Colonial settlers stealing land from indigenous populations and participating in ethnic cleansing are NOT “innocent civilians”. They are free to leave the war zone they created anytime they like. For Palestinians, this is homeland defense.

We didn’t have much chance to discuss it in depth. He was hosting a local event where selected speakers take about 5 minutes to speak on a subject they are passionate about and he invited me to speak. I told him I wanted to talk about ending the embargo on cuba (which I did) and he said, oh that’s ironic because I will be opening the event by celebrating our right to free speech and saying how my grandfather didn’t have that right in Cuba. We both laughed and agreed we onviously don’t agree on some things, then just focused on boring procedural stuff about the event. At the actual event he elaborated the details I included in op but not with the exact same words I chose

To be clear I don’t think he supports embargoes or sanctions and certainly doesn’t support war or invasions, but he just doesn’t like communism at all and believes a lot of misinformation about communist led governments

A guy I know, real nice guy but super liberal, was telling me how his Cuban grandfather suffered under Castro. Sure enough, when he got into more details, it turns out his grandfather was a wealthy landlord whose farmland got collectivized and he only had to go to jail after he got very vocal about trying to get people to oppose the revolution (in which he was very much the minority BTW, his own friend turned him in)

The architect was actually the same for both, and he designed Mt. Rushmore after Stone Mountain. Mt. Rushmore was originally supposed to depict Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Red Cloud, but this racist mf’er convinced the government to use founding fathers instead