Josh, this is heartbreaking. I have some sense of what it must be like, because I lost literary friends over the public position I took in my first novel, but I must admit (because the core of my politics has remained consistent since I was in the last couple of years of high school), I have never experienced this kind of wholesale "friend-shedding".
I'm hellishly busy at the moment (hence my long absences of late), but if you are really stuck, I am here.
It's a heartbreak millions of people are going through, and none of us expected it. Thank you for the kind words as always, Helen.
You tolerated me during the years I was a reflexive liberal and an obnoxious drinker who posted way too much bullshit online. That's a lot more leeway (and more than I would have asked for) than some of my oldest friends have given me to change my mind in more mature way. I appreciate it.
Hey, I can totally relate! Lost most of my “friends “ too, over the past 3 years, once i broke out of the liberal bubble and started thinking for myself. Now engaged in the painful process of making new friends as a middle age person living in a blue state. Ugh! You are not alone Josh. And you are right!
Outstanding. I could tattoo this on myself. History will look back at this time with incredulity. It is a period of derangement on a scale I am not sure we've seen in modern history. I choose the side of morality and truth, consequences be damned.
I find myself in a similar place with my friends (albeit extremely limited group).
My closest and longest held friend of 15 years is a White woman (whom we all know are the ultra susceptible ones to this nonsense), and it's become increasingly clear how much Flavor Aid (as a Southern, Black woman, I shall not besmirch the good name of Kool-Aid with Jonestown slander) she has actually ingested. Our conversations occur less and less these days because it inevitably turns into some unnecessary political diatribe about Trump or (as of late) Matt Walsh, and how much she likes yelling abuse at him on Twitter (while simultaneously complaining about how often he shows up on her feed...). Or about how there's no grooming going on in schools, that the videos libsoftiktok showcases mean nothing, that it's just teachers sharing their lives with their curious students...
She can understand the women vs trans debate, but still says she'd call anyone anything they wanted her to call them. She understands that pansexual is just bisexual, and how it's really ped0s placing themselves the P. She can even somewhat understand how out of proportion damn near every racial interaction is/can be blown (but still says CRT isn't harmful).
She imagines herself as a moderate progressive, but she's not. I await for the day she tells me she's in Antifa, the way she smugly retorts to some imagined conservative, *The Voice* "Antifa is ANTI-FASCIST, guys. Haha, it's LITERALLY in the name!"
I love her but should shit hit the secret police/informer fan, I wouldn't be surprised if she sold me out for being an Unbeliever. Wherever I'm going (physically and mentally), I don't see her coming with.
Josh, I’m so sorry that you have to do this. It must be incredibly hard to look at that situation and know that the trade off is one between the value of people who love you and the truth of facing reality as it is. It’s hard for me to contemplate the daily struggle that kind of choice must entail.
But your fidelity to the truth, to the real, and to the knowledge that wishes can’t change either of them has made you a source of inspiration to those of us who’ve come to know you through Disaffected.
I hope that someday the friends from your past come to embrace these principles as you have, but if not, know that you deserve the kind of friends who will stand shoulder to shoulder with you against the horde of savages that the Left has become. I suspect you’ve already found some and will continue to find more the times to come.
That’s fair enough. And most likely a moot point. There’s a hell of a sunk cost for the people on the left at this point. To change their minds now would require them to admit that they were complicit in everything from legalized child mutilation, actual institutionalized racism, and the destruction of many of their own relationships. And for what? To pretend that what’s real isn’t?
You condensed a world of sense in this post, all of it with an aching but hardened(as it must be) heart. Most of your readers will sympathize, having experienced much of what you describe as loss, exclusion and heart-rending disillusionment with "friends" and family.
I was reading a good post by Mark Bisone on hypnotism https://tinyurl.com/2xd37y2e that sort of explains how people can get caught up in what 25% of us know to be utter nonsense. See the Stanford Scale, which reveals that roughly 25% of human beings cannot be hypnotized by any known method.
Even so, much of this mind-set is chosen and willfully indulged out of some motivation I can't fathom unless I apply the word evil to it.
When I was in therapy I wanted my therapist to hypnotize me so I could know if there was trauma in my childhood that I had hidden-I am really good at compartmentalization. He told me he would try but that I was not a good candidate. He was right. I was disappointed at the time but now I am very glad I have always danced to a different drummer and have never been a follower. It has made for a more solitary life but then I suppose nowadays it means I have fewer friends to lose.
Oh, please re-think this. Hypnotism is not a window into a perfectly recorded past. No, you can't "access real and true memories that are totally forgotten by you by undergoing hypnosis."
No ma'am. You will confabulate and make up stories, and you won't do it consciously.
This big mistake is the entire reason the false memory/Satanic Panic crazy took off in the US.
Please, please do some more reading. I'm not having a go at you, but your false belief is actually dangerous. To you, and to people around you.
No worries, I have long ago moved beyond that notion. I am happy with myself as I am now, I was not then. It was a passing thought only. Thank you though for your cautionary words.
I'm sorry you've had such rotten experiences. I can relate, to an extent, to that crushing loneliness that comes with quietly losing your friends to this madness. It's hard to realise and accept that the people you've loved since childhood and shared so much with, cared do deeply for, now view you with discomfort at best, like some sort of guilty pleasure. ("I know I shouldn't be friends with a conservative/non-believer, but she's not so bad, just ignorant." Etc)
At worst, they'd sell you down the river in a heartbeat. Better to know in advance. There's better friendships to be had, it's just bloody hard making them nowadays. It's not a social world but a social media world we live in now, and it makes real connections more difficult, nevermind the minefield of figuring out if someone thinks you should be locked up/fired/re-educated for your opinions.
Well written, as usual. I too, have lost friends. I'm unable to listen to their brainwashed, uninformed delusions, and I was never "allowed" to speak on these subjects in the first place.
One online friend of mine, a gay man who has made me laugh and learn so much over the years, used the words "liars" and "hypocrites" on people who were opposed to biological men in women's sport. Apparently, these people were "pretending to care about women's sports only when trans women were involved". As if no one who isn't a sports fan, particularly women's sports, should be bothered at all about the likes of Lia Thomas.
It wasn't the first time I heard this "point" made.
It's not the kind of loss (the friendship with this guy) I can talk about on Facebook. But it does feel like a loss.
Not for the same reasons as you, but I've had those awkward silences where no one is saying anything because we know the other won't agree or doesn't want to hear it. You can tell it's what is going on. And in my case it meant the end of the relationship. What point is there to being friends if we can't discuss things freely without "triggering" the other regardless if we disagree? It's not even an authentic relationship at that point.
Today so many think it's a moral failing to not be on a "side" and that's probably because it is actually a moral failure, such as the case with legalizing child abuse. So there's this moral judgement with the disagreements. However, the only ones seemingly not wanting to communicate about it and rather stick their fingers in their ears are the leftists.
I feel very much the same. I have to be careful what I talk about with members of my extended family, and the friends I see once or twice a year at certain events, because they are all traditional soft-hearted lefty types. You know the sort; flags-in-bio-I-support-the-current-thing people. Well-meaning, nice, kind, willfully stupid and asleep. More afraid of being called right-wing, racist or cruel than they are about objective truth.
I know if I start to explain my worldview to them, they're going to call me a right-wing conspiracy theorist. I see these people rarely, so I avoid anything contentious as much as I can. Eventually, I expect I just won't see them any more.
Hopefully, I can replace them with the Awake, rather than the Woke.
So many of us are in the same boat! The knowledge of this shared experience is such a balm to me. On the bright side, I have gained some new friends in real life that I might not have otherwise.
It's a steady kind of pain that you wish could be experienced all at once like ripping off a band aid. Since life and relationships aren't tidy like that however it instead ends up crumbling over time, becoming ruins of what once was. It can feel unbearable, but I hope those of us who survive to see the end of all this will manage to rebuild on the personal Towers of Babel ruins we've found ourselves left with.
One of the advantages of my being in my 70s - perhaps the only advantage - is my having seen this movie before. I mean this "friend canceling" business but back in the 1960s. This 21st century replay seems identical except that the issues have changed but the anger, nasty accusations, and the ruptured relationships have not. Circa 1965 the hot button issues were the civil rights legislation and outlawing segregation, the escalation of the Vietnam war and the military draft shipping so many of our young men to their deaths or maimed for life, and the increasing push to legalize abortions. Everybody had strong opinions on these issues and shouting matches were common. It was ugly - just like today.
So what happened? Time happened. The passage of time had the effect of causing these issues to fade and, of course, new issues replaced them. Meanwhile those fractured friendships sometimes healed and it usually went like this. The 1960s were long gone by the 80s and 90s. By then I could be impolitic enough to bring up an old hot button issue to test the reaction. What I typically heard was a variation of "That was a long time ago and nobody really cares about those issues anymore." This from a guy who called friends a bigot or some type of hypocrite if they failed to see things his way. Now the controversy just brough a smile and a shrug. And I understood why. Let me suggest that this too will be the fate of today's overheated rhetoric. You see, I've seen this movie before.
I love your optimism. I fear that some of the toxic notions did not die out but evolved, morphed their ideas to make them palatable and like drugs to the massses. They parasitized academia, education, the arts, politics, and institutions only to rise as the thought ccontrolling dominant entities we see today, corroding society at its foundations.
❤️❤️❤️
Josh, this is heartbreaking. I have some sense of what it must be like, because I lost literary friends over the public position I took in my first novel, but I must admit (because the core of my politics has remained consistent since I was in the last couple of years of high school), I have never experienced this kind of wholesale "friend-shedding".
I'm hellishly busy at the moment (hence my long absences of late), but if you are really stuck, I am here.
It's a heartbreak millions of people are going through, and none of us expected it. Thank you for the kind words as always, Helen.
You tolerated me during the years I was a reflexive liberal and an obnoxious drinker who posted way too much bullshit online. That's a lot more leeway (and more than I would have asked for) than some of my oldest friends have given me to change my mind in more mature way. I appreciate it.
Hey, I can totally relate! Lost most of my “friends “ too, over the past 3 years, once i broke out of the liberal bubble and started thinking for myself. Now engaged in the painful process of making new friends as a middle age person living in a blue state. Ugh! You are not alone Josh. And you are right!
Outstanding. I could tattoo this on myself. History will look back at this time with incredulity. It is a period of derangement on a scale I am not sure we've seen in modern history. I choose the side of morality and truth, consequences be damned.
I find myself in a similar place with my friends (albeit extremely limited group).
My closest and longest held friend of 15 years is a White woman (whom we all know are the ultra susceptible ones to this nonsense), and it's become increasingly clear how much Flavor Aid (as a Southern, Black woman, I shall not besmirch the good name of Kool-Aid with Jonestown slander) she has actually ingested. Our conversations occur less and less these days because it inevitably turns into some unnecessary political diatribe about Trump or (as of late) Matt Walsh, and how much she likes yelling abuse at him on Twitter (while simultaneously complaining about how often he shows up on her feed...). Or about how there's no grooming going on in schools, that the videos libsoftiktok showcases mean nothing, that it's just teachers sharing their lives with their curious students...
She can understand the women vs trans debate, but still says she'd call anyone anything they wanted her to call them. She understands that pansexual is just bisexual, and how it's really ped0s placing themselves the P. She can even somewhat understand how out of proportion damn near every racial interaction is/can be blown (but still says CRT isn't harmful).
She imagines herself as a moderate progressive, but she's not. I await for the day she tells me she's in Antifa, the way she smugly retorts to some imagined conservative, *The Voice* "Antifa is ANTI-FASCIST, guys. Haha, it's LITERALLY in the name!"
I love her but should shit hit the secret police/informer fan, I wouldn't be surprised if she sold me out for being an Unbeliever. Wherever I'm going (physically and mentally), I don't see her coming with.
She would absolutely sell you out.
Consider whether it's actually true that friends like this "love" you.
And also consider whether it's true that you "love" them.
Josh, I’m so sorry that you have to do this. It must be incredibly hard to look at that situation and know that the trade off is one between the value of people who love you and the truth of facing reality as it is. It’s hard for me to contemplate the daily struggle that kind of choice must entail.
But your fidelity to the truth, to the real, and to the knowledge that wishes can’t change either of them has made you a source of inspiration to those of us who’ve come to know you through Disaffected.
I hope that someday the friends from your past come to embrace these principles as you have, but if not, know that you deserve the kind of friends who will stand shoulder to shoulder with you against the horde of savages that the Left has become. I suspect you’ve already found some and will continue to find more the times to come.
Thanks Alexander.
Love dies. We don't admit it out loud, but it does. It dies all the time.
I'm not taking anyone back. I'm not capable of re-kindling trust after it's been broken.
That’s fair enough. And most likely a moot point. There’s a hell of a sunk cost for the people on the left at this point. To change their minds now would require them to admit that they were complicit in everything from legalized child mutilation, actual institutionalized racism, and the destruction of many of their own relationships. And for what? To pretend that what’s real isn’t?
Ouch. That's looking into the abyss! Scary at the precipice when you open your eyes and see others falling in.
This resonates with me, as you know. I am losing my liberal friends because I cannot love that which I cannot trust.
You condensed a world of sense in this post, all of it with an aching but hardened(as it must be) heart. Most of your readers will sympathize, having experienced much of what you describe as loss, exclusion and heart-rending disillusionment with "friends" and family.
I was reading a good post by Mark Bisone on hypnotism https://tinyurl.com/2xd37y2e that sort of explains how people can get caught up in what 25% of us know to be utter nonsense. See the Stanford Scale, which reveals that roughly 25% of human beings cannot be hypnotized by any known method.
Even so, much of this mind-set is chosen and willfully indulged out of some motivation I can't fathom unless I apply the word evil to it.
When I was in therapy I wanted my therapist to hypnotize me so I could know if there was trauma in my childhood that I had hidden-I am really good at compartmentalization. He told me he would try but that I was not a good candidate. He was right. I was disappointed at the time but now I am very glad I have always danced to a different drummer and have never been a follower. It has made for a more solitary life but then I suppose nowadays it means I have fewer friends to lose.
Oh, please re-think this. Hypnotism is not a window into a perfectly recorded past. No, you can't "access real and true memories that are totally forgotten by you by undergoing hypnosis."
No ma'am. You will confabulate and make up stories, and you won't do it consciously.
This big mistake is the entire reason the false memory/Satanic Panic crazy took off in the US.
Please, please do some more reading. I'm not having a go at you, but your false belief is actually dangerous. To you, and to people around you.
*No one* can do this. *All people* confabulate and can be led under hypnosis.
Yes all.
No. There is no human that this process "works" for the way you believe. It's not that you're not a good candidate.
It's that no human being is a good candidate.
No worries, I have long ago moved beyond that notion. I am happy with myself as I am now, I was not then. It was a passing thought only. Thank you though for your cautionary words.
I'm sorry you've had such rotten experiences. I can relate, to an extent, to that crushing loneliness that comes with quietly losing your friends to this madness. It's hard to realise and accept that the people you've loved since childhood and shared so much with, cared do deeply for, now view you with discomfort at best, like some sort of guilty pleasure. ("I know I shouldn't be friends with a conservative/non-believer, but she's not so bad, just ignorant." Etc)
At worst, they'd sell you down the river in a heartbeat. Better to know in advance. There's better friendships to be had, it's just bloody hard making them nowadays. It's not a social world but a social media world we live in now, and it makes real connections more difficult, nevermind the minefield of figuring out if someone thinks you should be locked up/fired/re-educated for your opinions.
Well written, as usual. I too, have lost friends. I'm unable to listen to their brainwashed, uninformed delusions, and I was never "allowed" to speak on these subjects in the first place.
One online friend of mine, a gay man who has made me laugh and learn so much over the years, used the words "liars" and "hypocrites" on people who were opposed to biological men in women's sport. Apparently, these people were "pretending to care about women's sports only when trans women were involved". As if no one who isn't a sports fan, particularly women's sports, should be bothered at all about the likes of Lia Thomas.
It wasn't the first time I heard this "point" made.
It's not the kind of loss (the friendship with this guy) I can talk about on Facebook. But it does feel like a loss.
Not for the same reasons as you, but I've had those awkward silences where no one is saying anything because we know the other won't agree or doesn't want to hear it. You can tell it's what is going on. And in my case it meant the end of the relationship. What point is there to being friends if we can't discuss things freely without "triggering" the other regardless if we disagree? It's not even an authentic relationship at that point.
Today so many think it's a moral failing to not be on a "side" and that's probably because it is actually a moral failure, such as the case with legalizing child abuse. So there's this moral judgement with the disagreements. However, the only ones seemingly not wanting to communicate about it and rather stick their fingers in their ears are the leftists.
Painful truth.
I feel very much the same. I have to be careful what I talk about with members of my extended family, and the friends I see once or twice a year at certain events, because they are all traditional soft-hearted lefty types. You know the sort; flags-in-bio-I-support-the-current-thing people. Well-meaning, nice, kind, willfully stupid and asleep. More afraid of being called right-wing, racist or cruel than they are about objective truth.
I know if I start to explain my worldview to them, they're going to call me a right-wing conspiracy theorist. I see these people rarely, so I avoid anything contentious as much as I can. Eventually, I expect I just won't see them any more.
Hopefully, I can replace them with the Awake, rather than the Woke.
So many of us are in the same boat! The knowledge of this shared experience is such a balm to me. On the bright side, I have gained some new friends in real life that I might not have otherwise.
It's a steady kind of pain that you wish could be experienced all at once like ripping off a band aid. Since life and relationships aren't tidy like that however it instead ends up crumbling over time, becoming ruins of what once was. It can feel unbearable, but I hope those of us who survive to see the end of all this will manage to rebuild on the personal Towers of Babel ruins we've found ourselves left with.
One of the advantages of my being in my 70s - perhaps the only advantage - is my having seen this movie before. I mean this "friend canceling" business but back in the 1960s. This 21st century replay seems identical except that the issues have changed but the anger, nasty accusations, and the ruptured relationships have not. Circa 1965 the hot button issues were the civil rights legislation and outlawing segregation, the escalation of the Vietnam war and the military draft shipping so many of our young men to their deaths or maimed for life, and the increasing push to legalize abortions. Everybody had strong opinions on these issues and shouting matches were common. It was ugly - just like today.
So what happened? Time happened. The passage of time had the effect of causing these issues to fade and, of course, new issues replaced them. Meanwhile those fractured friendships sometimes healed and it usually went like this. The 1960s were long gone by the 80s and 90s. By then I could be impolitic enough to bring up an old hot button issue to test the reaction. What I typically heard was a variation of "That was a long time ago and nobody really cares about those issues anymore." This from a guy who called friends a bigot or some type of hypocrite if they failed to see things his way. Now the controversy just brough a smile and a shrug. And I understood why. Let me suggest that this too will be the fate of today's overheated rhetoric. You see, I've seen this movie before.
I love your optimism. I fear that some of the toxic notions did not die out but evolved, morphed their ideas to make them palatable and like drugs to the massses. They parasitized academia, education, the arts, politics, and institutions only to rise as the thought ccontrolling dominant entities we see today, corroding society at its foundations.