As a leftist, I dislike this sentiment. We should not normalize isolating folks on the far right.
Of course, do what you want with your friend groups. Kick someone out if you don’t like hanging with them. But if you can swing it, there are a lot of cases where it can be really good thing to expose conservative folks to leftist worldviews in a friendly setting.
I feel including conservative folks has a much more direct and convincing theory of change than excluding them does.
(Again, it is cool if you don’t want to do that.)
I gotta say, its been hard. Im my experience what happens is the saner part of the fried group starts looking at you funny (you AGREE WITH THEM?!?), and over time it becomes a game of “well maybe if i just said this to them”. There are some people who are just entrenched. It becomes toxic and having to navigate through an increasing polarized environment becomes difficult. And “over on the other side of the fence“, its increasingly just different- different movies, music, social customs, and a lot of open hateful behavior, with little introspection or empathy. After a while it becomes a little hard to stomach the realization that sometimes, people do change for the worse.
