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In reply to the discussion: What was the Specific Event that Made You Realise that Republicans Are Evil? [View all]politicat
(9,808 posts)I grew up in AZ and got my Bach and master's at ASU. Arpaio (which autocorrect wants to be rapacious, so clearly autocorrect isn't stupid) was elected the year I officially started college (I had most of my AA between AP tests and community college classes during HS) and from the first, it was clear he was going to cost the county a lot of money and perpetrate a lot of human rights and civil rights abuses. That it took more than 20 years to get him out says a lot about Maricopa county, and nothing it says is flattering.
I figured out in that first year that people who supported Arpaio bore a streak of self-satisfied sadism. I GTFO'ed from Arizona as soon as I could and I do not go back if I can avoid it. I never got arrested, but I got harassed by the town cops for all of the remaining time I lived in that jurisdiction.
Then I spent a year watching a bunch of serial liars, adulterers, sexual harassers and financial fraudsters howl with rage over a land deal that lost money and a stupid, but private, misbehavior, while destroying a young woman just because they could.
Those four years made a me a liberal and a progressive.
Funny story -- I GTFO'ed to Colorado Springs, the belly of the beast of fundigelical conservatism. It was a vast improvement.