to leave my apartment at night—it was too much.

On November 5, 2024, I ran a gauntlet of Working Families Party activists and Democratic Party volunteers to get into the polling place in my deep-blue precinct. Everyone was happy to see me, assuming that I would vote with them. I felt like a secret agent.

I hesitated for a long time before pushing the button for Trump. I knew he would do things I disagree with, and he has. But the thought of a Harris presidency was worse. The last image to flash through my mind before I voted was my friend from Jerusalem’s beautiful daughter in a combat unit in the IDF. How could I ever meet her if I voted for a candidate who would undermine Israel and throw Jews in this country to the antisemitic wolves?

I came out to the world in a piece in Chronicles magazine called “Childless Cat Ladies for Law and Order.”

The End: I changed my registration to Republican!

Have you done it yet? I bet you will.

I never imagined that I would be a Republican. I do not agree with everyone in the party or everything on the platform, but I do think there is room to move in a positive direction. Like the majority of Americans, I don’t want to live in a country that hates itself, burns its own flag, and judges people as “good” if their skin is brown and “bad” if their skin is any other shade.

Have I lost friends? Of course, but I’ve gained many more. My conservative friends are more willing to agree to disagree, or to just talk about things other than politics, than the liberals or progressives who walked out of my life.

Letting go of the fear that I’ll “get in trouble” for my newfound conservative beliefs has been hard. The days of cancellations and professional consequences for not towing the line on race, gender, crime, and any number of things are not far behind us, and for many are not behind us at all. Readers of my Substack frequently tell me that they love what I write, but they can not be so outspoken because they would face problems at their jobs in academia, law, or other industries. I live with some fear that I will encounter physical retaliation in my progressive-to-anarchist neighborhood, but I keep a low profile and keep my door locked.

Communities like Jotting in Purple are an essential resource for those of us stepping outside the boxes we once inhabited and seeing a new world beyond the Woke. I look forward to meeting more of you as we travel the road of rational thought!