r/politics • u/Arrest_The_President • 9d ago
Will Trump chicken out of the presidential debate? Probably. He's a Grade-A coward. Soft Paywall
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/06/25/trump-biden-presidential-debate-cnn-rigged/74195698007/
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u/OneWholeSoul 9d ago edited 9d ago
He's someone I was close friends with in real-life for a bit over a decade, then stumbled on him on Reddit using the same username he always did when we gamed online, and I was disturbed by the sort of things he was posting and how aggressively he was posting them, because he thought he had anonymity.
"Blacks have lower IQs but they're better at physical labor."
"It's OK to discriminate against blacks as a landlord because blacks lower property values."
"Women should be subservient to men, especially if they're married."
"All gays are coming from your children and need to stop shoving their existence down our throats. They're lucky we don't stone them to death like Islam does."
And so on, and so on.
I confronted him about it and told him that what I was seeing him say online was impossible to reconcile with being his friend, especially as a bi-racial gay man, myself. His response was to tell me that he'd never said any of that, and I pointed out it was literally all in writing, so that wasn't going to work. He countered that it's my own fault for being too sensitive and "choosing" to make this "something that affects our friendship." Also, I'm a stalker.
I check in on his commenting every once in a while to see if he's changed at all or - as has actually happened - to see how much further he's fallen. If this is who he wants to be, then clearly he wants people to know since he's voicing it online, and I'm just helping him out by signal-boosting him and making sure people know who he is when they're debating and conversing with him, instead of who he pretends to be to appear to have a moral high ground.
This is someone I watched for years angrily railing against "materialism" and "money-loving" and insisting that there's no such thing as systemic racism, casually professing that he wholeheartedly supports systemic racism if there might be money in it.
Oh, I almost forgot:
"Chinese and Indians are an inherently dirty people. Have you ever been to the bathroom in a Chinese restaurant?"
I think a lot of it might be externalized self-loathing? At least on the gay parts? He's always been a huge proponent of gay conversion therapy, like, to a weirdly invested and insistent degree, and one day I was just flat-out like: "Why is something so horrible such an important thing for you to always defend?" and his response was this weirdly cagey "Some people just really depend on and need it," and suddenly I'm remembering things like he telling me I can sleep on his couch for the night before I hit the road after turning in the keys on my own apartment that day but then a gay comedic scene coming on in the movie we were watching and suddenly he shuts off the TV and is like "Well, I should head to bed, you can let yourself out." So I just, like...lifted my suitcase and box and slept in my car.