Right wing disinformation is powerful. I lost a friend to it.

[Botany]

Good guy love him dearly but now he is quoting from some group called the Hetrodox Academy and he is now convinced that the real put upon group in America is the white male which is a right wing talking point.

I have known him since I walked into my dorm for 1st time @ Harvard on the Hocking aka O.U.. We have gone to weddings, funerals, hung out, taken canoe trips through the bush in wilderness Canada, and have gotten together on New Years with other friends for 30 + years and now I miss my friend. This sucks.

[Phoenix61]

1. I'm sorry. It's hard when that happens.

All you can do is scratch your head and wonder WTAF happened to your buddy. There’s always a chance he’ll see the light.

[TwilightZone]

2. Heterodox is one of those orgs who claim to be non-partisan but are clearly right of center.

"According to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, Heterodox Academy advances conservative viewpoints on college campuses by playing into or presenting the argument that such views are suppressed by left-wing bias or political correctness.[14]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterodox_Academy

[Botany]

4. I had never heard of the Hetrodox Academy before but ...

.... only took a few minutes to see that it was funded by dark money and it pushed a totally disingenuous right wing agenda.

[Hortensis]

25. They hide behind principled language that uses vocabulary

and sounds notes that initially may seem similar to what liberal academics think and say, only shortly in...not.

A while ago I ran into something by Jonathan Haidt that I was having trouble following, just knew it was irritating and making me both wonder "okay, what's wrong with this?" It wasn't the first time with him, so I didn't care to dig in and figure it out; but because I've been avoiding him for years I hadn't known then what he was up to.

In the end, "intellectualized" versions of the kind of hypocrites who claim to be freedom fighters while fighting to limit freedom, in their case intellectual, or those rale against what everything they want to destroy in modern culture by claiming others are "counter culture."

Sorry that your friend has succumbed to his worst inclinations, like so many, and you've lost a friend as a result.

[babylonsister]

3. I am constantly floored

when I read how intelligent people are so easily swayed by stuff like this. Hetrodox Academy? We can all google... Was he a faux watcher? I feel your pain, I do. I haven't been 'friends' with my two brothers since dimson.

[Botany]

5. The guy was brilliant in many ways.

A hands on engineer. We were 50 miles from any kind of
road in n.w. Ontario on some island in a big ass lake and
He tore down and rebuilt our outboard motor and as he was doing it he looked @ me and said that he was going to find a spring around a thumb screw needed fixing.

He was right. But for the past 12 + years he has been taken in by the right but now it is really bad.

[Caliman73]

27. They use emotion.

Emotion can affect logical and rational thought processes. Those organizations use grievance and that sense that "something is not right" under the guise of "logical argument". It is an appeal to nostalgia and to authority once unquestioned. When people are emotionally aroused, they ask less questions and are more susceptible to poor, but effectively constructed arguments.

[kimbutgar]

6. I lost two longtime friends I've known 30+ to this bs

Someone posted a picture of them at my batcherlorette party in the late 80’s for my birthday. Seeing them I missed the fun times I had with them and now they are gone to this right wing culture.

[Trailrider1951]

7. Wow! I'm so sorry you have lost a friend to RW conspiracy nuts

I've lost both of my sisters to them. One is very fundy "christian" and votes how her Baptist church tells her to vote. The other is just plain bat guano crazy. It just sux.

Otherwise, I'm an Ohio U alumnus also. I was there from 1977 to 1981, and earned a degree in Geology. I loved my time in Athens.

[diane in sf]

8. Engineers tend to have narrow vision. Two of the people in my family who went down the right

wing rathole have narrow technical educations and occupations. They’re smart enough to rationalize the garbage they have taken in. But they’re not open minded or exploratory enough to really go after the question of how do they know what they know.

[Silent3]

13. Maybe it's just the engineers I've worked with...

...but most of the software engineers I’ve known were broad-minded people with diverse knowledge, not just narrow specialists.

[wnylib]

15. I think that software engineers and most

computer techies are less narrow in their thinking than engineers in other fields. That's my experience, anyway.

[Hekate]

20. My sis was an engineer, but because we came from a literary family, I took our correspondence...

...on books absolutely for granted. I assumed all along that she had been required by UC Berkeley to take a selection of classes not in her major, just as University of Hawaii required that I suffer through a bunch of subjects I had no aptitude for despite being a History/English major. Imagine my shock when she informed me many years later that she had been required to take one (1) English class, but she had tested out of it. She said the jokes that got told about Engineers were true — their formal edumacation was incredibly narrow, er, focused.

On the other hand, the 30 - 40 y.o. computer programmers I met about 1980 were just about first-generation in their profession — there was no “computer degree” as such when they were coming up, and they ALL had degrees in the humanities. My husband’s little group of analyst buddies included men and women with degrees in philosophy, music, Latin, French, you-name-it. I never lacked for conversation.

But that was then. I don’t know what the university requirements are like these days for computer programming. I doubt they feature music composition or Latin, though.

[ibegurpard]

9. I've lost family

Cannot tiptoe around their views on things any longer.
I am sorry for the loss of your friend.

[dchill]

10. I'll bet just about everyone here has had similar experiences.

I know I've lost several friends and family. Their rationality and empathy have left them.

[uponit7771]

11. Don't toss just yet, listen first then repeat what's being said in your words then hold your ...

... boundaries by saying stuff like " ... I don't see how most blacks have it better than most whites in a lot of areas but I hear what you're saying..."

A way to get into MAGA logic is to get their trust and their respect by listening first then chip at their logic with as much pithiness as possible ...

So you're thinking the guy who lied about the lethality of COVID in a recording is honest ?! then laugh a little ... I don't know then leave it alone.

Sometimes those little pokes at the logic get them out of smelling the GQP smelling salt

[blm]

12. PragerU gets credentialed

🙄

[maxsolomon]

14. There is a segment of white men doing worse.

There are many reasons why, but the main one is de-industrialization, particularly in small-towns & rural America. You know, Trump Country.

Of course, black men are doing worse as a result of that too. But White Grievance keeps Republicans in power to serve the Oligarchy that sent the jobs overseas in the 1st place, and talking about class and poverty means you're a goddamn socialist.

[ChoppinBroccoli]

16. Happened To Me Too--Lost A Good Friend To The Trump Cult

He decided his "relationship" with Donald Trump was more important to him than our friendship. It ended with him saying, "How dare you call me an antisemite. F--- you!!!" and blocking my number. After he used the term "globalists," I told him that I knew that was a secret RW codeword that means "Jews"--because I honestly thought he was using the term just because he saw other RWers using it, and not knowing what it really meant. We haven't spoken since. That was in June

[radical noodle]

17. I'm so sorry

I lost one of my best friends since elementary school to the trump cult. I understand what you're feeling.

[Hulk]

18. The prognosis is not great...

You probably realize that. There are some that finally see the light, but unfortunately most never will. I lost one of my (6) favorite sisters and two brothers to this disease of the mind. The fox-propaganda outletS are powerful and unrelenting. You would think they are talking about a war enemy when they refer to Democrats, or liberals, or progressives, or minorities.

I just tell myself to keep the old, dear memories, and move on.

[hay rick]

19. I know it's no solace, but welcome to the club.

There are people who I knew would be lifelong friends and now I can't tolerate their company...

When I am feeling charitable I think of my lost friends as victims of a new kind of behavioral virus who fell victim to a sophisticated propaganda campaign. More often, I feel like their character was tested by the opportunity to indulge wishful thinking and paranoid fantasies. Their veneer of rationality and decency cracked and the exposed innards were really ugly.

I know it's not the same, but I have also gained new friends in the last 5 years.

[DFW]

21. I ALMOST lost my musical partner to the dark side

That would have been tragic, and the end of The Freedom Toast. He is from South Carolina and now lives in Atlanta. But he didn’t entirely close his mind, and got “saved,” for lack of a better term, he says, by his respect for me—admittedly, probably not the best reason for ANYTHING, but I’m not sad about it. TFT has turned out some great political satire in the last four years, and I couldn’t have done it without him.

[Silent3]

23. My right-wing fundamentalist sister miraculously snapped out of it

For her, Trump's handling of COVID was the breaking point. That wasn't right away, either. I remember her trying to defend Trump's stupidity about injecting bleach. It wasn't until Trump's encouragement of armed anti-masking, anti-shutdown protests that it really hit.

She's still just as religious, but is turning into one of those rare fairly-liberal evangelicals. She voted for Biden. I think she's still against abortion, but she has posted articles on Facebook that show she knows how the right wing used the abortion issue to manipulate voters, and has made some sort of peace with trying to culturally foster resistance to abortion instead of making it illegal.

While she specifically mentioned COVID as her breaking point, I have to wonder if the Q insanity didn't have something to do with it too. She never went down that rabbit hole herself, and maybe seeing others sucked in scared her off.

[BobTheSubgenius]

24. I know 2 or 3 RWNJs locally, but none "lost" to it. They haven't changed in the time I've known them

[milestogo]

26. Lost a relative to it.

Might as well be dead.