By Selwyn Duke

“There is no one as illiberal as a liberal with power,” goes the apocryphal saying. And a warning about this very phenomenon has come from a perhaps unexpected source: fitness icon Jillian Michaels. The Left “comes for everyone,” is how Michaels has put it while discussing her “conversion” from leftism. What a conversion it was, too, as the fitness trainer has said that she “felt like Neo in the Matrix.”

(Neo, the 1999 film’s main character, learned that he’d been living his entire life in a faux-reality simulation. When he took a “red pill” formulated to arouse him from it, he could see the Truth — and how he’d been used by masters of illusion.)

Part of Michaels’ illusion, however, was self-delusion, she essentially confessed. As Fox News reported yesterday:

“Honestly, it felt a bit like Neo in the Matrix at first because I really did think that, you know, when you’re on the left, like you’re the empathetic one, you’re the good guy, you’re the one that cares about people,” the 52-year-old fitness icon told Dave Rubin on his “The Rubin Report” podcast.

Part of her evolution involved marrying a conservative “who let me know that that wasn’t the case,” she added. “We had very many fights early on in our relationship.”

After that, she said she watched the “world invert. Up was down. Right was left. Literally. And being obese became beautiful and healthy and then COVID happened and that was another crazy moment for me. And then I started learning that all the news I had been ingesting was a lie. COVID did not come from a bat in a wet market and it just — Russia, Russia, Russia wasn’t real.”

Though the cited Rubin Report episode is from 2024, Michaels’ transformation is now again getting some press. And as the Blaze wrote at the time, providing more details on the Covid revelation:

Michaels recalls the Los Angeles restaurant policy requiring that “you had to wear a mask when you walked to the table, but as soon as you sat down you were below the COVID layer and you were all good.”

“It was the stupidest f***[**]g thing I had ever seen in my adult life. It was utterly nonsensical,” she tells Rubin.

“So, from that moment then, you started in essence seeing the lies, right? And then once you see the lies in one way, it’s everywhere,” Rubin comments.

This is why the Matrix analogy is so apt. Mirroring the movie, the world leftists perceive is precisely the world they expect — inclusive of what they consider problems. It’s not actually reality, however, but an illusion obscuring it.

Where the analogy fails is that unlike in the film, real-world reality is actually far more beautiful than left-wing illusion. Leftists, though, do find that reality scary because their altered eye alters it. (“Watch out! The patriarchy will oppress women and fascism will kill minorities!”)

What scares Michaels now, though, is far different. As website Mixvale.com.br informed yesterday:

The mother of two expressed constant worry about political developments, particularly regarding the future her children will inherit. Michaels discussed her concerns with her 14-year-old son, who she described as politically aware despite his young age. She voiced specific alarm about California political figures, including Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist, and former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Javier [sic] Becerra.

• Raman is currently running for mayor of Los Angeles
• Becerra is pursuing the California governorship
• Michaels considers their potential victories a critical threat to the state’s future
• She has discussed with her children where they want to attend college to potentially purchase property there now

The celebrity was so worried, in fact, that she followed many others in leaving California, in 2021. She and her family ultimately relocated to Wyoming.

Pathology of an Ideology

Michaels also opined on what she believes inspires left-to-right transformation. What “converts a person on the left, is when it comes for them,” Fox relates her as saying. “It comes for everyone. Let’s just hope it’s not too late.”

Unfortunately, this is often what it takes, and it brings to mind a story from 2015. It concerned a plan to bring “diversity” to schools mainly attended by the children of white liberals in Brooklyn, NYC. These leftists, mind you, were none too happy to have to finally live with their own ideals. In fact, one actually said, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.”

That this doesn’t sound virtuous reflects what epitomizes leftists: They are low-virtue people, as I explained in February. This brings us back, too, to something Michaels expressed about liberalism’s appeal.

It tells you you’re “the empathetic one, you’re the good guy, you’re the one that cares about people,” she said.

In other words, while “suicidal empathy” is currently a fashionable explanation for Western leftism, narcissism perhaps more often tells the tale. In the least, at issue is comforting self-delusion often driven by a certain psychology. As I explained in 2022:

Many have noted how supercilious leftists can be, seemingly convinced of their own intellectual superiority despite obvious intellectual vacuity. They revel in mocking conservatives for being mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, humorless scientific obscurantists. …

Now, one appeal of supremacist ideologies concerns self-image. No matter how insecure or lacking one may be, no matter how “small” he may feel, he can always hang his hat on being part of an “elite” group. “Hey, at least I’m not like these other people,” the thinking goes, on some level. “I’m special, superior, in the ether.”

Realize, too, that while supremacism is generally associated with racial feelings, it can involve a host of different orientations such as nationality, class or religion — or ideology. And, generally speaking, leftists absolutely do exhibit this phenomenon.

Coming to mind here is the liberal neighbor who told me years ago, perhaps trying to couch a put-down in pseudo-compassion or exhibiting a perverse sort of charitableness, that it wasn’t that I was bad. I just wasn’t as “evolved” as he was (thankfully, since I later realized he was a narcissist).

What this means is that leftists’ self-esteem, their self-image, their conception of self-worth, is tied in with their pseudo-ideology and group association. This is one reason disabusing them of their misguided notions can sometimes be impossible: You’re not merely combating intellectual error but emotional dependence. In many cases, relinquishing liberalism would collapse leftists’ whole world; their self-image and ego would implode. They’d feel lower than dirt.

Of course, lying to yourself (rationalization) reflects, again, some lack of virtue. Yet Michaels deserves credit for doing what we all must: Confess prior error and seek greater virtue. (And, yes, that the fitness icon claims to be “married” to a woman means she has a way to go.)

A good indicator that you’ve gone astray, too, is when you’re following all the pseudo-elite fashions. When you’re wholly reflecting the masters of this world, you’re probably not reflecting the master of the Universe.

This article was originally published at The New American.