To have been as close as you two were and then to have it ripped away--it's very painful and hard to get away from.

My deep condolences.

I’ve experienced it, too. The other friends in our group are treating it as a death, all but having a mock funeral. Talking about her as if she’s gone from the earth, not just our lives. I hope you find better friends and better times.

She didn’t just drink it, she has drunk it all of her life, she just put the cup down for awhile until it was time to drink it again.

But not to the extreme until he retired ( it was always his way or the highway). His consumption of non stop fox news brought out the worst in him. My parents were FDR union democrats growing up. That all changed a few years into retirement. He drank the Kool-aid when trump ran in 2015 and my mother followed. After my mom's passed in 2017, I could no longer tolerate my dad's ranting on how the the Democratic Party had gone woke. I cut all ties with him. He passed in 2022.

To see someone you love turn into someone else that you no longer recognize is especially heartbreaking.

I don't know what happened to change him, but he did an abrupt 180-degree turn in his politics.

Went from happy-go-lucky flower-child hippie to hardcore asshole, seemingly overnight.

He died from COVID after refusing vaccine and treatment. Said COVID was a hoax and the vaccine was deadly.

That type of ignorance is exhausting to be around.

brainwashing / propaganda operation. The only cure is a mental health professional well versed in deprogramming .

However many Americans were lucky enough to receive a good education and we know how to turn off the TV set.

"click" ... bye-bye...

For adult children with parents who are showing signs of frontal temporal dementia (personality changes) or dementia (memory impairment).

I suggest you send her a copy.....with your final Goodbye.

Having said that, my father was 'MAGA' most of my life. His turn to conservatism was when he became a part of the NYS Department of Corrections. (It reinforced his racism and bigotry) He was one of the first to get on the Limbaugh bandwagon.

I maintained my relationship for years after he called me a feminazi-- even though he never condemned Hitler. (He's dead now. I have his English printed version of Mein Kampf)

At a very specific point in my life, I walked away. When he died, I knew I had done my best. He rejected me, my sisters, and eventually all of his friends.

Maybe your friend would appreciate this. I am so sorry for your hurt.

Pod People!!!

It's shocking reading it.

A friend of my mother's was such a die hard Trumper that she was posting Trump as Jesus images five years ago. She extolled the virtues of Trump so much on social media, that even her fellow MAGA friends were asking her to tone it down.

There was no way I thought she'd ever change, and I made no effort to bring her to her senses. I had given up on her completely.

I was wrong. She is now officially anti-Trump. What pushed her over the edge was the war in Iran. Likewise the tariffs, Epstein files, price of gas and other things may have played a part. She used to and maybe still does listen to Alex Jones and that could have also swayed her.

Her conversion suggests that some hard core Trumpers can and do change.

I think as long as she's with The Asshole, it will continue.

She may be lost, but research shows even just a couple weeks of staying off Fox News and right-wing social media, and watching CNN instead transforms people back... until they start watching Fox News again.

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_happened_when_fox_news_viewers_watched_cnn_for_a_month

...some sort of national "recovery program."

Something like Exit Deutschland on a big scale.

Showcase recovering MAGA folk.

More attention on the heartbreak of losing loved ones to the brainwashing.

We need to move from the current us vs. them-ism where we write "them" off as evil people that deserve nothing but our condemnation, to a serious examination of the snowballing social problems the multibillion dollar far right noise machine kicked off, which is being accelerated at an unbelievable pace by social media algorithms fomenting anger and hatred that are sending an unbelievable number of Americans into rabbit holes that just keep getting more and more and more bizarre.

We need to take on Christianism Nationalism, while being very, very, clear that we are not condemning Christian faith.

We need more documentaries like the 2015 Brainwashing of My Dad

But after rewatching the film of the musical "1776" on Saturday, I clocked the "Cool, considerate men" goose-stepping to the refrain "To the right, ever to the right, never to the left, forever to the right", you realize that they are the ones moving radically away from the center. It's no wonder they call Democrats radical leftists, because they can't even see the center from their perch in Fascist territory.

Hammer the Fascists. They moved away from the rest of us, just like they did in the 19th century.

Sometimes it is self induced, but mostly it is due to external factors.

'Personality reconstruction' - just a polite way of saying brainwashing.

And no one is immune, so be on your guard.
(HINT: don't watch Fox Spews.)

Here’s to a happy ending, if possible.

But I suspect you started losing her when asshole came onto her life.
Now I wonder when either asshole and/or Trump are no more, will you welcome her back onto your life?

And it IS a great loss to lose a dear friend with whom you share so much history.

Something similar happened to me with a decades-old friendship. It still hurts.

Consider the current version as an Alien Shapeshifter.

It's the only logical explanation.

It fucking sucks. One of my best friends from high school and I used to hang out all the time. We even went to rallies like an anti-Prop 8 (the California gay marriage bill) together. But then one day he fell for the Fox Kool-Aid. I went over to his house because we were going to go out and have a couple of beers and he's like "Hey I really like this Glenn Beck guy!". Instant puke. It only got progressively worse from there. A couple of years later, he was into full blown Alex Jones conspiracy theories.

We and a couple of other friends got together after COVID restrictions were lifted and found out that a mutual acquaintance of ours was in January 6th and was actually part of the mob that was entering the Capitol. He also took a vacation in 2020 when everything was shut down and went to the Sturgis biker rally. He didn't own a motorcycle. It was pretty much over by then.

I wish I was kidding.

I’m not so very social or outgoing, but when i do have conversations I’d prefer to have the skills to make the most of them.
I feel that it is a dire emergency to learn how to knit the fabric of the country together, and to be equipped to share some counter-programming or to be more precise and engaging.

she have Stockholm Syndrome? Maybe accepting Asshole's opinions and behavior is emotionally necessary for her marriage to survive, or for her to survive.

And sorry she hooked up with an asshole.
I'll hope she'll turn around some day.

because I am afraid they will be magats and I will have to cut them off. Otherwise, if I don't find out I can still pretend they are all ok.

In my case it was my older sister. I still love her, but we have very little contact anymore.

She married a guy who was in St. Ronny Raygun's administration for both terms, and she drank the Rethuglican Kool-Aid by the gallon. She became a rabid MAGAt and dumped me when I said I didn't want to have dinner at T💩p Tower when we met in Chicago five years ago. It's all good, because I prefer my friends who aren't brain-dead, soulless fascists.

My wife has lost several friends to MAGA. Some have gone MAGA but they remain friends because they don't talk about it. In most of the cases it's because their man has told them to be a Trumper. It's hard to know that nastiness has been in there the whole time. Again, I'm sorry

in all the same total absurd bullshit. I watched it happen to both my parents.

They became magaloons in 2016 and we no longer talk. Both of them had lousy childhoods with horrible fathers and married guys who were pricks and they ended up divorced.

I count at least 10 who I used to engage with. No more.

It is the politics of enflaming people’s base feelings or emotions; primarily fear, resentment, hate, and greed. Fox does that very well. On Fox, there is never any appeal to reason, or any intelligent discussion based on facts. There is only a play on the viewers’ base emotions, by providing them with a constant stream of enemies (libs, immigrants, minorities, etc.) to further excite whatever stirrings of fear, resentment, hate and greed that were already in the minds of those viewers. Reason cannot work against that.