It's only texts. We used to text only occasionally to coordinate visits and vacations, but starting last summer he began texting about right wing conspiracy topics. Most of the texts take the form of a link to a video, usually YouTube, accompanied by some conspiracy theory laden comments, for example that covid is an invention of Democratic politicians seeking an excuse to take away our freedoms, or for another example, that there was massive mail-in ballot fraud in 2020.
Our particular family circle likes him as a person, he's fun to be around, and he remains pleasant even when discussing conspiracy theory topics, but he's so stubborn and determined about them that no one wants to discuss these topics with him, and that's what he often wants to discuss, steering conversations in that direction. My daughter didn't want him at her wedding, and my daughter-in-law won't have him to her house. Because he's offered several times to come down with his gun to protect us when armageddon strikes, he's no longer welcome here, either.
Here's another text he sent a little while back to give you a little more flavor of how his opinions are affecting his life:
quote:
My boss would say. <name-redacted> tone it down. Your always right but you are making the engineers look bad and that isn't good. Well guess what. I'm not wrong very often.
My relative interprets this as his boss endorsing his opinions while trying to prevent hurting the engineers' egos. I interpret this as the boss trying to tell him he's becoming perceived as one of those people who doesn't play well with others and to take it down a notch. Hopefully he did.
He believes I have my head in the sand and will be sorry when his predictions come to pass. My responses are purely fact checking. I don't express my own opinions because I just almost never discuss politics with friends or family, but since his "facts" that I find questionable are almost always right-wing positions, he's classified me as a liberal. He's the only one in the family who's become impossible to avoid discussing politics with because of these texts, and so now he's blocked.
--Percy