I have 2 GOP parents, one that voted Trump originally and one that did not. Over the last 9 years, I have watched them both travel down the MAGA pipeline to become visibly fascist. The parents who taught me racism was wrong and to have empathy for others, have become openly hostile about immigrants, Muslims, and even parrot the Nazi “great replacement” theory.
Part and parcel with this, they refuse to have any discussions about the facts – like immigrants not stealing and eating people’s pets. They won’t hear it, they won’t even engage in the conversation…they just get angry and loud the second they hear anything that doesn’t fit into the Fox News narrative. Can you relate? How are you dealing with it in your relationships with your parents?
This is a painful topic for me. I empathize with you all.
I try my best not to talk with them. End up talking with them more than I’d like.
ITT: Really depressing stories of society’s decline into ChristoFascist mania and delusion.
What’s the cause for it? Media manipulation can’t be the only one.
The ultimate cause is an economic system which is failing to meet the needs of the majority (combined with media run by, and for the minority who the economic system does serve.)
The media’s real purpose at this point is to distract the majority from the real issues, and deflect any movement towards a real solution.
What’s the cause for it?
End stage capitalism.
Don’t think it will happen to your country? Neither did most of the people in the USA.
Yup. 72 percent of the world’s population now live under authoritarian rule – the last time it was that bad was 1986. And the scary thing is that for the most part, people are voting away their rights, rather than the authoritarians rising to power through invasions and tanks.
Most people in US probably didn’t think at all.
That is not true, I had a thought last week
Extreme inequality, easy scapegoat, control of virtually most large media by a few oligarchs, algorithms, lack of education on recognising desinformation… they also think they’re part of the in-group rather than realising they will never be considered ‘one of them’ by the oligarchs.
The one answer is to cut off all hateful news from them, by any means possible.
Changing people’s mind is like quitting smoking. Very difficult.
For me, what has sort of worked it pointing out that both sides of the news are getting basic facts wrong - things where there shouldn’t even be a debate. If the news was true, you could watch any channel - it would all be the same. Instead, we get things like one side claiming murders are up and the other claiming murders are down. Our current journalism is a failure of a system designed to drive engagement/viewership/clicks rather than convey knowledge.
I also find it helps to remind them that we’re Americans first, party second. The other side isn’t stupid, they’re just getting a completely different set of ‘news’.
I use these too. The “team sports” nature of it all is really deeply engrained, like a “water is invisible to a fish” kind of way. You can use that to surprise them and build some genuine curiosity sometimes.
It’s really disarming and opens up convo when I seem to disagree with them on everything… but then just agree and help them attack whichever hideous Democrat they go after during a given conversation. Same for news, the conversation shifts in useful ways when they learn I dislike “their” (Fox and worse) news, as well as what they think of as “mine”.
It’s not enough to magically deprogram anyone, but it can start the gears turning. In my experience it usually takes the situation from two people standing across from each other fussing at one another, to two people standing together fussing at everything else. It’s a start.
I broke up with my parents about 9 months ago.
I need to mourn the good, morally centered parents, who taught me all of the principles that are now being sacrificed by my parents, or by the creatures they have turned into. The parents that raised me are essentially gone.
Haven’t had any contact with them since. Makes it a bit awkward with my siblings, since they generally feel the same but haven’t taken as drastic a step yet.
Similar vibe here. I mourned the loss of the dad I thought I had. Not going to maintain a relationship with the person he is now.
I need to mourn the good, morally centered parents, who taught me all of the principles that are now being sacrificed by my parents, or by the creatures they have turned into. The parents that raised me are essentially gone.
Man, I feel this.
This sounds very familiar. I don’t often try to talk politics around my family anymore, but they still feel free to regurgitate whatever nonsense conservative news has riled them up about around me. Its way to annoying to ignore, so I try to set the record straight when they do that. It doesnt matter though. I’ve completely laid out all the details on a topic, and they just stare at me. When I try to get a response its usually along the lines of “I don’t know about all that, but I’m not going to acknowledge that anything you said was right”. Its like they have to go check fox news before they know how to respond. They just assume I’m wrong about everything before I even start talking. Its rich coming from people who are constantly misinformed, and by their own admission don’t know much about any topic I’ve tried discussing. I’m on the verge of telling my dad “I want to think of you as a good person, but I’m running out of excuses for you”.
I’m on the verge of telling my dad “I want to think of you as a good person
I guess at the root of this, I realize my parents are deeply selfish people. My dad, at least, includes his children in the things he’s selfish for…that is to say he cares about his kids, and extends the “in-group” to us (but then fuck everyone who ain’t us). My mom doesn’t even go that far. She pretty much only cares about herself. She never hit us, she doesn’t root for the Empire in Star Wars…part of me tries not to judge her too harshly for her behavior. She grew up in a time where women weren’t expected to do much, think much, say much…just be moms…and so even though she’s kind of a shitty mom, she never really wanted more than that, and I think it impacted how much she read or thought about things.
So while I tend to think of that kind of selfishness as a type of evil, she lacks the critical thinking skills to see outside of herself, and at her age, it’s too late to assume she can. I don’t know, I have this mixture of anger and pity, anger that she’s not a good person, and pity because I don’t think she’s able to learn how to become one.
I have thought about this very topic quite a bit over the years. Maybe I’m more judgemental than you but I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have a few specific handicaps is incapable of developing critical thinking skills. The people who don’t develop them simply don’t want to and that’s something I feel more than justified in blaming them for. That may not be accurate in reality but I don’t know how you could prove which one of our views is more correct.
We only see each other two or three times a year and have mutually agreed not to discuss politics since the unfortunate Christmas dinner of 2016, just after the brexit referendum, when I’d had a few drinks and rose to the bait. And they always liked to bait me, knowing I was involved with direct action and am pretty hard left. They got more blowback than they anticipated. I love them, I can even understand their positions, but they’re not going to change and neither am I, so we just don’t discuss it anymore.
Username checks out.
You’re better off asking them questions. “what makes a person eat someone else’s pet?” or do simple definitions of what they say, as if you’re trying to understand. “so white people deserve to travel and others don’t?” (that’s a stupid example, but all of the talking points boil down to these types of statements). Apparently getting them to debate facts doesn’t work, getting them to question what they’re blindly believing, does, but I haven’t put it to practice. I want to go and get a refresher on critical thinking, so I can more easily break down, the way to properly ascertain if, what is being sold to you is truth or propaganda, and then make it into a question / statement and rather than addressing any topic, add a where did that come from, who sold you that, who profits from that, kinda thing, but I want a better statement / question than that. My parents are really similar, I have to avoid a lot of topics, I’m the black sheep of the family, I’ve always been much more earth conscious than them, it’s gotten so much worse lately. It’s the news they’re being fed. They believe it, wholeheartedly. It’s how they’ve always known what’s happening. And it’s why they’re panic buying out tiktok, currently, they (those creating the propaganda and distributing it) can’t have a narrative out there that doesn’t align with their agenda.
I’m lucky. My parents flipped in 2016. My dad became a Democrat at 60 years old and hasn’t looked back.
I was talking to him the other day and said, “Sometimes I wish you were still Republican, so I’d have someone to yell at.” Like it’s frustrating in a way, because I want to shake these people, like, how can you be this shitty? My dad laughed and said: “Sorry, it turns out I have morals.”
Meanwhile my mother-in-law is still a conservative but refuses to talk about it, and it’s not my place to push too hard. She’ll be cut off eventually, when we have to flee the regime, but for now I point out the insane shit that’s going on and she just giggles nervously, because she’s incapable of confrontation. If she were my mother she’d have been cut off by now.
It’s a shame, because in every other respect she’s a wonderful lady. She always welcomed me into her family, and she’s such an active, loving grandmother. Except for the part where she sold out her grandchildren’s future because minorities make her nervous, of course.
I’m happy for you and your dad but you say
“Sometimes I wish you were still Republican, so I’d have someone to yell at.”
as if there weren’t still plenty of very good reasons to yell at Democrats…
It’s 2025. The US government is under the complete control of a fascist regime.
Yelling at Democrats would be a silly thing to do.
Well Democrats aren’t fully committed to fighting a fascist regime so not yelling at Democrats would be a silly thing to do
I don’t keep in contact with my family, but I’d have no problem telling trump supporters that they’re dumbasses straight to their faces.
Fuck you’re cool
Probably cooler than you, yeah.
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If you sit at the table and have a good time with the fascists, it can’t be helped if others think you are one.
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Hating gays and minorities isn’t a political view. So jump into a piss puddle with that.
The party they vote for isn’t the biggest indicating factor here
Meta: Lemmy doesn’t seem to have something akin to Reddit’s “QAnonCasualties” subreddit. That’s kind of surprising as I think there’d be plenty of interest in such a thing. I can imagine it might be a lot of work to moderate though.
OP: the abovementioned subreddit might help you understand what’s going on and if you tell your story you will definitely get a lot of support from people who have lost friends and loved-ones to MAGA/QAnon. Don’t let the “QAnon” part of the sub name deter you, there’s a big overlap between QAnon and MAGA and the sub has content from people affected by both/either.
I just wish someone had come up with a novel approach to mend relationships between leftists and their MAGA-brainwashed parents, but reading the 40 or so replies here and taking your advice and popping over to my favorite redlib instance to read some of that community…it looks like success at improving these relationships is incredibly rare.
I do quite like the approach laid out by Honkology in their “why facts don’t change people’s minds” video and have been taking that approach for the last 9 years, but not only has it failed to move them one inch out of the cult, they have only gone deeper and deeper. Mentally, I have accepted the fact that it’s not my responsibility to fix them, but emotionally, it’s difficult to accept.
On one hand, all the replies here from people in similar situations has made me feel less alone in the situation. On the other, it has also made me really sad about how easily tens of millions of people could be turned against anyone who doesn’t look like them, think like them, or belong to their same economic stratum.
I am so thankful my mom is still just a stoner that likes high fashion, pun intended. I am so sorry you all have to go through this. It is mind boggling the change that the poison propaganda has brought. I lost some other relatives to it, but it’s nothing like a parent. Hugs for all.
I’ve looked briefly into the equivalent of antifascist projects, and former neo-Nazis talking about how their minds were changed. From what I’ve seen:
- People can and do leave political cults
- There’s no universal recipe. A common factor among former neo-Nazis seems to be having someone close to them who doesn’t tolerate the bullshit, so to me it seems the best approach is to stand firm, but leave a door open in the rare case that they have a revelation on their own. (Historically, this sometimes happens if/when their own personal reality begins to clearly contradict the propaganda.)
- Many people simply don’t leave, so it’s unfair to demand those around them spend so much time and effort trying to make it happen. It can be a waste of time. It’s a gamble, really, so again that’s why I say leave a door open, as long as it’s safe.
Obviously these are just second-hand observations, I don’t have much personal experience with this, so if any of it sounds wrong then I’d like to know.
All 3 are great points. Thank you!
Remember how the far right likes to chant that facts dont care about your feelings?
Its projection. They go off of feelings above all else. And whatever sky daddy tells them to think.
You’re free to start one. This is the people’s internet after all.
Before Trump, we’re get republican still? My parents were always super republican, but won’t vote for Trump. Also won’t vote for a democrat….
We don’t talk about politics or religion or health.
My parents have never been very well reasoned.
However, I’ve found that the best way to challenge people’s beliefs is to just ask what it would take to change their mind.
You’re still not going to win, but their answer will force you to acknowledge that they’re nuts and can’t be reasoned with.
