When I was a child living in suburban, upstate New Jersey, I saw politics as something that wasn’t of matter to me. My parents did their best to keep me as far from the subject as possible, so the most I’d ever heard of it was from the occasional, middle-of-the-road joke from some of my favorite TV shows. Sides were never taken, so feelings were never hurt – probably done deliberately to maintain their audiences – but I just assumed that both sides of the spectrum were equally ignorant. Still, we elected a Black president, so surely we were making progress.

This week the Republican majority House of Representative passed the American Health Care Act of 2017. The bill is more or less the exact same as the bill they attempted to push in March, which was aimed at curtailing access to health insurance to families of lower income and reducing the amount of federal spending on the programs and remove the tax penalty put in place from Obamacare. It was cited by several sources as one of the biggest movements of wealth from the rich to the poor in recent history and is also expected to not diverge too far from the previous draft’s expected 6 to 10 million people becoming uninsured, estimated by Standard and Poors Global Ratings.

The bill will reverse the shift of wealth that Obamacare caused and tip the scales heavily in the top class’s favor. In particular, it will only do further damage to the poor communities on both sides of the fence – towns such as Flint, Mich. and an innumerable amount of predominantly-white rural towns out in the “flyover-states.” It sounds rather counterintuitive, as the latter group served as a decent portion of the president’s diehard supporters.

It’s never made sense to me how a political party that’s scorned its own supporters so frequently can still thrive. Things that I thought I’d only see in comic books are actively unfurling in front of my own eyes. Following the vote, the Republicans all boarded busses to head to the White House for what was effectively a party celebrating killing off swaths of their own party’s supporters.

I can understand what drives a person to the Republican Party, but I’ll never understand why they’re so strong. Tossing aside everything with regards to Russia this past election, they still ran with a guy who actively goes against “traditional Christian values,” has a populist campaign while living in a golden penthouse, and was loudly backed by known white supremacists who call for “ethnic cleansing.”

I’m often told to exit my comfort zone and explore what the other side has to offer, but when offered a choice between extremes of protestors with colorful haircuts and the literal KKK, I think it shouldn’t be unreasonable to cling to the former.