Sorry everyone about the violent subject here.
The first time I heard a conservative republican speech, I was in sixth grade. My teacher had just found out two of the students were gay and sexually active. He called everyone together to tell us, and gave an impassioned speech about respect, rules, order, discipline, knowing your place, and all those conservative republican values. I remember it making a lot of sense to me at the time.
The next day a bunch of kids dragged those two boys out into the field, threw them in the mud and beat them with baseball bats. I still remember those boys screaming and crying, clinging to each other as they begged for mercy while the teachers just watched and laughed from a distance.
I learned a lot about extreme conservative values that day. I know now that this kind of behavior is extremely common among the far-right and to them it feels justified. We see it again and again, from putting children in cages to executing the mentally disabled to literally firebombing black neighborhoods. I can’t even count the number of stories I’ve heard from people who have been abandoned by their right-wing parents for not fitting in. The far-right passionately engages in this behavior while the center-right looks the other way (with important exceptions such as The Lincoln Project).
I disagree with modern leftist politics in a lot of ways. So many in fact that some might argue I actually lean right. But at the end of the day, I side with the left because I’ve never seen extreme leftist values cause this kind of violence.