Do you have any family members with really weird politics?
Do you have any family members with really weird politics?
For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights. For instance, after travelling to Ecuador, she donates to some Ecuadorian land trust run by locals. However, if you start talking to her about the border or gender, she goes full Orbán.
Yeah, definitely my mother. She calls herself a "pagan socialist" but she's also into Trump. She's a virulent racist who mainly hates Latino people and the Spanish language. She's really bad. She'll scream at people to speak English if she hears any Spanish in her vicinity. She'll confront people minding their own business and will tell them to go back to Mexico, even if they're not Mexican. She's told a person from Pakistan to go back to Mexico.
She believes in a complex, bizarre religion that's a combination of Norse and Irish mythology she claims was eliminated by Christianity, which she says is the most destructive force on Earth. Most of her understanding of Norse mythology comes from the History Channel show "Vikings." Her understanding of Irish mythology seems to be more influenced by Game of Thrones than anything else. She doesn't read books, since she considers them "the words of another" and believes reading can only serve to pollute her pure mind.
She's a vocal Irish nationalist despite being American, but get this, she believes the British monarchy is the greatest force for good in the world. She wants a reunited Ireland, but under the UK because she says Britain rightfully owns Ireland. She's an American born in Chicago, by the way, and our family is descendant from Poland as far as I know.
My mother is strangely positive and understanding on LGBTQ rights. She's one of the only members of my family to support me being non-binary, for instance. And she's very positive about it and has a very firm grasp on gender and identity. I have no idea how though or where she learned any of it.
Also despite calling herself a socialist (she actually does know somewhat what a socialist is) she's deeply into Elon Musk and thinks he should be president after Trump dies. I really don't know what to call my mother other than a reactionary idiot.
My uncle still hates Deng for ruining communism and regrets the sino-Albanian split.
He also dislikes the PC police for erasing the fact that Mao smoked cigarettes and complains that portrayals of Mao these days doesn't include him with cigarette in hand anymore.
He's certain Maoists could have led another protracted People's war against Dengists and believes Shanghai and Shenzhen and that are capitalist hellscapes. Xi has been the only secretary of the CPC he has liked in decades. And even then it's critical support.
Spring Festival every fucking year he has a hot take about X host or comedian or actor in the Gala looks gay. He also chain smokes indoors while drinking 二锅头 and it makes the room smell like rubbing alcohol poured into an ashtray.
I mean at least his brain worms are mostly better than western brainworms (obviously aside from the homophobia and some racism towards south Asians), it's just that he's more critical of AES nowadays in a boomer way than he is critical of western imperialism (which he definitely is against, but when he complains it's about like how North Korea has strayed from Leninism or how breakfast 馒头 costs too much these days 80% of the time and America bad 20%). He's also critical of China's reluctance to intervene in global politics, if it were up to him, the People's Liberation Army should have been deployed to defend the revolution in Burkina Faso or Argentina like how Mao sent troops to defend the DPRK against the 美国鬼子. I keep saying "hey look maybe not getting involved in foreign conflicts like the late USSR is a good thing" but he still thinks the Soviets, for all their faults, could have won Afghanistan if they tried harder.
Pretty sure my uncle is a Nazbol. Used to be very active in the largest leftist party and then left over "wokeism." He wanted to purge the trans members and not focus as much on indigenous issues. The end result was him getting booted and moving to the far-right.
Now he advocates for universal healthcare, free public college, paid family leave, environmental protections, erasure of lgbt, indigenous that have been "westernized" losing their rights and status, as well as women not being allowed to divorce.
Absolutely.
One that believes all kinds of alien and AI conspiracies. The alien ones are fun, the AI ones make me want to tear my hair out because they "know for certain" that AI is totally sentient and will take over the world. They're genuinely worried about this and it makes me feel bad. They're kinda doomer and nihilistic and it worries me. Wish I could cheer them up about the future.
The other is an alt-right wanker that believes in anti-woke shit.
Both listen to the Joe Rogan and Russel Brand podcast...
I was talking to my Dad’s wife about the way capitalism controls us, including be media we consume, how all politicians are in the pocket of the capitalist overlords, and she was all in agreement, and yet she is a staunch Trump supporter. But she’s no stranger to hypocrisy, she also thinks that we should cut social spending while living off disability. It’s a real “rules for thee and not me” dichotomy. I do think she’d be a great ally in the revolution in a general sense tho.
My dad once told me that Ghadaffi was masterminding the Muslim conspiracy to do great replacement in Europe by outbreeding white people. He is also really scared about China. When the Al-Aqsa Flood happened and zionist atrocities exploded, he justified the carpet bombing of Gaza by claiming that Hamas rockets "could just as well have killed as many people".
He is angry at reactionary politicians for doing austerity and being corrupt but he won't vote for anyone on the left because they're woke. Last election he voted for the succdems, hoping to get racism and non-woke welfare and then was shocked and disappointed when they did what they had spent the entire campaign saying they wanted to and formed a government with other reactionary parties to do racism and austerity instead.
My older brothers are zen fascists in denial. Both are well off Xennials whose struggle with white fragility which inspires the most kneejerk reactionary takes. They literally just argue however they need to in the moment and have zero coherent views. They are terrible at sources, they will cherry pick whatever article agrees with them especially if it's a 'local' news outlet. There takes are so clearly self centered that I often just argue that really most Americans are selfish assholes just like them. Therefore they shouldn't be surprised they're unhappy because that's the logical outcome of the bucket crab mentality.
Anticommunist woo woo crystals lover that also desperately wants everything socialism stands for.
Parents and one sibling believes that American healthcare is trash because it prioritizes profit over health, American culture is trash because they overwork you to death and everything is far away, Americans are trash because all they do is kill, but they are staunch Trump supporters because they don’t want democrats ushering in communism.
My other sibling believes that American healthcare is trash, but only because it has too many regulations.
Not family really, they're mostly just lib or con (though I guess one guy is like a "moderate" lib but clearly understands the world and capital better than the others, but chooses to be a class traitor and make $$$ rather than being left-wing much at all) but I have run into a lot of, shall we say, idiosyncratic views at the local worker co-op coffee shop.... you'd expect decent politics from people there, some of whom founded the worker co-op, but its really all over the place there:
1 with major terf-brain, one with almost-great politics but a closet misogynist, 1 regular who seems like a bernie type guy on the surface, but over time I've heard him multiple times discussing the republican primary candidates and seems to really like Vivek lmao, etc
It's me!
got a cousin who is simultaneously extremely pro indigenous people and extremely anti-vax / pro "freedom"
My brother would probably be the closest. He used to listen to Alex Jones all the time. I'm not sure what made him change his mind, but he stopped listening/watching his show. He's still hung onto some of the stuff he's heard from him though. He watches Jimmy Dore, Kyle Kulinsky, and John Oliver a lot now. And during the last presidential elections he was into Bernie and Yang. Now it feels like he's shifting further right again. Honestly not that weird, I guess, just kind of that American lack of political understanding outside of the framework that is presented to us.
There's one uncle who's politics is an uncomfortable spot.
For a while he's been sliding further and further right. When he was younger he was a communist and then, like, he became a liberal (I don't see him in the flesh much, or maintain a presence on the sites he uses anymore, but gossip is he's gone full tory now). Last time I had a big arguement with him was online almost a decade ago when he said that communist revolutionaries've only made countries they've liberated worse. Now I'm an anarchist and thus critical of many of the big socialist projects, but claiming they were worse than they were before the revolution is complete bullshit. So I asked him "do you think Russia was better under the Tsar?" and he was like, "yes." So I asked him how he felt about the pogroms tsarists carried out on the reg, and he just started doing the whole "whataboutism" shtick. And harped on at me about the huge death toll of communism and when I tried to tell him about how fudged those numbers are, he called me a genocide denier.
Now, I get a lot of you in thread have folks down the Q-hole or whatever. But being a bloke that grew up as Thatcher bollocksed the community he grew up in, from a family of commited communists. We're all scratching our heads over how he went that way.
For instance, I have an aunt who is definitely MAGA, and is flirting with Q-Anon ideas. However, she has pretty good views on the environment and animal rights.
Hippies do be like that.
A young-ish (mid-forties) lobsterman I knew was seemingly a pretty solid Berner (like back in 2018) who was, unfortunately, obsessed with vaccines and believed all of them to be evil, despite the fact that he had like five kids from three different wives and had vaccinated all of them without any problems. He was a good guy, at least on the surface, who was driven insane by his third wife, the cliche Californian white woman with blue hair who sells alternative "medicine" and calls herself a shaman. She was also actually really nice but just had terrible and bizarre political views. (One of her kids from a previous marriage had very vaguely defined vaccine injuries, thus her anti-vaxxness.) My kids were friends with their kids. I honestly really liked their family. They lived in a nice house that reeked of marijuana. You could smell it from hundreds of feet away.
Back then I was on Facebook, and the guy would just fight with anyone there over vaccines, endlessly, including me. I once drove past his house and saw him sitting on his porch using his phone, clearly arguing with someone on facebook. Like many of the people mentioned ITT, his political views were totally incoherent. One moment he was ranting about the Rothschilds, the next he was approaching me in person to discuss the Holocaust because I'm Jewish. (Feel like I should mention that Israel is an abomination which should not exist.)
Still, every politician or political issue hinged entirely on vaccines. Nothing else mattered. If Hitler was an anti-vaxxer, go Hitler! Eventually the lobsterman was banned from every local Facebook group (like me, but I was banned for being a communist). One of the last times I talked with him was maybe in late 2020 / early 2021 when I ran into him at the post office, and he said: "Ready for the Trump vaccine?" This is an interesting artifact from that era, when more liberals might have become anti-vaxxers if Trump had won re-election (since Trump did actually push for the development of vaccines). At the time I couldn't answer the lobsterman's question. I had not actually thought of it that way. All I had thought was: just please get us these fucking vaccines.
I'm not sure what happened to him but he ended up moving away but still lived in the area. I saw him at the beach either that summer or the following summer. My kids and I were the only ones there masked, of course. One of his kids said hi to my kids and wanted to high-five them, and I told them not to. (Judge me all you like.) Several hours later, after we had gone home, I saw that the lobsterman had PM'd me on Facebook strongly implying that things would get violent if we ever met in person again. I didn't respond and haven't interacted with him since (and have also been off facebook for years).
Before the pandemic there was this thing with small groups of petite bourgeois white people where they made being an anti-vaxxer their entire identity. They were extremely vocal about this online and in person, but never represented more than a small minority of the general population. Another woman I knew at the time was a friend who stopped being a friend once it became impossible for me to ignore her anti-vaxx views. (My FIL has been disabled his entire life because he got polio as a child and was too poor to afford the vaccine.) I saw her at the grocery store a few months ago and she was unmasked, with her unmasked daughter, and grabbed her daughter and moved away from me the moment she saw me. She also had this weird thing where she was really into fucking Graham Hancock.
Anyway, I'm not sure what the lobsterman is up to now or how his family is doing (I feel bad for his kids, who were really nice), but I do know that another lobstering couple is constantly sick now, with the mom being yet another white multi-level marketing organic health food yoga anti-vaxxer.
Me, I'm a dedicated Posadist monk.
I'm training in the mountains, slapping rocks, genetically modifying my body, staring down bears until they retreat, exposing my junk to radiation so it becomes a beacon that signals the return of the extraterrestrial god named Karl Marx, and kicking tree trunks with my shins. But most importantly, I'm posting.
My mom. She was apolitical. Got her to vote for Obama when I liked Obama. Obama didn't do shit. She fell hard into Trump politics and spiraled on conspiracy theories. She still has a child's concept of politics. She's blue collar af and I got her to agree to the labor theory of value before I told her what it was.
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centrist in refugee issues, claims both refugees and racists are annoying
states that communist are good guys at the end of the day just wants to help poor people
instinctually repulsed by any form of mass protest, even if she agrees with the protest.
believes that most jews and chinese people are rich but thinks thata a good thing and everyone is just jealous of their success
hates salafists while saying gay and bi men are icky except for freddy mercury (doesnt mind lesbians for some reason)
thinks october 7 and 9/11 is a false flag operation by america and netanyahu
And many more bizzare political beliefs.
Debating with my dad gives me such whiplash between absolutely based calls to action he actually implements to help the oppressed in our society, environmentalism, anticapitalism and the chuddiest bigotry and anticommunism ever.
Weird brain worms side of things but my boomer aunt was complaining that her daughter had to move/downsize her clothes. I asked why and she said it was to make room for her new husbands clothes because there was no room in the closet. Come to find out that my aunt has never shared a closet with her husband whose clothes were kept in like a guest room I guess? Such a weird interaction
Most of my family with the weirdest politics are dead, mom was a hardcore anticom tradcath, enough said there, as she aged she chilled down a lot on abortion and the role of women, watching someone undergo a miscarriage while we waited in the ER for like 12hrs since her blood sugar was like 500 has a tendency to do that. She loved John Paul II, Mother Theresa especially, I remember my sister pointing out the faults of the later with the India school deal and she didn't really believe her since she was a saint.
My grandma was a boring standard demsoc but had the weirdest view on environmentalism (my sister figures its related to grandma was super into magic and had all sorts of awesome mystical stories that could make a full length movie or two), basically climate change is man made all right, but it is caused by us discriminating against lgbtqia+ community, we apparently have magic mass climate and weather-controlling powers from birth or someshit and the more we're harmed/hated the worse climate change gets. She was always extra nice to those she perceived as different, not out of respect for fellow humanity/comrades, but fear her garden would get cursed and that she'd contribute to the demise of the world via environmental destruction.
The last one with the weird politics is my uncle who is living, standard neofasc conspiracy minded new age hippie sort, but he's full of regret from his career in the military (you know the type), so he knows he's fucked up at some level, desperately trying to improve on the surface 'safe' level ex learn about other peoples and cultures, then falls back into his old patterns and insults everyone that isn't a cishet monotheist white male with cosmic grade bigotry. He holds the sort of contradictory views you can imagine.
My dad is a QTard, my brother is a tankie, and I am an anarchist that already got banned from another Chapo sublemmy for pointing out that China has a massive state surveillance and censorship apparatus, and making jokes about how historically tankies are always very nice and respecting to anarchists.
Supporting FSA 🫠
I have one cousin who will defend China no matter what. Genocide, censorship, slave labor, doesn't matter what. No matter what horrible thing you bring up that China is doing / has done he will defend it like a total simp.
He's obviously not a very likable guy.
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