I hope this is relevant for this community, because I don’t know where else to post this. I’m honestly scared to post it anywhere else.
I live in Eastern Europe. I’m a university student, and recently, we got an American exchange student. They’re a very outspoken liberal.
A few days ago, we took them out with a few mates out for beers (they’re under 21, so they didn’t drink, even though you can here if you’re at least 18) to break the ice and make them feel comfortable. We got talking and because I’ve never been to the US, I asked them what I thought was an innocuous question. For some context, I’ve been a communist for a very long time, and joined the communist party the day I turned 18.
I basically asked them: Why would I vote for Harris? How would that improve the situation in the US and abroad? I’m not too familiar with her, but her politics don’t seem too appealing, especially her support for Israel and her incarceration background.
That made them launch into a screaming rant about how I’m a conservative for doubting her abilities and deserve to be jailed for wanting to infringe on the rights of women. There were a few more insults targeted at me for asking that question, I didn’t really understand them. The entire time, I was not even saying anything, I was honestly too shocked to react, but they just kept screaming until they got up and stormed out in a rage after calling me a Trump supporter, misogynist, and a fascist. My mates were equally confused. We tried to figure it out, but everyone is equally stumped.
I’ve been thinking about that entire situation for a couple days, and I’m so confused about their reaction. They even refuse to speak to me now.
What have I done wrong? Can someone please explain? ☹️ I really don’t understand what happened. We have liberals here of course, but even the worst ones never behave like this.
The contradictions are sharp enough now that simply acknowledging the terrible things the dems do/have done the past 4 years can provoke a full-blown chimp out. Trump Would Do Worse makes up the vast majority of everything I hear from them whenever they pester those like us who can no longer stomach the rat race. I think the reason they're so aggro this cycle is because deep down they know that they don't really have a leg to stand on beyond bluanon crap. They can't accept the fact that you simply can't claim to be anti-cop and anti-genocide and then not only vote for them, not only stump for them, but also bleat when we refuse to. It stresses them out to address that contradiction and call it out for what it is, self-interested fascist apologia. This is what happens when your only perception of what fascism is comes from Spielberg movies and other holocaust oppression porn.
If I were you I would probably either ignore them or corner them if you're already stuck in a conversation and ask point blank if non-American lives are worth sacrificing to them to get what they want: Trump crying on election day so they can gloat and over-post about it for the next 4 years and go back to being blind, deaf, and dumb to geopolitics (whilst pissing and moaning ineffectually about SCOTUS and congress every day).
Thanks for the very detailed response. It’s interesting insight.
I don’t think I’ll speak to them again, or want to at all. They have already angered a few other people, and I think they’ll eventually get isolated because nobody will talk to them (apart maybe from the couple other American exchange students). We really did our best to make this student feel included despite their unrelated mishap (calling our school racist because we didn’t have any black people, in a country that’s 95% culturally homogenous and speaks a Slavic language).
Yeah that tends to happen when your country doesn't abduct over 20 million people and take them across an ocean to another continent so they can be used as slaves lmao
The country I live in indeed never did any of that. True, I won’t whitewash it and say that it never did again wrong, but we had no colonies. We were often subjected to colonization (in our case, by Austria)