This question has been devouring my mind forever now. I am at all of the intersections of privilege: a financially comfortable cishet cracker man in the imperial core. The only way I could be more privileged would be if I was bourgeois. I'm aware enough to know that my way of life is only possible due to the subjugation of others both here and abroad (even if I've so far put off reading theory to better understand how that works like Fanon, Amin, and Cope), but I am so entrenched in a social circle of people that consists almost entirely of protofash or cryptofash. Instead of challenging them on stuff all the time, I regularly let things slide - if not feed into it. The closest I can eke out anymore is spouting back the vile shit they imply rephrased to be completely mask off and feigning agreeing with them. Instead of shocking them, this seems to please them more, and I'm not sure if I'm "feigning" agreeing with this shit so much as actually agreeing with it.
To give you an idea of the level of kkkrakkkery we're dealing with here, I'll rattle off some things I remember off the top of my head:
- Saying Tortuguita (I'm using his name, it's not like they fucking knew it) had it coming when he got shot protesting cop city. In fact, they have no issue with cop city at all.
- Saying that redlining was effective at "isolating the problem" with respect to a very poor town in the county I live in. When I asked if he considered redlining based, he answered in the affirmative.
- Celebrating the shiny sparkly treatsball district that is being built in our city, displacing shittons of people living there in an act of gigagentrification.
- Regularly making jokes about "indians", e.g. "Bruh sickass gun, bruh imagine if you were using that gun to fight indians".
- Large, prominently placed blue lives matter car window sticker
- Going on about how important it is to keep property values high
- Trying to convince me to invest in starting a meme coin that we could attract investors with and and then sell our coins in what is, after me asking him multiple times, "not a rugpull"
- Spouting off about how Pakistan is invading the UK because all the people immigrating there are military age males
- Always referring to undocumented immigrants as "illegals"
- Celebrating a bill to fund a local LGBT center being shut down due to some made up sex predator bullshit whipped up by libs of tiktok
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the vast majority of my already pretty small friend group should get the wall. At the same time, I find it hard to justify cutting them out of my life because they haven't done toxic shit to me and I've known these people most of my life. It doesn't help that I still live with my parents in my hometown and that they're the only people I see somewhat regularly in addition to my parents and a hand full of extend family. No matter how I try to justify it to myself, by handling this problem as I currently am, I am committing a serious liberalism.
What's tearing me apart is that I know that while me sticking to the status quo is infinitely easier and more comfortable than getting involved organizing, having principles, and sticking my neck out - something that is guaranteed to alienate me from basically everyone in my life. But I also know, even from a selfish perspective, that the knowledge that I was too much of a coward to actually help make a better world will be torture the further in life I go. It's already torture now.
I've talked to my therapist about cutting people out because of politics and she said it wasn't worth it, but she's also a lib, so I'm not inclined to trust her on that one.
Edit: Thank you to those who answered. You've all given me a lot of food for thought, and it's comforting to know there are options I can take besides the nuclear one. I've already been paying the highest dues tier to a local Marxist org but had stopped reaching out to them, partly due to my depression and partly because it's hard for me to rouse myself to drive into the city. The last time I had done anything with them in meatspace was some canvassing to support the UPS strike. They do have online meetings though, so that at least gives me a way to stay involved even if I can't rouse myself.
Apologies for not directly replying to anyone's comments. Trying to think of good responses for comments on an effort post is hard.
wow. i've heard some toxic ass waste before and your bullet list is choice, but this is a new one on me.
anyway, i'm not sure i have relevant life experience enough to give advice. in my late 20s i left my home town to go join a friend in a shitty-pay job doing conservation type work. i moved further and further away to places where i knew no one, to chase seasonal outdoor work. i would make and leave friends through my own moving or through the transient nature of seasonal, low pay work. the benefit was that pretty much everybody gave a shit about the environment, the effort/value of physical work, and nobody was really caught up in consumerism. the point being, it was easy to meet people with shared values and shared social availability just by working.
i bumbled my way back to school around 30 for something related and it turned into a career in my 40s where i was able to put down roots and now exist in a completely different social context than the one where i grew up. i certainly don't live in some socialist utopia. the regional political machines here are all center-right or worse, but i have my people and my work to make things better.
i quit FB and all of that years ago, but by all accounts my original high school cohort is almost entirely reactionary assholes. where i grew up is a laboratory for developing reactionary politics. i barely keep in touch with any of my old "friends". the last time i visited family and made an effort to appear at some function i had expected to be chill, talking to some of them was like talking to an alien that learned how to speak by listening to talk radio. some are absolutely disgusting people. i pushed back a lot more than i would have if i still lived there, recommended some literature, and haven't been back for probably 6 years.
i don't really recommend trying to track down seasonal conservation work, because it can and generally is highly exploitative. it also has a well above average chance to result in injury and there are no medical benefits. but what i would say, is look for ways to make your professional/working situation incorporate some of your values. we tend to spend half of our waking life at "work", so if you can make that time be spent in relative service to your values, it can be an avenue to a new social environment. if you combine that with moving to a new community/place/area, it can be a whole new world.