And, a good friend of 12 years just became collateral damage as Trump & Musk "get away with it because they're stars"

[EuterpeThelo]

71. I'm sorry, that sucks

I had to walk away from a friend that I've known since 1986 over her political beliefs. She was one of my best friends when we were teenagers. A couple years after her family moved away in 1990, I got pregnant with my daughter and we just sort of drifted apart.

In 2014, she hit my brother up on Facebook asking about me. Turned out she lived just five miles away! I was so, so happy to have my friend back, and thrilled to see that she was one of my few childhood buddies who actually grew up to achieve their dream; she is a female rock 'n' roll drummer, has played with a "who's who" of L.A. musicians and managed to buy herself a nice home in the San Fernando Valley and build her own drum studio.

We had a good run for a couple years until the orange hellbeast got installed in 2016. After that, she couldn't seem to agree to disagree and had to keep bringing up right-wing talking points no matter what else we were trying to discuss. She CLAIMED she wasn't MAGA and didn't like Trump, but it was obvious she had to be, let's just say, a very unsophisticated consumer of news.

She had a particular hot-button issue about "supporting the troops," which I know I don't need to explain to you guys how absurd that position is now for any Republican to defend. The last straw was, after my mom died, she called to tell me her own mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness but wound up turning it into an argument about Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. I tried to explain why W. and TSF were 99% responsible and it would've been a shit show no matter what because we should never have been there in the first place, let alone stayed 20 years. Finally, I snapped and said "This isn't what you called me to talk about! You're not going to change my mind nor I yours. How can I support you through your mom's illness?" I never heard from her again.

In the intervening years, I've given my life an enema and two of my cousins, who are R but not MAGA (though everyone around them is), are the ONLY two people I've not cut out totally, because anyone who still supports him now is just pure evil and I've learned they just can't even be reasoned with.