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I mean lots of old people go quietly insane… the world moves on and doesn’t want their “wisdom.” MAGA feels like a club or a religion, it’s accepting as long as you want to own the libs or whatever.
It’s a simple version of America that feels like the good old 50/60’s… family values, beating the communists.
To answer your question, I tell myself they will be dead soon. We need to focus on saving the country, not our folks. Let them go.
I had a friend who said there's good in the natural order of people getting old and dying so that their bad ideologies can die with them. I've always appreciated that viewpoint. Unfortunately, I have a brother who still lives at home...and he gets that shit ideology from our parents and shit ideology from Stephen Crowder (and even Alex Jones!) and the like online.
And now, he just models my parents where, even when I try to approach him with understanding and empathy, he refuses to even discuss why we should give a shit about immigrants or anyone else. To mash together two of your points, it's like religion in the 50s...there's entire swaths of the US where it can be dangerous to even believe otherwise because everyone around you has their beliefs so intertwined with beating their enemy (communists/the left/atheism, etc.) that at best, you will lose your family, your friends, all your support networks, and at worst, you'll have the devil beaten out of you if you even entertain leaving.
Bingo, fascism is a very easy comfortable place for their old brains to rest. It takes zero thought or effort, just do what you are told and regurgitate a few simple catch phrases.
i deal with it by just trying my goddamned hardest never to have to see them.
bury myself in setting up self hosted shit so maybe i barter a season of bobs burgers for an ounce of pepper once all the shareholders have extracted all value and moved on to the next planet.
i absolutely can't stand it.
deal with them because i want to use the pontoon boat? its just not worth it anymore
edit. did not realize it would format like that
No contact. I tried. I tried so hard to point out the wrongs committed by the regime that I thought that they would disagree with, but MAGAs just bend reality around it all.
It's painful, given that most of us don't do this out of a sense of right or wrong, but because we care. You get used to it eventually though.
My dad was in the military, but I never heard the sorts of things from him that I do now. He has started saying the N word to try to get a rise out of me, thinks Trump is going to “fix” everything, and every time I talk to him on the phone, I can hear fascist talk radio in the background.
We have learned not to bring up politics with each other. The last time I challenged him on it, he said I was being disrespectful, but I don’t accept that. He just thought I was supposed to sit quietly and listen to crazy ranting.
I have learned that in general it’s best to change the subject if someone wants to talk politics who I know I don’t agree with. Most people have gotten the point. We still get along great! We just have polar opposite politics.
Now I know that some people would question why I remain friendly with those people. The answer is that we have more in common than not. Someday, when everyone finally comes to the conclusion that the powerful and foreign are manipulating our political discourse to sow discord, we will finally be at peace again.
My dad has always been on the right and he’s a Trump voter, but he’s mostly avoided going full MAGA-proud. We have always had a tense relationship when it comes to politics and at times had very little personal relationship. Now we just avoid political discussions or keep them very high level, and it’s manageable. I talk to him a lot less than I would if he didn’t have those views. His health is declining significantly at this point so I have decided it’s not worth trying to change his mind.
My mom is still with him and she’s leftist and we talk all the time.
My dad’s two sisters are deep into MAGA (they were proud attendees of Trump’s first inauguration). They’ve been far-right fundamentalist Christians most, if not all, of my life, so I already had a strained relationship with them before 2016. I haven’t even tried in over a decade now. I was recently diagnosed with a chronic disease that one of them also has and I kept thinking about reaching out but ultimately decided I don’t even want her in my life for that so I haven’t bothered.
I he’d a funeral for the one that went MAGA in my mind. I gave a great eulogy. All my favorite food was served at the meal following the wake. Easily in my top 10 funerals.
Anytime they bring up politics, I just tell them we can't discuss it.
If they press the matter, I say the same thing, except the second time I add: "...because it's going to make me hate you."
They've been borrowing my car to drive for DoorDash since April 2024 and still haven't figured out that this government they voted for is really fucking shitty.
My mother is a hard R republican and a self proclaimed Christian Nationalist and has been making excuses for the GOP since at least Nixon.
I spent about 20 some years of my life being subjected to Fox News, Limbaugh, Mike Savage, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity every single day. It was exhausting listening to all of the unhinged screaming. While I lived with her I did not seek to find who was telling the truth because I didn't want to know how bad it really was, and I had a pretty good idea of what she would do to me if she found out I was so much as questioning the Republican ethos. So I kept my head down and my "official" stance then was that I wasn't into politics.
I went no contact with her because she became physically abusive 16 years post-TBI. I have not spoken to her in 7 years. From what I gather from her Facebook posts, she's still an awful person who is also falling for all AI pictures, videos and scams that support her narrative.
I have no interest in speaking to her ever again.
I try to take a page out of the playbook of a cult deprogrammer or a Darrel Davis type personality. My trips home are short (no more than a week) and I try to deescalate any hotbutton conversations. People do change, but unfortunately some people harden and shut off to new ideas as well. Hearing a different personality speak often helps open people up to hearing new ideas; a lot of the fascist ideology is born out of fear, miseducation, and selfishness.
A week?! I limit mine to half a day.
Went no contact in 2016. Was the right choice, my life blossomed without them. One of the last things my dad said to me was " guess I'm a fascist then" Still miss em tho, still not worth it to reach out. My aunt tells me however he turned on trump when his j6 crowd was yelling to hang mike pence. He would have always preferred a theocracy to a full blown white nationalist state tho.
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.
well it sucks. It looks like he's going to die a Nazi. What the fuck dad?
I feel for you. My parents also drank the Koolaid, but my mother is dead now, and my father has slipped even further down the rabbit hole. He's also a horrible person in general, and while I used to engage with him if he were behaving himself, I've effectively gone no contact now. I've only spoke with him once in the last few years, and when he launched into a racist anti-immigrant tirade I told him not to be a coward his entire life and hung up on him. It was on my birthday.
This is essentially the same story with my in laws. MIL is gone. FIL is getting angrier day by day without her to be his bullshit caller. He won't behave himself when he's 1 on 1 with my husband. It's tearing my husband to pieces.
And he's barely still able to live on his own. He's been hospitalized 3 times in the 10 months since MIL passed. I noticed that if we have more contact with him, he does better, we catch things and can intervene. But if we go low contact because of hateful behavior then we get blindsided by a hospital trip where we drop everything and screw our schedules all up to deal with his illness & recovery.
It fucking sucks. I think I've started treating him as I would a dementia patient just to be able to be around him. I like another poster's tactic of declaring something batshit "seems meanspirited". Maybe it will curb the worst of it. Who knows.
I'm sorry for you, me, anyone who struggles with whether to sever contact with a (formerly or currently) loved one.
ITT: Really depressing stories of society's decline into ChristoFascist mania and delusion.
I live in a place that could pass for MAGA Mecca and am literally surrounded on all fronts pretty much anywhere I go. It is extremely isolating. Thankfully my parents are sane; still Christian, but at least they look on with a similar confused horror - though they still "like a lot of what he's doing, just not how he's doing it."
I'm... lucky?... that my dad was a shitbag for other reasons. He was already on thin ice prior to 2016. My mom "isn't interested in politics" but even that's feeling unforgivable for me nowadays.
My parents have gone from seeing their 2 grandchildren biweekly, to me limiting visits with their 3 grandchildren to 3-4 times a year. Even those times are intentionally with my dad absent, and are only at extended family gatherings.
Fuck. Them. Both.
I do have friends that I certainly wouldn't call fascists but definetly follow the narrative of communism is when big govenment and no toothbrushes and Donald trump is like a communist dictator.
My dad always leaned center-left, and he's only gotten slightly lefter as I reach middle age and get very left. I'm very fortunate. My mom is long dead but I would like to think she would be on board too.
The real bugbear is my extended family, typified by dad's sister and her family. Always leaned into the Rush Limbaugh right, but really she isn't so much visibly MAGA as she is aggressively Zionist. It happens with a lot of Jewish boomers; Does 'Never again' mean for everyone, or just for the Jews?
Anyways, I was a protest at our local holocaust center in 2018, protesting the detention camps on the border. The proudboys and others were counter protesting. I told her about it, and she just said,
"They cant use that word, thats our word!" "You know who would agree with you? The nazis?" "What do you mean?" "They were there! I have pictures!"
Anyways, shes been surface level cordial ever since.
My dad is awesome but my mom is scum. I told her to fuck off and stop talking to me but it wasn’t that hard cos she used to abuse me and didn’t raise me
You can love someone and things dont work out. Family or otherwise.
Parent #1 is christian, and has all the mental faculties that come with that. #1 gets dragged into the current republican bullshit by proximity to the fusion of christofascism. I can still talk to that one about most things, as long as neither of us brings up anything about current government. Seeing as I live with #1 to make sure medicine is taken and quality of life doesn't deteriorate, the days are... strained at best. We talk for a moment, I check up on the health, and then it's either off to work and back to my portion of the house, or I avoid the other portion of the house and try to carry on my hobbies.
Parent #2 was once, so I thought, the logical, reserved one who didn't care for politics. Then it turned out #2 just thought because #2 worked for the government, it was best to never really hold beliefs. As soon as #2 retired, fox news was turned on 24/7, and suddenly the mild distaste for people 'not like me' turned into full fledged rants. I try to keep all contact to a minimum, because I still love my parent and I'm sure #2 loves me, but I think that's just deep roots from childhood. All of the good characteristics are still there, just buried beneath that vile layer of filth that manifests as hate. Every now and then you see the good qualities shine through, and it kills me knowing they're likely going to never be the main character traits again. I can't break contact because there's a part of me that just can't give up hope, but it hurts that I can't come and actually talk through the much deeper thoughts on the world I have now like we did when I was still considering what musical tastes I had.