[notliketherest]

> "This strikes me as a splendidly healthy way to approach life online: let your online persona take the criticism, while you get on with living."

If only it were that simple. It wasn't my "online persona" that lost friends due to publicly showing support for Trump online during the election cycle, it was me. It was real and it hurt.

[rainbowmverse]

Every Trump supporter I distanced myself from got distanced for other things, not because they supported Trump. It was the cruel comments (usually in meme form) about me and people I care about that did it most of the time. They revealed themselves to be very different kinds of people than I thought they were.

Supporting someone who's either a very terrible person or panders to those who are raises a lot of questions, but that's not enough on its own. Plenty of good people fool themselves into believing a person like Trump doesn't really mean all the awful things they say and do, and that can be forgiven.

Are you sure it was because you supported Trump, and not because of things you said?

[notliketherest]

Honestly it's people like you who equate Trump supports with terrible people (or who equate Hillary supporters with terrible people) that are the problem. It's a spectrum of belief. Yeah there are white supremisitcs who like Trump, just like there were black militants who supported Obama. That said, what I believe it comes down to is people don't like to be challenged in their core beliefs. When they are, it engenders the spirit of contention, and some people get so offended by this (because they're not use to it) they'd rather shut their ears and shut out the source. In San Francisco this is especially true as the city is one giant echo chamber of liberal progressiveness, which is where I live as well as most of my "friends" who couldn't handle my opinions (I had kept my mouth shut about my political beliefs for years, so they got to know me devoid of that). Shows you what kind of "friends" they are (were).

[rainbowmverse]

>> Honestly it's people like you who equate Trump supports with terrible people (or who equate Hillary supporters with terrible people) that are the problem.

I very plainly said I don't do this (first sentence). The rest of your post is a rant based on you missing that, so I'm going to ignore it.

There are many Trump supporters who are more critical of him than I am, and I'm fine with those people. I don't really understand them, but they seem to get that a lot of his positions and comments are bad.