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I Was A Lifelong Progressive. Then I Started Listening To Bari Weiss — And Everything Changed.
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“No one is forced to take red pills. We take red pills. The question is why.” Bari Weiss at a Free Press Book Club event in New York City in November 2024. A woman hugs her child among the tents at a makeshift camp for displaced Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, on April 1, 2026. Most of Gaza's 2.4 million residents have been displaced, many of them multiple times, during the war that began after Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, with concerns growing over conditions in the tented camps. The author at a recent ICE protest in Boulder, Colorado. Emily Graf is a writer, poet, and editor living in Colorado. She is the acquiring editor at Sentient Publications, and her work has been featured most recently in New Feathers Anthology. Find more original essays on her Substack at emilygraf.substack.com. This article originally appeared on HuffPost in March 2026.