The screenshot above is from a recent Facebook post. The person writing it is someone I have known since we were sixteen, that is forty years of friendship, we were best friends for a lifetime and in his post, he’s talking about me.

We built things together later in life. I spent weeks helping him with renovations and saved him several thousand dollars by constructing his pergola with him. It was during that more recent period of practical work that the conversations which ultimately ended the friendship took place. Until then, those years had been ordinary and largely free of ideology. Friendship, as I understood it, was simply the willingness to show up for each other without a political loyalty test.

Somewhere along the way that changed. His view of the world appears to have been absorbed almost entirely by the prevailing consensus of social media and mainstream commentary. Opinions are no longer formed and then tested; they are first checked against what the group already considers acceptable. Independent judgement itself has become the offence.

What he describes in the post as open racism or bigotry was, in practice, my refusal to adopt a set of positions I do not hold: that Elon Musk is a Nazi siphoning public money, that a man can become a woman by declaration, or that the correct emotional response to whatever appears in a news feed is automatic outrage. I form views from observation and experience. That, apparently, is now sufficient grounds for moral condemnation.

He once told me, in those exact words, that he is “woke as fuck and proud of it.” On another occasion he stated, with complete certainty, that people who think the way he does are on the right side of history and everyone else is simply wrong. He has also claimed that communism is a right-wing ideology. These are not the remarks of someone who has spent time examining the historical record; they are the confident pronouncements of a person running primarily on unfiltered emotion and group affirmation.

Once that “right side of history” certainty takes hold, disagreement stops being treated as a difference of view and starts being treated as a character defect. You are no longer merely wrong on the facts—you become a suspect person. I found that shift particularly unsettling. It is one thing to hold strong views. It is another to close the possibility that those views might ever be incomplete or mistaken, and to reclassify anyone outside the circle as morally compromised.

He is not an intellectual or a scholar; he has simply bound himself to an ideology without the grounding that would allow him to see its contours clearly. At his age, that is more than a little sad.

This is the first time ideological conformity has cost me a friendship of that length. I was the one who ended contact. The last message I received from him was about work. I simply stopped answering. Being redefined as a moral problem by the only lens he still trusts was not something I was prepared to continue absorbing.