today was An Experience
my hugely conservative UKIP relatives were around.
It got so bad that my other relatives even offered “just ignore her” support, which they’ve never done before. She was literally handing out a bag of clippings from the Daily Mail and some sort of petition in favour of it. At a Christmas party! I told her I was supporting Stop Funding Hate and that I wasn’t gonna support the Daily Mail, and after the other extended family had left things got really weird. We had a strangely civilized debate where I pointed out how the Daily Mail employs people like Katie Hopkins and Richard Littlejohn, who have done and said things I know she wouldn’t agree with, and when she sang the praises of Nigel Farage I pointed out that he goes fox-hunting which she also doesn’t agree with but she just…wrote everything I said off with vague statements. Trump? We’ve just gotta give him a chance! His neo-nazi supporters? Well we don’t KNOW they’re Nazis. There’s constant evidence that they are? Weeeeeell….
Then she started bringing up the Illuminati and the Rothschild conspiracy (she raised three half-Jewish children) and I just. I tried. Nothing went through to her. She contradicted herself loads of times when it came to Muslims and the Koran and the Bible, kept dropping in references to the non-white friends she had and she couldn’t even keep their ethnicities straight.
In mild despair I asked her, say I have children, those would be her great-grandchildren, what if they were adopted children who weren’t white or who were gay or transgender? Vague answers again and I was really hoping. She ended by saying “You’re just like me when I was younger!” and I hate being so uncharitable to her, she is my grandmother, but…I really hope I’m not.