[Desabafo] Found out that a group I'm kind of a part of has many very conservative and extremist people

First of all: Desabafo is an idiom in Portuguese which means "to get things off your chest, when you're upset about something". I didn't find a one-word English equivalent, but, hey, at least your learnt something :P

Anyways, I'm a Brazilian man in my mid 20s and I can speak English and Spanish pretty well (at least, I think), but I don't get many opportunities to practice both languages verbally. I found this local group "poliglotas" which hang out in a restaurant every week for 2 hours to practice foreign languages (mostly English). I actually liked this group a lot and it's helping me get better at talking, each week there's a theme so we have something to guide the conversation

The thing is, yesterday's theme was "patriotism" and, as you can guess, the conversation got to politics pretty fast. And... it was weird...

The conversation started with Brazil vs US patriotism, but it quickly went to how the US border control policies are justifiable, how in the scandal about the children of immigrants being separated from their parents is the parent's fault. There were a few rebuttals mostly from me and one other guy

Then it went to the problems we have with Brazil and how it could be solved. The arguments presented were to inflate the sense of nationalism, taking votes away from people who they felt were not qualified to choose their own politics, one of them specifically feels that we need a dictatorship and gave compliments to people in the veins of "Rodrigo Duterte" the infamous guy from the Philippines and even mentioned things like how Hitler was great for Germany, just not the rest of the world (wtf). Needless to say, I didn't agree with anything about it and just decided to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the meeting

The most extremist one though did want to hear my opinion, which I said very non-confrontational way "we need stability, we can't keep changing our government whenever things go bad. We need to choose a path and stick with it" but I also took the opportunity to talk about the things we lose with a dictatorship: freedom of speech, transparency, people being alienated

And they countered by saying that in democracy people are alienated because of "fake news" and that giving rights to people is no good if they don't know how to use them. The worst argument in my opinion though is how an older woman said that our people are like children who can't take care of themselves, so they need a parent to give the rules and take care of them until their old enough to be able to take care of themselves

Their mindset border those of a conspiracy where democracy is actually hurting people and that we need some saviour to free us from some unknown enemy force. It really left a bad taste in my mouth, I think I'll keep going there because I don't think someone's political opinion defines who someone is, but it's a little hard to swallow this last experience I've had

Pheew, making this desabafo made me feel better :)

Thanks for reading, feel free to share your opinions about it or to make a desabafo of your own!