My dad’s always been an anti-intellectual prick but now he’s a smug one having his worst impulses reinforced by assholes on the internet and his workplace.
Yeah, permanently from my mom… She refused to mask up. I’ll give you one guess how that ended. ☹️
My dad is an OG cultural chauvinist who on one hand would teach me and even live out some genuinely good Christian values, then turn around and tell me explicitly that might makes right.
My own dad has gone into a weird one. Ue watches a Mexican youtube channel about UFOs a lot. Guy who runs it was involved with that kerfuffle last year with the mummies. But here’s the thing: you’d think UFO cranks just tend towards right wing politics because of how detached from reality they are, right? You know, the cryptozoologists from Disco Elysium, Qanon, etc. But this channel also does a news report on like, real world news, and it’s surprisingly solid, at least most times that I’ve happened to hear it. They are super critical of Israel, they cover climate events and always connect it to American greed causing climate change, I think I’ve heard them be supportive of MoReNa (Sheinbaum’s party) too. A little whiplash inducing when they’ll show a video of a supposed UFO flying out of a volcano then a report of Israel bombing a hospital.
But get this, despite how anti-imperialist this news source that my dad watches regularly is, he still thinks the US is the best country in the world. I think this is basically just brain worms that can’t be much avoided for the period in time and space he lived in, and it’s crazy because he was a left wing separatist when he was my age. US = wealth = good is such a powerful cliche that permeates the Global South.
But here’s the thing: you’d think UFO cranks just tend towards right wing politics because of how detached from reality they are, right?
No? UFOs signal exploratory thinking, which is not what right wing is
right wing is offended by anything that isn’t mayosUFOs being occupied by aliens is an affront to mayos because it means there are more technologically advanced beings. This is why right wingers are increasingly anti–belief-in-aliens
this tendency has been going on for several years now, maybe even a decade
Look, I could’ve phrased it better because I recognize that there are some legitimate reasons to think alien life has reached earth. But the stuff I’m talking about is not “exploratory thinking” it’s flat earth tier stuff. As I said, videos of UFOs flying out of volcanos, urban myths about places on the Earth where gravity is backwards, that kind of thing.
UFOs being occupied by aliens is an affront to mayos because it means there are more technologically advanced beings. This is why right wingers are increasingly anti–belief-in-aliens
Really?
Or they could pull an “Ancient Aliens” and just claim any other non-western civilization’s technological innovations are made by those Ancient Aliens (notice how it’s not really applied to western ones as much; this feels like how Hitler claimed his “own Aryan race” invented lots of these things in other lands)
Really?
yes. “project bluebeam” is way more popular now than it was 10 years ago
Or they could pull an “Ancient Aliens” and just claim any other non-western civilization’s technological innovations are made by those Ancient Aliens
they do that too but only for ancient stuff
This is why right wingers are increasingly anti–belief-in-aliens
The rise in “okay UFOs might be real, but if they are, they’re actually demons, not aliens” has been wild to see.
my family consists of both. my dad believes in aliens, my mom and other family members don’t believe in aliens and my inlaws believe they are demons in disguise
also dad believed he was an alien (and still does for some reason)
i have this weird memory of an alien sighting cd that played a low quality version of the xfiles theme and i think was in spanish, i have no fucking clue how i got there but i was fascinated by the dark green and black color palette
aliens are funny, i like alien’s :)
yea the transition from “new age spirituality” to “new age christianity” is strong
sadly yes. i am alone. this post resonates with me and i am sad to hear the stories you all have
my family used to not believe in reactionary bullshit like chemtrails and antivax but somehow they believe in everything now. i think facebook and my brother in law were at fault for this extremist change. inlaw used to be the cool guy who bought me a lego set and listened to metallica but now he’s a reactionary christian who keeps telling me that i am in a satanic university who supports the lgbtq (has one teacher that asked for pronouns because she was from the usa) and marxism (had a course on marxist analysis in year 1) and that i should watch all that “jordan peterson ben shapiro good trans people bad disproven with facts logic science and GOD” type of shit
it costed my actual sanity, or a lack thereof, but hey they believe in romanian sorosposting to the max. i didn’t describe “sorosposting” i keep saying that word (because it’s funny and because it’s a word i can use instead of saying the actual thing every time). basically the main scapegoat usage of george soros in the far right “community”. “politicians are paid by soros”, “soros planted the lgbtq horde in the country of romania”, shit like that. that’s what i call sorosposting. whatever the far right says and uses soros as “the reason”, that’s sorosposting.
it’s not just the internet anymore. the news ended up becoming the same. romanian news uses all those things and end up being the exact same. you cannot escape the far right’s grasp anymore. you hear it everywhere, even outside
edit: i also think they were always like this, my rose tinted glasses can’t detect that but damn. they basically consider me useless cause i can’t be used as a money maker and shit.
dad used to be a police officer and ended up drinking and shit. one time he threatened to cut my fingers off during math homework.
my mom was in italy in most of my childhood and ended up telling me about this “mussolini” guy who was “good” because “he was so intimidating that when he was leader nobody took coins from the ground”… like what? that was what boomers she worked with believed in so that says something tbh.
so yea i was fucked from the start. i am surprised i am with you all instead of the hellish landscapes they oh so love
the anti-intellectuals in my family all came about as a result of my family’s intermarriage with while people and it’s created a situation where the boomers and gen-xers are now more liberal than my millenial and gen-zers thanks to their white parents.
those parts of my family that never bothered w white people are all either liberal or leftists and our anti-trump conversations amongst each other during xmas about the upcoming cultural changes to my country’s future was a STARK and concerning contrast to conversations i had w the maga & maga-friendly family members.
ironically, the maga-ites were consistently more vocal in extolling their latin american heritage than the rest of my family who never once brought it up; nevermind that they kept getting everything wrong.
Latinos, North Indians, and Koreans gotta be the worst maga-ites overall
I hadn’t realized we weren’t the only ones 😑
Whenever I hear my dad listening to some right wing shit on his phone I tell him watching all that liberal media is rotting his brain, and he always gets upset about it, arguing it’s not liberal lmao
I had someone tell me conservatism can’t be liberal because liberals are woke. No matter how hard I tried to explain what a liberal is, they cannot wrap their heads around it
The “the woke mind virus” mind virus strikes again.
Remembering a few years back when they tried to make “classical liberal” a thing, after limbaugh turned “liberal” into just a slur for dems
The biggest problem is probably realizing he doesn’t respect me as a fundament of his being. If I say anything it’s taken, at best, as just an opinion. An opinion that can be discarded upon any cognitive strain to himself.
He will talk down to me on literally any topic, either a lot or just subtly. I was saying we needed furnace mortar for the wood stove and he told me it didn’t exist or something because of the high temperatures. Fucking stupid.
Yes. Especially with what the US is doing to Palestinians. My grandpa fought Nazis for my dad to learn nothing.
Also seeing this at 88 upvotes while I was scrolling did seem a bit *too" appropriate.
CW boomer mind poison
My ma is a fundamentalist Christian Zionist. She just sent me a video about why she thinks Gaza has it coming, and it’s a Jordan Peterson interview. Since her religious radicalization she has also said homophobic and transphobic things to me, though I cannot tell if she is getting these from the computer or her church.
My father cannot use a computer but has Fox News playing in his home at all hours of the day. By sheer coincidence, he wants all “the illegals” deported and asks me about crime in my neighborhood constantly, telling me (without ever having stepped foot here) that it is “out of control”.
Sometimes, in the very short time frame before I am enraged, I try to teach them media literacy and how to scrutinize WHY a source is saying what it is saying. They both basically just believe that whatever is said on the TV or the internet must be capital-T True. Because they are both so fucking stubborn and opposed to learning, this often devolves into a shouting match.
I try to move the conversation away from this-or-that source and just prompt them to imagine themselves living the life of, e.g., an undocumented immigrant or a bombed Gazan child. But they think they know better than those people, and that if they would just follow the “right” channels (that they heard exist on TV and have never investigated further), they would not be in their situation in the first place.
It is this fundamental lack of human empathy which makes me truly, deeply detest my parents, and which makes my visits to them shorter, and our phone calls less frequent.
They have both made remarks to me along the lines of, “our family bond should exist beyond our political ideologies.” But I have no place in my life for people without human empathy, whose idea of casual conversation is to bay for the blood of brown people.
My partner is of a nationality that my father loudly wishes for deportation, and if we get married (I really hope so bc we really love each other!) I am strongly considering not inviting him or his family. Maybe seeing a normal family of this nationality would be eye-opening to him, but my partner’s family is not an educational tool for an old man who has had his entire life to consider things differently.
Anyway, that’s why I like this website and my community and my friends, because I don’t feel like every expression of human empathy is a trigger for fucking ideological combat.
P.S.: This is an impulse I will never understand, to hear one thing about one topic and suddenly claim to understand it, and reduce all conversation and counter-argument down back to the one thing you heard one time. For people with very little intellectual curiosity and interest in being challenged, they are very argumentative and sure-footed; I have never heard either one of them say, “I don’t know enough about that topic,” let alone, “why do you/others feel that way?”
Yeah my parents are cooked when it comes to their political views. They got extremely conservative when I got older and right now it got to a point where my mum started to doubt vacinnes’ efficency. My parents also believe in a fuckton of conspiracy theories, think that liberals in my country are “communists” and are generally racist and prejudiced in every way imaginable.
The only good think I can think of when it comes to their political views is that they oppose Israel, but they don’t oppose Israel because they feel bad for Palestine and are actually anti-imperialist. They just oppose zionists because they don’t like jews
The only good think I can think of when it comes to their political views is that they oppose Israel, but they don’t oppose Israel because they feel bad for Palestine and are actually anti-imperialist. They just oppose zionists because they don’t like jews
hear that. Several years ago I was talking about the history of Palestine with my dad and it was so obvious to me that he only became receptive to the idea that Palestinians have a right to not undergo genocide when I explained that there’s a significant Palestinian Christian minority. And I’ve had like 4 arguments with him over how Jews as a whole have nothing to do with Israel. The antisemitic conspiracy theory mind is immune to evidence and any kind of nuance is what I’ve sadly found.
When I talked to my dad about Palestine he just said that “arabs and jews are natural enemies” and “they will always fight”. When I watched a play on TV about polish antisemitic campaign in 1968 they got annoyed and said the jews “deserved it” (literally). Unfortunately I don’t see a way to change my parents’ views on things like that
my dad likes palestine because he hates jewish people and called them “thieves and the most irredeemable people imaginable”
and then praised hitler for all the gassing and shit. he once told me as a kid that he would’ve televised the chemical euthanasia of ethnic minorities if he was a president or a leader or whatever the fuck. help
I am very sorry for your dad. My parents praised Uganda’s and Russia’s policies towards LGBT people, so I kinda relate
my parents really hate the lgbtq+ like any “good” christian family. they really love shit against them, and the news goes all in on just showing crossdressers and laughing at them because “LOOK THIS IS A MAN AND THINKS IS WOMAN !!! LAUGH NOW WE ARE OF CULUTRE AND TRADITION THEY ARE SCUM KILL THEM ALL”. it disgusts me and i am powerless against this shit because anything i say will be discarded
i can’t do shit in general, anything i say in the left side kind of works but not really.
my parents say they loved the time when they lived in communism but somehow their memories are covered in iron guard propaganda. shit like “communism would kill gay people so i love it” and “death to romani people” are their favorites. one time my dad kept telling me about “HEY KID, STALIN SAID “IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO DO THE VOTE AND NUMBER OF IT, BUT WHO COUNT THE VOTE” !! LOOK, WIKIPEDIA SAYS IT’S TRUE” and i kept saying “no he never fucking said that” and then he asked “then WHO ??? ha”
my only form of escape from them are the university which consists of liberals and so many far right folk that love calin georgescu and donald trump. that being said, i have no way to escape. i will just die mentally, my brain will genuinely disintegrate into fine powder
Lots of things you described are similar in my country, my parents at least have a bit of decency and don’t talk about their politics all the time. I’m still very sorry for your situation and I hope it will get better
One question, do Romanians actually recognize their own participation in the holocaust?
thank you for the hug, wish i can :meow-hug: back
funnily enough, i only knew ONE person who knew… and only used that info for shock value because that person was an edgelord and shit
my dad for instance said “no we didn’t gas we used trains lol silly, they were right you know, don’t believe in the lies by soros” so far righters believe romania did it but because “da jooz are irredeemable and steal and make a shit ton of money” and because “the [ROMANI SLUR]s steal and have big castle house and steal and make dogshit music and manipulate the government to give them money while they have big castle house and are welfare queens kill dem al !! !!!”
if only stalin didn’t stop at berlin
It’s crazy becuase I went from radlib going into college to DemSoc coming out and now I’m floating between ML and Anarchism. They were Bushites and then when Trump became a thing, they both just hard pushed right. Both parents are extremely bigoted but I used to think my mom at least cared about some things. My dad has always been a sort of locked box(I think he’s undiagnosed ASD) but my mom spent all of Trump’s first term posting stuff about Trump and just misinfo all over. I spent a good long time trying to deprogram here via explaining why the misinfo was wrong, but she’d delete my comments or friends and family would attack me over it.
The one that stands out was the “no dems at Lincoln’s Emancipation speech”. I was explaining that this was befor the party switch-a-roo and that those that attended were progressives, not conservative, and that that was the lens that this should be viewed through. One of her friends was like “why can’t she just post stuff without being attacked?” I was like, “she keeps posting easily debunkable shit?”
When George Floyd was killed my mom said “I’m glad he died.” and was buying into the bullshit fent claim even though autopsy showed it was an insignificant amount. A few weeks before that I was out protesting at parks. It’s wild how different we are now.
I could actually go on and on but just know my parents aren’t great people. I’m no saint, but I feed the homeless and am currently working on organizing. My free time and energy is limited but I try to help out when and where I can.
I slowly moved away from them(and the rest of my family) but there was a big fight between me and my brother-in-law a few years ago on FB and it was the final straw. It was a very one sided fight too.
CW: suicide
So, I was suicidal at the time and was even planning on attempting again because I was in a very dark place. Autistic burnout for like 8 years straight, depressed over career not panning out, student debt, being a failure, undiagnosed autism, zero self care, etc. But I was causal posting socialist stuff on FB and for some reason out of the blue my BiL decided to pick a fight with me. First time even talking to me on socials and even in general. It started as a debunk war but after a while he would just start to attack me. So I’m dealing with suicidal idealation and getting bullied online. I eventually blocked him and I was the bad guy for it. But a year later he got my phone number from my brother and started shit again. I posted his number online and bitched about it some and I guess that started the Holiest of Holy Wars. My whole family pretty much started attacking me over it and I ended up nuking my FB account.
After all of that, my mom will call every couple of months but the convo is always like walking on eggshells. She thinks the FB shit was just me and BiL fighting over dumb stuff or something but can’t understand I was trying to check out permanently and it was compounded but the aggressiveness of my BiL’s bullshit. But since then, I’ve been pretty much estranged from my entire family. I move further left and they all move further right.
When my parents came down to visit last, my mom was in my house for all of 5 minutes before she decided to make a dumb joke about the saw blades on the river at the TX border because “dumb Mexicans”. Then she asked my then 6 year old son if he had a girlfriend.
The funniest thing I think, i that as I unpack my past more and more with my therapist, I realize that my family has always been shitty people.
Bonus: my brother claims he’s a libertarian and went to prison for the thing that libertarians are memed on about so there is that.
Sorry if this reads a bit tangential.
I’m right there with you comrade
When my parents came down to visit last, my mom was in my house for all of 5 minutes before she decided to make a dumb joke about the saw blades on the river at the TX border because “dumb Mexicans”. Then she asked my then 6 year old son if he had a girlfriend.
What do you do in these scenarios? I would seriously consider kicking them out; I have to fly to visit my parents and have changed my flights and left early because of comments like this. But I’m curious how others handle it.
For the racist joke, I just bluntly told her we don’t do bigotry in this house. And when she asked my kid about a girlfriend, I bluntly asked her to not groom my kid lol. She acted like that was the offensive part so I replied with “He’s fucking six years old. Ask him about Legos and Sonic.”
we don’t do bigotry in this house
This would just be the start of a bitter argument with my folks… no way I would be allowed to call their speech bigotry (accurately) without some huge defensive rant about “I would never treat them any differently face to face”, as if being two-faced is a virtue
I’m extremely blunt to my mom. I have had my fair share of issues with her most of my adult life. So that and being in my house, I’m gonna set some rules out the gate. If they wanted to talk to me about disrespect, I can just kick them out of my house and tell them to have a fun drive back to Indiana from Texas. Waste of gas money to come all this way to be racist but it’s their retirement
I suppose I’m relatively lucky. My parents are just garden-variety libs for the most part (with the exception of my dad being a staunch union man).
Kinda similar here. The truth is my dad mostly cares about his hobbies, work and family. Like sure he follows local/global politics a bit but he is 0 in touch with all that rightwing culture war bullshit and doesnt use any social media. You cant believe how thankful im for that.
Advice from a guy with dead parents: Try to enjoy your fash parents.
Earnest question: how does one do that? enjoy the presence of someone who openly craves the death of others?
Haven’t really spoken to my parents in two years. One of our bones of contention was the fact that they pay for the new york times, if that gives you a hint about their politics.
my mom is pretty much fine. She hates politics and has enough sense to understand the news cycles exist to give people like her panic attacks, and she fucking hates donald trump and maga people and their hatreds with an intensity.
But my dad is down a Q rabbit hole, a maga guy, and some of it’s pretty sad. He’s getting fed stuff by the algorithm that’s designed to prey on his insecurities and his pathologies. He’s been abusing stimulants for years now, and that has caused him to lose almost all of his teeth. So of course he believes in a theory of medicine that lets you regrow teeth with a mild electrical current???
And like, we still talk - if i can keep him in a narrow range of his para politics interests we can shit on israel together, we can discuss a lot together. He gets into fights with people who agree with him more politically over me, because i’m trans? He’s weird. He puts his family first and I believe that man would take a bullet for me, but he supports a ton of shit that’s positioned against me, and is in total denial about that fact.
He’s mentally ill and the algorithmically delivered content is making him worse. It’s really depressing, and it’s making him burn a lot of bridges in a really sad way.
Uh, my parents are still garden variety libs, watching billionaire mindset “Diary of a CEO” and all that.
I can convince them that the Global South’s rise is good and that western finance capital’s domination (read shareholders and lenders) is bad, but at the same time, they have this Putin-bad mentality, and are still pro-Trudeau (they treat him as a lesser-evilism, lmao)
