This was originally going to be a post where I wanted to have us all share stories about family members and friends of ours that are unhinged reactionaries. As in, people who are a step further below your average liberal or conservative. I encourage you guys to still share your stories below, but I realized that this post seems more like an excuse to vent about my brother, and I will take this opportunity to do so.

I still live with my mom, (parents are separated) and so does my brother (we will call him Tony). I will be living with them until I am done with an online college and have obtained a driver’s license. Tony’s job doesn’t pay enough for him to move out so he stays home.

In general, my family is pretty right-wing. I’m the only person I know in the family who is a commie. My parents are Trump supporters, but they seem mainly harmless and uneducated, they just think Biden is doing a really bad job but Trump might help them out. Tony goes steps further than that. The man is not uneducated, he is heavily miseducated. You know people like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Ron DeSantis, etc? He has similar beliefs as those people. He’s further right than Trump. The man is much more politically confident than my parents (he has a different father), and has much worse views.

Here are some more facts about Tony:

  1. He is homophobic. Of course he is, he’s a conservative. Except my parents, despite being Trump supporters, have pretty tame views on homosexuality. The guy no joke said that LGBTQ stands for “Let The Gays Burn The Quickest”. He also said that gays spread AIDS everywhere. He hates Ellen DeGeneres not because she’s only pretending to be nice but because she’s a lesbian.

  2. He’s anti-abortion. My parents, once again, are pro-choice in certain conditions.

  3. He denies climate change. When I informed him about the Amazon Rainforest burning years ago, he just sang “Let it burn.” Then he unironically said that it wasn’t that bad and that birds would just come around and plant the trees back or something like that. He pointed out that they fixed Chernobyl without mentioning the intense effort by the Soviet government to do so.

  4. Whenever I cry and he sees me, he just mocks me. He doesn’t really take my mom seriously when she cries either.

  5. His father spanked him. He brags about it all the time saying “I deserved it” and says that it somehow isn’t child abuse. Any time I’ve had any kind of inconvenience with my parents, he would bring up spanking. One time, he looked at my mom and said “I think he needs an ass beat.” And after he did that, he had the fucking audacity to say that he was just “trying to help me.” This was during a time where I was suffering from a severe depression where I made several suicide attempts. This was the event that finally made me lose every last amount of respect I had for him.

At this point, I do not see him as my brother. I can’t wait for the day I leave this house so I don’t get to see that fucking pest ever again. Before I leave, however, I want to tell him how much I despise him and how I do not wish to see him again.

Thank you guys for listening to my story. I would love to hear your own stories as well.

  • Kras MazovEnglish
    7·
    19 days ago

    You didn’t say he ever claimed to be a fascist, but speaking from an outside perspective he sounds just like that without the self-label. The reason I say that is because when I was still a lib that knew jack shit of politics, my only friend group had fascists in it, the kind that will call themselves fascists without hesitation, but that are all too much of a coward to do anything. Still they would say basically everything you described in here, and even worse stuff, antisemitism was a big one among them.

    When I became increasingly aware of what being a fascist actually meant and started to see through them, instead of cutting it right away I naively tried my best to change them, not realizing that was impossible. I still hate that I didn’t leave that group sooner. Being an autistic, social anxious and introverted person, I clung to the group from fear of ever feeling lonely.

    I’m only now realizing how much that group fucked me up mentally and it fucking sucks.

    Nowadays, while I do feel lonely, most people around me are just libs that know little or close to nothing of politics but that are all well-meaning people. My attempts at politicizing and bringing class consciousness to them have met only some success, but I’m learning along the way and I’m sure one day I’ll be able to connect better with them on that front. Most of the time I can’t even bring myself to say what I want, probably because of the way I had to act around the old group, and when I actually do say what I want, it’s like my body wants to shut down, so it’s really hard. Luckily I have a good psychologist that is slowly helping me with this.

    I do want to say tho, please prioritize your well-being. As much as I completely agree with you wanting to say how much you despise Tony to his face when you leave, weight in if it is safe to do so when the time comes.