One of my friends doesn’t want to be friends any more because I’m not as extremely into politics as he is. He’s far right, I’m center left. He believes in conspiracy theories, I don’t. I don’t care who comes up with the theory, I just don’t believe it. We’ve argued about things before and agreed not to talk about politics, but the subject comes up anyway from time to time.
When you take the position that everything, literally every problem in America is because of Liberals, you’re taking an extreme position on the far Right. I am not an extremist. I live in the real world on the CENTER Left. I see problems with BOTH sides, but lean towards preferring we do things like help the common man.
We don’t show we’re a great nation by increasing the amount of people we put in poverty. That’s failure, not success. I believe in things like equality. Other people having the SAME rights in no way takes away your rights.
I guess I’m just really frustrated that after 29 years of being friends I see someone who was pretty Liberal back in the day, who for most of our friendship could talk, discuss, even argue about stuff without losing his cool is now so far to the right that it’s either all his way or not at all. I feel bad because I know what he thinks, that I’m the one who won’t see the other side of it, and that’s just not true. The problem is I cannot, nor will I ever, trust websites that are on either extreme. And a lot of people claim that’s what the main stream media is, but it isn’t. Being popular doesn’t make you wrong. Being fact-checked, or peer-reviewed doesn’t make you wrong. It means you have the standing to make a claim and back it up with science or data. That’s all I’m saying. If you were really as open-minded as you claim I’m not, you’d question everything like I do and go do the heavy lifting and really research things and then ask yourself if it sounds true or not. That’s what I do and in the past have called out people for making shit up about the Right. I usually say something like “We should be better than this. Let’s get mad at what they actually did, not make shit up”.
Like imagine if I said something like “It’s already been proven the Proud Boys started all those fires in the summer”. I’d look uninformed, right? Because it’s NOT true. Even IF one or two happened to be there they weren’t behind all that. That’s what I’m saying.