Self-Care Sunday
It's okay to drop friends and relatives who have become full-blown fascists!
This is the latest in my occasional series on the importance of engaging in some self-care in order to help you deal better with the fight against worldwide authoritarianism and fascism.
I know that this latest Self-Care Sunday post is similar to my previous post on Should You Really Cut All Ties to Friends and Family Who Voted For Trump? I was inspired to write my previous post after deleting a Facebook friend request from an old school classmate who used to frequently taunt me when we were kids and I discovered on his Facebook page that he is a devoted Donald Trump supporter. At the time I advised that it’s still possible to remain friends with a Trump supporter as long as you discuss topics other than politics.
I’ve since changed my mind and it was due to a recent incident where I dropped a longtime friend who has become a full-on supporter of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement because she had become so completely insufferable in her support for Trump and his fascist authoritarian ways. I’ve become one of the many Americans who have lost a friend to the MAGA movement and I had to drop her as a friend for the sake of my own mental health. Cutting these people out of your life is the ultimate in self-care because doing so will bring peace to your own life.
Recently I became even less tolerant towards Trump supporters after that recent incident where Donald Trump and J.D. Vance literally ambushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House. In fact I unfriended this person on Facebook on the same day that the infamous ganging up on Zelenskyy in the White House happened.
I first met this person years ago when she used to run a series of drawing events that took place in the DC area in various nightclubs where the models were either burlesque performers, belly dancers, or sideshow performers. On top of it she was a burlesque performer herself. She would serve as the emcee while we attendees would draw the models in various poses. I was a regular at these drawing events (which were held bimonthly in the DC area) so we became friends in real life and on Facebook. I used to make posts in my artist blog, Sagittarius Dolly, about the drawings I did at these events where my friend served as the emcee. There was even the one time when I drew her in my sketchbook when she served as the model at another drawing event that was held in Baltimore.
I found her to be quite outgoing and witty. She used to frequently make hilarious self-deprecating jokes about the current state of her crazy life. In short, she was a really cool person to hang around with. I remember after the 2016 election when the subject of Donald Trump's win came up and she basically said something like “Oh my God I can't believe it!” I interpreted it as being just as weirded out by Trump's campaign and ultimate victory as I was. She seemed sane and normal at the time.
She stopped hosting the drawing events after 2018 and sometime after that she stopped doing burlesque shows and switched to being a tattoo artist. This was when her Facebook posts started to shift from making hilarious self-deprecating posts about her life trying to juggle two children as a single parent plus a menagerie (that included a couple of chickens, a turkey, and a couple of dogs) to making posts that had me go WTF?!? One example was that she had started a discussion on Facebook about a certain topic whose subject matter I’ve since forgotten. I found an article on the Deadline website that was related to the topic so I posted the link to that article in the comments. She subsequently made another comment tagging me and announcing that she had deleted that Deadline link I had posted because she said that that site is too left wing. That made me confused because Deadline is devoted mainly to gossip about celebrities, politicians, and other public figures. I would’ve understood if I had shared a link to Mother Jones or In These Times but I would never consider Deadline to be anywhere near leftist.
When QAnon began its controversial campaign to save children from human trafficking she made posts asking why aren’t more people concerned about the kidnapped children. She was suddenly echoing QAnon when she had never expressed any prior opinions about missing children and human trafficking.
It was during the COVID-19 pandemic that her true colors came out and I began to feel alienated from her. She began to denounce vaccines on Facebook to the point where I considered her to be an anti-vaxxer. She also expressed skepticism about wearing masks.
But then her Facebook posts gradually became worse. She posted about being a prepper while she was showing off photos of her garden. She began to echo Trump's nickname for Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe.” She came out as a Donald Trump supporter and she even posted this about Trump shortly before I unfriended her: “I love this man more everyday and I used to despise him. It’s so much fun to watch him dismantle every inch of this corrupt government.” She decided to stop using a certain company's products after that company announced that it was retaining its commitment to its DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policy. She started posting about wanting to “own the libs.”
One of her more relatively sane posts was when she suddenly announced that she had recently moved from Maryland to a more remote area of West Virginia that is close to Ohio.
I don't know what brought on her transformation into a Trump supporter who also believed in QAnon. She never displayed these far-right tendencies when she used to run the drawing events in DC. It was almost like she had transformed into this person I didn't recognize after she quit running the drawing events and retired from being a burlesque performer. She became a tattoo artist but she only posted closeup photos and videos of the tattoo work she did on other people. She never posted about her clients or what they discussed with her, especially their political opinions. I really can't explain why she converted to the MAGA movement.
Her posts had alienated me so much that I stopped interacting with her. I still kept her on as a Facebook friend because I still wanted to keep that one line of contact between us open just in case she sees the light and becomes disillusioned with MAGA.
That finally changed last weekend when I decided to unfriend her after an incident where I finally decided that I have had enough of her. It involved her interaction with another one of her Facebook friends where she posted screenshots of the woman’s comment that she didn’t like and that woman’s Facebook homepage while writing “[Name Redacted] supports Palestinians who took hostage and murdered a 9 month old Jewish baby named Kifir. These people are supporting evil and I’m here to call them out.” She was obviously trying to encourage her other Facebook friends to cyberbully that woman and even call that woman’s workplace in an effort to get her fired.
As for [Name Redacted]’s post, she didn’t write “Hooray for Hamas!” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Here is what she actually wrote that my now ex-friend had denounced as “supporting evil.”
“It seems like you've confused all Palestine people with the terrorist group Hamas. They are two different things. Innocent civilians caught in the middle of a war because of where they live and an organization of people using violence to gain power. I don't believe that Palestinians wanted, wished or are celebrating these children being killed nor did they want or wished for the 13 thousand children of Gaza to be killed as well.
Both losses of life are a tragedy. Pushing the blanket narrative that Palestinian people are to blame is not helpful to understand the situation.”
I thought that [Name Redacted] wrote a thoughtful post where she said that the loss of children on both sides is a horrible tragedy and my ex-friend called it “supporting evil.” Yet my ex-friend supports Donald Trump, whose mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic led to the deaths of over one million Americans, including children. Trump is close to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has invaded Ukraine. Since she’s so concerned about children, I should mention the fact that Russia has kidnapped hundreds of Ukrainian children from their families, taken them to Russia, forcibly adopted them into Russian families, and forced them to abandon Ukrainian language and culture in favor of Russian language and culture.
If anyone is supporting evil it’s my ex-friend through her support of Donald Trump and, by extension, Trump’s BFF Vladimir Putin. She’s not the person I once knew, that’s for sure. I felt a lot better for dumping her as a friend by hitting the Unfriend button, especially since I did it on the same day that Trump and Vance bullied Zelenskyy at the White House.
A couple of days later I began to have second thoughts about my unfriending her on Facebook. I was still naively clinging to the good old days prior to 2019 when she was a really cool person to hang around with. I went to her Facebook page where I saw a notice that she had updated her cover photo featuring a meme based on the Ukrainian flag with the words “Universal Symbol For Money Laundering.”
That indicated to me that I made the right decision to drop her as a friend. It's now obvious that she supports Russia, which isn't a surprise since she now idolizes Donald Trump, who also supports Russia and its dictator, Vladimir Putin. To support Russia is to support Vladimir Putin. To support Russia is to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. To support Russia is to support the mass rapes of Ukrainian women and children. To support Russia is to support the mass castrations of male Ukrainian soldiers. To support Russia is to support the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians in towns like Bucha, Mariupol, and Irpin. To support Russia is to support the mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children from their families in order to be taken to Russia where they would be raised as Russians. To support Russia is to support indiscriminate bombings of places like schools, hospitals, apartment buildings, playgrounds, and other civilian targets. To support Russia is to approve of Putin jailing Russian citizens who have openly spoken out against their country’s invasion of Ukraine. To support Russia is to approve of Putin killing his opponents like Alexei Navalny. To support Russia is to ignore the fact that a surprisingly number of wealthy and powerful Russians have suddenly fallen out of windows since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, with the most recent being Buvaisar Saitiev, a Russian Olympic freestyle wrestling champion who later served as the State Duma deputy and as the assistant to the head of Dagestan.
If you want an even more blunt explanation on how supporting Trump is supporting Russia, check out this video by Malcolm Nance.
My ex-friend accused someone else of supporting evil when she is the real evil supporter due to her siding with Russia and Vladimir Putin. In any case I'm better off without her as a friend.
If you are starting to feel alienated about a friend whom you previously liked but is now starting to openly support Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, now is the time to drop that person as a friend. The same goes with family members. If any of them start to openly admire Trump and/or Putin, cut off all further contact with them.
The thing you really need to ask yourself is this: Do I want to be identified as being with a movement with authoritarian fascist overtones based solely on the company that I keep? If you have fascist friends and relatives whom you frequently hang around with, soon people will automatically assume that you're a fascist too—even if you're really not a fascist yourself. It may even get to the point where people will shun you because they perceive you as a fascist who hangs around with other fascists. You don't need that headache. Drop that problematic friend or loved one immediately.
There's also your mental health to consider as well. Do you really want to be around a person who is such a hardcore Trump supporter that he or she will drive you crazy with all of that nonstop talk about how great Trump is? You will be better off dropping that person.
I know that some of you reading this will talk about how it’s awful to drop someone just because you don't approve of his or her politics. You might say that it’s possible for Democrats and Republicans to become friends and get along despite their political differences.
But here’s the thing. I agree that two people with different political beliefs can be friends despite their differences on certain issues if they both support democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law. But not if a person openly supports fascism and authoritarianism. Because you cannot support the Constitution and the rule of law as a fascist. Fascists tend to disdain democracy and the rule of law. They also disdain loyalty to anyone else except to their dear leader. Fascists will think nothing of betraying a friendship for the cause. Fascists do not respect others who aren't like them. In fact, fascists would rather oppress others who aren't like them than to attempt to be friends with them. That's why you can't reason with fascists. As James Baldwin once so eloquently put it:
“We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
Donald Trump is not your typical American politician. He has never conceded his loss in the 2020 election. He has attempted to overthrow the government on January 6, 2021. On Inauguration Day 2025 the first thing he did upon his return to the Oval Office was to give an immediate pardon to all of the January 6 rioters. Do you really want to associate with a person who supports a president who attempted to violently overthrow the government and has openly admired authoritarian dictators like Vladimir Putin? Now is the time to claim your sanity and distance yourself from that person.
I know that dropping a Trump supporting friend or relative is hard. You probably have positive memories of the fun times you've had with that person. Well it's time to take a hard look at that Trump supporter in your life right now and drop that person from your life. Look at that person as he or she is now, not as what he or she was years ago. The person you knew years earlier is gone now and has transformed into a devout Trump supporter who cares more about Trump than about your previous friendship. Now is the time to drop that Trump supporting friend or relative from your life. You will be better off in the long run if you do so.
You'll probably wonder where do you go from here once you dropped that Trump and Putin supporting friend or relative. I would advise you to look at the below list of my previous Self-Care Sunday posts and take some of the advice that's offered. Over time it will get easier to the point where you won't even think about your ex-friend who supports Trump.
Previous Self-Care Sunday Tips
Contact current friends and make new ones.
Step away from social media for a few hours.
Cultivate a sense of humor and laugh.
Don't ever be afraid to ask for help.
Become a master of the Square Breathing Technique.
Become a tourist in your own area.
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