all those friends who turned their backs on us are going to start crawling out of the woodwork with tails between their legs now.
It depends. I'm a golden bridge person because there has to be a way back for people.
However, there will plausibly be very little acknowledgement or even continuing ostracism and silence. This is known as the "premature anti-[X]" phenomenon because nobody wants to be reminded of a time when they were on the wrong side of history.
Two of the best known instances are to have been a premature anti-fascist or a premature anti-Nazi.
‘Premature anti-fascist’ was the name by which the Lincoln Brigade veterans of the Spanish Civil War were known by the US Army in World War Two. This service and knowledge didn't distinguish them for a leadership position, it was counted as demerit on their record.
In John Platts-Mills' autobiography (barrister and post-war Labour MP), he recalls being ‘excluded from any form of normal war service by the stupidities of Bevin’. He noted: ‘An anti-Nazi history, was of no help and to have been prematurely anti-Nazi was a positive hindrance … we were condemned throughout most of the 1930s on the grounds that only Communists were against the Nazis and this hostility carried over into the war years.’
Commenting on (British?) veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Platts-Mills wrote that ‘many lefties who had served in Spain were called up or were accepted when they volunteered. Several more got in only after a tussle with the authorities.’
I have no expectation that women who were banned from social media platforms for stating material reality will be restored.
There is a strong need for something like a Truth and Reconciliation exercise to understand how this ever happened but I doubt any of the organisations would cooperate.