“My mom has gone full MAGA...I eventually found out that she had been trying to indoctrinate my 10-year-old daughter with anti-immigrant and anti-democratic propaganda behind my back.”

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"When I pointed out that the government is constantly changing the rules about who has legal status and who doesn't, and is also straight-up arresting citizens, he brushed it off. I then asked how he'd feel if my wife, a naturalized Chinese adoptee, were arrested, and all he said was, “I guess that would suck.” That was it."

"I'll never vote for anything other than a Democrat again. It's not a both-sides thing. Democrats are more centrist capitalists than real liberals. Republicans just follow the GOP playbook of gaslighting, obstruction, and projection. It sounds cheesy, but hell, look at their justification of a VA nurse carrying a firearm and the clear cause to murder him. I didn't break my family up. Trump and hate did."

"I've got a master's and a law degree, and I refuse to comment on court cases until I've read the entire opinion and dissent, but they'll fire off Jon Stewart's take on whatever as if it's the 11th Commandment. It's kind of infuriating, and that's the real reason I can't talk to them."

"Fortunately, my daughter isn't an idiot and knew better, but the damage was done. I don't talk to my mom anymore as a result, and it makes me sad that fucking Trump was able to corrupt her so easily. I thought she was smarter than that."

"EUGH, it's all so aggravating. Our son is autistic, and my dad has basically said, “What did you/the world do to cause it? Because this didn't exist back in my day!” Then he finishes up with something like, “Now, excuse me while I go downstairs to my reloading bench and measure out gunpowder to the GRAIN for different types of competitive target-shooting rounds.”" 

"In about 2019, I was there for my once-a-year Thanksgiving visit, and my brother had a MAGA hat, my aunt was on a transphobic bathroom rant, and my mother said something that confirmed she had voted for him. I just absolutely lost it. I actually yelled at her for about 20 minutes straight, which felt kind of cathartic. 

Then COVID happened, and I didn't have to make a decision about going back. Although I suppose from their side, it probably seemed like it was a decision. As we came out of COVID, it became a really tough decision because they're unvaccinated (for anything now) and also in denial about how serious illness in general is. So are they going to disclose symptoms? And right after we go there, I spend time with my in-laws, which includes a couple of very old people and a transplant patient. 

So even setting aside the question of whether I want to be exposed to their idiocy, I definitely don't want to be the person who brings that back. So anyway, that line of decision-making never totally went away. I've been asked for a couple of decades to get MY flu shot before I go see the in-laws, so...But it was getting to a point where I went back once, and then Helene hit, and I live where it was REALLY bad. 

When you're surrounded by environmental death and destruction and you can't leave the house without talking to someone who casually mentions losing everything or half their neighbors being dead, it does something to you. First, you have less emotional resilience. In the past, if I was doing well, I would suck it up and visit them even though I didn't enjoy it. But when you're dealing with other stuff, you just don't want to. The second thing was that, to me, you can draw a straight line from being in total environmental denial to more intense storms, so there's culpability on people who chose science denial and homo/transphobia over a livable planet. 

They don't really reach out; I'm expected to do that, and I just don't want to. If I met them in everyday life, they're people I avoid."

"My mother has gone through these phases throughout my entire adult life where she would say awful things to me and push me away, and then a few weeks later, I'd get the, “Sorry, I was in a bad space then, but I'm better now.” I would brush it off and maintain a relationship with her, if for no other reason than, “Well, she's still your mom.”

But after this back-and-forth went on for my entire adult life, I just got sick of the drama. I need to focus on my own family, so I stopped letting her get away with being verbally abusive just because she's my mom."

"My mom is like a robot, with no opinions of her own. Even when I've cornered her and she's basically admitted that she agrees with some Democratic policies, she'll backpedal and go full-on MAGA again. Everything has to align with extreme far-right viewpoints and dogma. 

It's literally insane because she's poor, too, and could actually benefit from financial help from leftist policies, but no. And she was a nurse, so it's not like she isn't educated. She's just... weird. My whole family is really weird, honestly, and that's probably why I'm a black sheep."

"And I think that history is part of why I struggle so much to understand my dad's politics now. You would think having personally experienced what it means to be part of a marginalized group, to have your opportunities constrained because of who you are, and then to be given refuge somewhere else would create enormous empathy for other people who find themselves vulnerable or unwanted.

It's also painful watching this reproduce itself with my much younger brother. He desperately wants my dad's approval, and he's now at an age where he practically hero-worships Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. I don't know how much of that represents beliefs he independently arrived at versus a young person learning that admiring the people Dad admires is a reliable way to connect with him and earn his approval. 

And like you said, it's rarely just politics. Politics isn't this neat, separate category anymore. It bleeds into how you see other people, what you believe they deserve, what you're willing to tolerate, and what kind of world you want your own kid growing up in. When those values seem fundamentally different, what exactly are we supposed to do, just talk about the weather forever? There's a particular kind of grief in having a parent who is technically still in your life but realizing there are enormous parts of yourself, your fears, your values, and the things happening in the world that you simply cannot bring to them. 

I'm cut off from my dad at this point, and I still wrestle with whether I'm being unfair, whether I should try harder, whether family should somehow transcend all of this. But I keep coming back to the fact that relationships require some baseline of mutual understanding and respect. You can disagree about tax rates. It's much harder to “agree to disagree” when the disagreement touches things you consider fundamental questions of humanity."

Sad desperate girl leaving in tears feeling upset

"It helps to believe that one day this is all going to come crashing down. These people will be lost when he dies and have to reckon with what they've done. They're not going to see the light, so focus on yourself, your values, and what's important to you."

"My husband is a cycle breaker, and that's why he's the black sheep. I know they blame it on me—that I'm somehow a wicked temptress who bewitched their son into becoming a liberal. The joke is on them because he's always been this way; otherwise, I wouldn't be with him.They also have a weird resentment toward me because I'm educated, smart, and more successful than they are."

"She and I stopped discussing religion and politics earlier this year because it was clear we would never agree. But the worse things have gotten, the more I couldn't believe that my intelligent, compassionate, kind, selfless mother could support such a fucking monster, support a genocide, or support our quality of life fucking tanking under Trump. 

I couldn't believe that she could continue to support a bigoted, racist, hateful, misogynistic man. Finally, I gave my mom an ultimatum: either stop supporting Trump or lose her relationship with me. She refused to denounce Trump. She was my best friend."

Text has been edited for length and clarity.