While I don't want to condemn people for cutting toxicity out of their lives, particularly bigoted toxicity that has overbearing detriment towards healthy relationships, it's not a simple situation in all its painful awfulness.
People aren't born or locked into ideological states no matter how ridiculous, bigoted, offensive, hostile, or insane they might seem. The core issue with modern politics, particularly Trumpism, is in the methodology it uses to radicalise people with existing predispositions or susceptibility towards shared ideological values. The goal is to target these people, deconstruct their opposing values, and radicalise them into fanatical, cult-like allegiance to the ideology, usually through classical propaganda techniques now accelerated and emulated by a digital age.
It doesn't excuse their bigotry, however it manifests. Not even slightly. But that's how radicalisation is so effective; divide susceptible individuals and isolate them from support networks, foster fear of conflict, nurture ideological absolutes, erode critical thinking and reasoning, and provide them with the illusion of a warm, welcoming community within that ideology. It's precisely the same methodology that every group aiming to ideologically radicalise uses, whether it be Trumpism and white nationalism, or Islamic radicalisation, or your run of the mill cult, and anything/everything in between.
I've lost a couple of friends to Trump-like thinking, and I'm in Australia. One, a once close friend of mine, married a guy who turned out to be literally a white nationalist/Nazi supporter slowly but surely infested her brain with conspiratorial QAnon bullshit. Now it's the "SJW left" ruining everything, Trump's got it all worked out for America, 5G is giving is covid, Melbourne is under fascist tyranny (we're in lockdowns, and the irony of this statement from her is palpable), yadda yadda.
Shit fucking sucks. I guess the point of my post isn't to dismiss the hardship and toxicity, so much as highlight how fucking insipid this kind of stuff is, or more how dangerous it is in a digital age. Ideological radicalisation has only gotten easier thanks to The Internet, and radicalisation itself has been a challenge for all of human history. It's an extraordinary mental challenge to reconcile retaining relationships with your loved ones while they've fallen victim to said radicalisation, balancing the knowledge that their ideological values are genuinely harmful to many others, they're ultimately arbiters of their own destiny, yet in the same breath isolation and ostracization is precisely what those radicalising want. There's no easy answer, solution, or methodology to combat this. Both as an individual (what you should/shouldn't do, for them, the relationship, and your own health), and on a broader social level. But it is, absolutely, one of the biggest challenges of a modern world and something that is not going to go away for a long time. It's going to require some fundamental reevaluations of our social framework and education.
