„Ich habe das Gefühl, ich verliere sie“: Die Familien, die von älteren Verwandten auseinandergerissen werden, gehen ganz nach rechts
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/apr/18/the-families-torn-apart-by-older-relatives-going-far-right
Von Both-Firefighter-668
24 Kommentare
The generations given everything and lived a life of Riley in the land of milk and honey reaping their triple lock pensions in their houses they bought for 2.5x their salary and now worth an absolute fortune? Acting entitled, unaware of their privilege, lauding it over others, denying other people everything they had? Nooooo! Surely not! You don’t say?! I can hardly believe it!
„Do you remember a time when chocolate chip cookies came fresh from the oven? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote and certain folk weren’t allowed on golf courses? Pepperidge Farm remembers.“
This might not go with the crowd, but I genuinely don’t think social media is the root cause at all, it’s a medium being used to spread it sure, and the algorithms can do that very optimally, but it can only spread because of the condition of the world.
The far right has risen plenty of times all over the world without social media.
My dad is one of these. A lifelong conservative who suffered severe online brain rot after retiring. I started using those annoying debatelord tactics whenever he went off on one and now he, thankfully, never mentions anything political when we visit because he knows I’m, basically, going to just end up making fun of him.
He’s still casually racist but baby steps.
My parents have gone down this rabbit hole. They retired and spend most of their day watching GB news now.
They can be genuinely cruel. My mum has sat in front of me before and said that I think I’m something special because I have a university degree, but a degree doesn’t make me special and I’m actually stupid.
It’s genuinely insane. They get so angry over such inconsequential things
That is just weird.
My wife and I disagree on politics and history, but it just isn’t a big thing. She is wrong, but that is fine.
My mother has never been political, never judged anyone, never commented on immigration or anything like that. This being said, the more she used Facebook, the more I started to hear comments about immigration, people from different countries, the usual sort of shite you’d start to hear about „dont belong here“.
It went on for a few months, she mentioned things more and more to the point where we’d end up arguing over it.
Every single time she’d mention something, I’d ask where she heard the information she was repeating, it was always on Facebook. I could see over the space of a few months, things which never bothered her before having Facebook now started to bother her.
I told her to delete it, get rid of the app and delete your account and see if you feel any differently about things.
The first week or so, I could see she was bored when she was just sitting, a few weeks into not using it, completely different person. Back to her old ways and questioning all of the utter bollocks that gets spewed from the right and the likes of Tommy Robinson, Farage and so on.
She was constantly seeing „bad news“ and negative takes and it 100% started to change who she was because she genuinely believed it. Hate speech and lies brought something out in her I’d never seen before, it scared her what she was seeing.
Social media absolutely played a huge part in that. Fear mongering will bring out the worst in people.
The problem is that a lot of these oldies are experiencing the outside world via the Internet these days. They join local Facebook groups to find out what’s going on in the village and spiral from there into „London now officially under shakira law as rampaging muslims behead princess Diana!“. When you’re reaching the age that it gets difficult to visit places and see for yourself, you rely on information being brought to you, and a lot of that information is highly untrustworthy.
Although I’m instinctively against regulating the Internet, I don’t think we have any other choice at this stage. It’s too effective a weapon being used against our societies.
It’s not uncommon for people to swing right when they get older. New things become harder to keep up with. Politicians who claim they’re going to take things back to „traditional values“ like they were before, get more appealing.
The perfect Reddit click bait – Ageism and the far right obsession.
Sometimes you just have to say to family that you’re going to have to agree to disagree and that you don’t want to talk politics with them any more. If they can respect that, then you can get on with life. If they can’t agree to that, then they don’t respect you and you’ll have to distance yourself.
If someone’s relationship with you is dependent on political agreement, they have zero respect for you as an individual.
Every day I count myself lucky that my parents have drifted left not right over the last few years. They’re planning on voting Green rather than Labour for the first time in their lives next month.
My brother on the other hand – different matter. He’s now my kid’s problematic uncle.
This doesn’t seem like a political problem, but rather toxic effects of social media . Clickbait , rate engagement, short format media. It can fanatacise basic ideas to damaging proportions by taking away context. This endemic is all media now , infantisation . All for the sake of advertising / lobbied control , done nefariously with too many degree’s of separation and no culpability.
I worry about my mum doing this. She’s months away from turning 70, retired, and watches all sorts of crap on YouTube.
Families not torn apart by relatives going far left? Do these things pass for news now?
My mum was on about Muslims calling for a mum to be killed because her son did something to the Quran so now there’s sharia law. Not heard that news, don’t know where she’s got it from, but my dad only watches GB news and loves trump. We’re fucking English for gods sake. I hate going round now. They’re awful sometimes.
I look forward to the article about ‚families torn apart by younger relatives going far left‘. Honestly, we’ve lost the art of being able to disagree. You may not share the same politics and that’s fine. Just park it. It doesn’t matter.
„im losing her because I want her to think the same way I do, and I cannot accept people who have different opinions because I am right“
Nothing more sad than seeing people become more and more unable to communicate and cooperate with families and friends over divisions made up by the government and corporations intended to divide.
If you can’t even work through your differences with family members what hope do we have as a people of standing up to any tyrannical moves made by our government?
“Losing” family members because of politics is peek woke derangement
Not strictly far right but watching my mum go down the anti trans rabbit hole on social media was wild. It’s all she talks about and it’s completely disinterested in any actual facts or reality
Nahhh the sooner their generation dies off, The better this world will be
It truly pisses me off that a lot of reform voters are mostly retired, and they’re going to screw the younger generations over with their voting when they won’t even live long enough to see the impact of the next few governments, but me and my kids will, constantly talking about the boats coming in when they’re on the way to the grave smh .
I’d put money on mass immigration being the main factor for the vast majority of those older relatives.