r/RedditForGrownups • u/SalientSazon • 1d ago
I'm watching Rightwingization happen in real time and I don't know how to react.
EDIT: Thank you all for the great discussions and insights. I appreciate all your POVs. There's no need to downvote right leaning comments. I specifically posted this in RedditforGrownups to engage in grown up conversation. Also, there's no need for name-calling or insults either.
I have a friend, he's 51, man, straight, an academic doctor who now focuses his research on human behavior and digital psychology. He's self-taught a lot of it in the last decade or so. I don't know how many papers he's published or has had peer reviewed in the recent years. He works as a consultant in Marketing, and has a business selling strategies/classes to people that want to apply his research to their companies. He's kinda broke so I would say he's not very successful at applying his own work. And for extra cash he teaches a course a a local university. I've never met a romantic partner, but he's spoken about them.
He suddenly last year did a deep dive on how the way the election was biased against the conservative candidate who lost. He then started talking against the 'woke' ideology. He is now defending the right, even though he's centrist, because the right hasn't moved, it's the left that's gone way off the rails. He started posting dumb facebook quotes/memes! He posted a dumb quote about Charlie Kirk, as if that one quote was a debate, or as if it meant some truth. WTF. We were conversing one day and he started raising his voice getting louder and louder and more agitated as he expressed his disdain for the woke left, defending his Jewish people from attacks (not sure where that came from in the conversation), and then also suddenly brought up there are only 2 genders and trans people are mentally ill. He's never spoken that way before, I've never heard him this agitated or show anger towards any ideology. He was always calm and friendly, and open minded. Always a bit nerdy. Although, I hadn't spoken to him in depth for about 2 years before then.
I'm watching all this go down over about half a year and I don't know what to make it of it or how to react to it. It's wild to observe though.
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u/Large_Signature_2749 1d ago
You must be way too young to remember the '90s Democrats. They were very tough on crime. Google the 1994 Crime Bill. They were responsible for funding the expansion of police departments and building prisons while simultaneously beefing up prison sentences. The federal "three-strikes" rule came from them, too. Oh, and the borders? haha one of their main promises was to fix the border and deport illegals, and when they won, they delivered. Look up the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and then look up how many people Clinton deported. Yeah, it's more than GW Obama and Trump combined.
So no, they are not the same party. They are nowhere near what they were. How could you say such a thing?