askchapo

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes. They get fed the worst kind of click bait

every so often my dad will just say some shit and it's clearly come from some daily mail article or some facebook post

but then one time i saw him watching a second thought video. so idk really what's happening. maybe i should just go on his youtube and try to shift the algorithm to the left

Idk if it's them or me cementing my worldviews. Like my dad is a nice fun guy and an ultimate EU lib. Sometimes he will say something which is monstrous to me.

I hardly ever see my parents and just avoid any political discussion now. I feel kinda bad about it, but I just can't anymore. At most I just answer with "what if I was trans?" Or "what if I was fleeing for my life as a refugee". It mostly shuts them up because how fucked their position is on subjects like these. I'm very disappointed in pretty much everyone in my family except for 1.

My dad’s not online thank god but his brain still gets ruined by Fox News. We never used to argue about anything but just last night we got into it when I tried to explain there’s virtually no one who lives in a country with universal health care who would prefer the American system. But he insisted everyone else hates it because Fox News will occasionally trot out someone from Canada or England to go on about how horrible universal healthcare is.

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)

Advice from a guy with dead parents: Try to enjoy your fash parents.

My dad is undoubtedly a very intelligent and educated man. He is well-read on western and Buddhist philosophy, history, culture and languages. He has a healthy impulse of mistrusting politicians. I do in fact owe him a lot when it comes to my intellectual development.

He also believes the most batshit insane white replacement conspiracy theories. He is a foaming "wollt ihr den totaler Krieg"-level NATO hawk. He thinks the height of humour is making people uncomfortable by saying the N-word at family functions. He believes Muslims (who he insists called Mahomedans) are some sort of orcs beset on conquest and evil. Once he claimed that all the crusades, every single one of them, was "self-defence" against Muslim expansion. He thinks muslims are ontologically predisposed to misogyny and homophobia, thereby proving their primitive nature, but he also think that feminism, gay rights and trans people existing is woke and stupid and icky. During COVID he trusted a Catholic quack and former "holistic dentist" with his health. He is of course a raging zionist, believing that the only democracy in the middle east is proportionally defending the values of civilization, freedom and democracy in the race war against the cartoonishly evil Muslim hordes.

He is quite a mouthful. Sometimes short glimpses of sanity shines through, like him disliking conservative catholics or the AfD, but most of the time he is just spewing the most deranged bullshit. I think he could be diagnosed somewhere on some spectrum but that's no excuse for constantly talking utter shite like that

First it took my brother, who was harmless stoner, turned lazy dad but provided for his family. Now he is off the charts nutter. Subscribes to even the most bizarre Q conspiracies. Flat earther, space travel is a hoax, the sun rotates around the earth, the whole nine yards.

He had his first kid five years ago. So of course, my mom starts to visit her grandkids weekly. My mom only became political when I did, which was 2000. She would read the same books, follow the same news, basically she wanted to be able to to talk politics with me. She even went to a antiwar march voted for Nader, and then lost interest during the obama admin. Then one day she tells me how my brother went off the deep end, and that he wanted her to check out a man named Jordan Peterson. I told her who he was and she told me she had no interest in his videos. But eventually youtube got to her the same way it got to my brother. Now that she is retired, and has back trouble, all she does is sit/lie on the couch and watch youtube. Mainly it's Lex Friedman and Scott Ritter, but also the guy who co-wrote the Israel Lobby. After sitting out the last three presidential elections, she proudly voted for Trump. I use public transportation and have for my entire adult life, the last time we talked about problems with transit she said we should do like Musk says and privatize it. She is fascinated with that and when I finally gave up trying to reason with her, is when she told me at least Trump will reduce harm by ending the war in Ukraine. I told her he is going start deporting migrants families in record numbers starting day 1. She said they need to go because of all the crime. I threw in the towel. I'll fill her prescription but I think that will be the extent of our relationship. Fuck youtube

yeah religious stupidity with my parents, dad got himself into believing that the man he is listening to is jesus's brother and some white evangelical thumb preaching about random shit

I haven't spoken to my Dad in years because I'm trans, but the Facebook brainrot made him far worse throughout my childhood.

My mum is just a bit lib brained in some ways (nuclear power and drug policy mainly). She is on the phone but she is usually just reading newspapers, fairly lib ones. The only thing she does on Facebook is congratulate family members on their birthdays etc. I am able to influence her as I keep being right about stuff before the news are willing to admit it (stuff like Russia bombing their own pipeline being ridiculous).

My older brother is just a lib, but whatever. He has an incredibly low risk of being radicalised.

My younger brother has had mental breakdowns and believes he is being gangstalked and is generally conspiracy brained, but that doesn’t have much to do with the internet.

Dad is dead, but he was just a prick. Not the online kind.

I only encounter the deep end conspiracy theorists at work, where I’ve had my kind of superior tell me in hushed tones that Obama is going to start a civil war a couple of weeks ago to stop Trump being inaugurated (note that he is Swedish).

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 dad has been reading reactionary blogs for over 15 years and is as big of a fan of Scott Adams today as he was 35 years ago. And yet he's been taking a lot of cues from the charity I do. For a long time he was into meditation and vegetarianism, and I feel like he would have been a hippie if it wasn't so repressed.

My mom can't handle any politics that's outside the MSNBC window. She manages to not be turned into a raging reactionary from being on Nextdoor.

It's frustrating but I know that at this point I have the high ground, having worked a wider variety of industries, lived with more people, and experienced more struggle than they have.