Have Political Differences Affected Your Personal Life?

With the way political divide is a constant thing whether you are on social media, watching the evening news, or just chatting with a stranger (somehow political preferences seems to come up even when specifically avoiding it!) I'm sure many people here have run into a few, shall we say, nutjobs. You know folks who blow everything out of proportion, get so ticked off with you for not agreeing completely with their views, or otherwise seem obsessed with yammering on about their hatred of this politician, that policy, or how the wrong word or phrase has offended them and thus shattered their entire world. I mean I remember hearing countless stories during the election of families being torn apart over differences and I honestly thought it was all just unique, overblown cases with overly sensitive yahoos involved.

Boy was I ever wrong.

Just yesterday I was chatting with a friend, a guy I have known since Junior High, a highly educated man who tends to be rather centrist on many issues. I'm used to this guy basically either being highly reasonable or doing the whole fence sitting thing in hopes of not aggravating anyone. Much as I hate the whole “I'm neutral, consider me Sweden” approach at least our conversations tended to be civil. Apparently after all these years only now is my being a conservative cause for alarm. Not just alarm, but angry ranting and threats, including vowing to “out me as a conservative” so that my writing career is destroyed before it even begins.

I kid you not, he has sworn to make sure everyone is so offended by my being a conservative that when I release my books (non-political fantasy stories with dragons, magic, and a cowboy wizard or two) my reputation would be trashed before its even built. He hit ever single buzzword too including bigot, Islamaphobic, Homophobic, sexist, and claiming that as soon as people realize how wrong my views are they won't want to read anything I write.

Now the reason I bring this insanity up is because I am curious if this is just a case of me knowing a whack job who can't agree to disagree and remain friends or if anyone else here has experienced something similar, even if its just a family member or friend turning on you simply because your views are not lock-step with their own?

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Have Political Differences Affected Your Personal Life?