The election of Trump has made it all so much worse. Which makes me lose respect for my ‘lefty’ friends. They simply can’t handle it and in some cases – when I do mention my political leanings – they attack in ways they wouldn’t have even under Bush. Oh well, Such is life,

The best advice for you in your situation Neo is to stay the course with the friends that will still have you and whose friendship you value. Most people that are friends will accept you as you are out of respect – to them you may be wrong but you are thoughtful, honest, and sincere. Maybe they won’t talk politics with you any longer but keeping them as friends will be worth it.

Best of luck to you.

If you had my friends, you would just puzzle people if you said you were a libertarian.

https://www.thediplomad.com/2019/08/toxic-culture-and-red-flags.html

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/06/igniting-civil-war/

Coming from Codevilla — who I believe has been fairly foresightful the last many years — this analysis gives one to a serious pause. Not a peaceful nor a happy pause at all.

Until the Obama years, intensifying with the election of Trump, that is. During the Obama years, I watched their public interactions in places like Facebook stop including posts about kids and pets, work and the house, etc, as they became parrots that were incapable of a conversation that didn’t somehow have something to do with the hard left Opinion of the Day or vilifying anyone who disagreed with, or voted differently than, them. After the Trump election, they literally became screaming, irrational infants. I specifically remember when one of my husband’s friends said, “If you voted for Trump, just unfriend me now.” It’s as if they’re all completely brainwashed, or under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug; they seem to literally believe that they are living in 1930s Germany and/or 1940s Europe and are incapable of grasping that there is a difference between expecting people to follow immigration law and invading other nations and shipping those nations’ Jews and other undesirables by the trainload back to camps to sort into lines for “immediate execution” and “work labor.” Even attempting to debate the subject marks you as evil. I suspect that Millennials have probably not had useful instruction in history, which makes them especially vulnerable to believing lies, but our friends are older GenXers; we learned basic history.

What’s worse are the professional colleagues. I don’t know that anyone I work with now, or at any previous job, is a conservative. If they are, they’re hiding it like I am, no doubt for the same reason – desire to keep that job. I’ve always known that my co-workers at one particular job were hard leftys. Back in the day, years before Obama was a thing, they knew I was a conservative and openly harassed me in the workplace for it. I would never dream of walking up to someone at work and challenging or mocking them for their political beliefs, but even pre-Obama, I had lefty democrats do it to me. And I learned their tactics early on: they would berate me for believing “A” because of reason “B”; of course, I did not believe “A” and what I did believe was not remotely because of reason “B”, but leftists always project themselves into fantasies of what the enemy believes … always. They don’t, and never did, understand that conservatives are not just evil opposites of themselves.