First off, an enormous number of "liberal" friends are not liberal and haven't been for a while. A lot of conservatives are liberals who haven't examined their politics since college, the world moved on while they're still fighting to get black people the right to sit on buses. News flash, we had a black president. The problems in America are mostly of class, not race, and the big cities are the most racist places now. The rurals are actually fucking sick of being racist.
I handled it by being as quiet as I could for as long as I could, but I'm coming out. It'll be easy for people I know to recognize this -- I tend to repeat myself. But I stopped caring.
I left Austin, because the idiot conspiracy theories just won't quit. Austin's not interested to hear they're more racist than the rest of Texas, either. They may conform to some abstract, but all you have to do is look around. Most of America is full of people of all races, perfectly normal people, going about their daily business. Austin's nothing but pretty little white girls.
Austin, Portland, Minneapolis and the other big cities are segregated as fuck.
My friends all know that I'm way, way more liberal than them -- I've always been the political outlier. So when I tell them that they're fucking up and backing the wrong horse, it causes problems in their heads. Some can't handle it and try to set elaborate traps for me, which I completely destroy, because nobody knows liberal orthodoxy like I do and I'm a tricky motherfucker, or they slink together and bitch behind my back. I've got some famous haters, people you may have heard of. Fuck them; I don't have to deal with them anymore.
The rest are all growing up and realizing that politics is about disagreement, so if they can't handle disagreeing, they need to get the fuck out of politics.
Finally, any of my friends who called losing an election "Kristallnacht" knows that they're gonna have hell to pay from me, so they're scared.
