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9/11 was a big turning point in my experience. American conservatives that I considered online friends were simple impossible to reason with within days and completely alien beings after a few weeks.

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Interesting. Things did change on 9/11 but it seemed incremental to me. Before that was the constant investigation of Clinton by Gingrich, the dog whistling of Reagan, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and before that to McCarthy and so on.

This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.

Yes. Almost everything about our current situation can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Things were much more civil and reasonable before that point.

I don’t know. Nixon had goons breaking into the DNC headquarters (and his whole southern strategy led to racially polarized politics up to this day), and there was that senator who got beaten by another senator just before the civil war. Eisenhower waited in the car rather than attend a meeting with Truman on his inauguration.

Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace to avoid impeachment when it came out. The dude in the White House now did much worse and he was rewarded with reelection.

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