My parents have always been left-wing hippies and entertained the odd conspiracy theory, but during the pandemic they got lost down YouTube rabbit holes and bought into Q-Anon and anti-vax ideas. They still don’t believe Covid is real (even though they blatantly had it…).
We’ve just kind of agreed not to talk about it anymore, but they’ve steadily become more and more batshit and I think they believe I have been brainwashed.
Anyone else’s familial relationships changed forever?
My family became very Anti-Vax during that time. My wife and I had just had a newborn about a year in to the pandemic and demanded everyone get their vaccines before they got to be around the baby.
My parents didn’t get any and didn’t see the baby for a while.
Then when we did start seeing them, they had completely lost their minds. Blatantly racist, blatantly homophobic. Even when it wasn’t things political, it felt like they had forgotten how to properly talk to people in an appropriate way. My mother made comments about my DAD having relations with my wife and that the baby wasn’t mine.
I know they watch Fox, I know my mother watches a bunch of far right-wing YouTubers. All of it has led to them barely being functioning adults.
Kind of. Father has turned into a religious right Trump supporting nutjob. COVID is bs, vaccine ‘changed your DNA’, etc. He’s 80 now, and the sad part is he used to be a science teacher.
And then he got leukemia. Because of his BS rhetoric, my mother and brother who live with him couldn’t visit him in the hospital because they all refused to get the vaccine. My brother almost lost his job over it.
Anyways get this: my dad got COVID while he was in the middle of chemo with zero white blood cell count, and recovered in like 3 days! And … is in remission from leukemia and has stopped chemo.
So I mean he’s really damned lucky, but this all just reinforces his view that COVID was nothing and he made the right choice. Meanwhile he spams my inbox with alt right bullshit all day. The fact I live in a different country and only see him once a year keeps things cordial I think.
My grandma was 100% sold on covid being some kind of left wing hoax. She died from covid.
…and now I’m the one being insensitive for acknowledging that she died an idiot, and likely took several others down with her. It’s like we’re supposed to just pretend her death was anything other than suicide by political zealotry.
One of my wife’s friends lost her baby to COVID because her mom wouldn’t stay masked, and lied about having COVID when she visited shortly after the baby was born. The abject selfishness boggles my mind.
For us, the topics just changed. After Covid, they started to talk Pro-Putin bullshit, probably Q-Anon related. It’s honestly shocking to see people who I once thought of as intelligent turn brainwashed. We rarely talk anymore, and if we do, it’s very superficial.
My parents would watch a channel that had little pro Russia news segments thrown into commercials. The damage this constant little poking with misinformation does is not easily undone. They didn’t even notice how their opinion was formed by those few lines in-between their favorite shows. Then suddenly they had issues with their satellite dish and when I fixed it somehow, for some totally unknown reason that channel was no longer there. Woops. They found other shows to watch and don’t support the war anymore.
Ribbit
No, because none of my family was dense enough to support ungodly government overreach
Ribbit
