My parents have gone off the deep end

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

It's been surreal watching how my parents are like a microcosm of the shift among conservatives to extremism seen the past five years. They've always been fundies (conservative, young earth creationists) but what they are now is a whole new level. 

My parents for the past 10 years have lived in central California. For the first five years I was living with them still until I moved to Boston. They were members of a tiny fundamentalist church (like 20 people). The year I left, they stopped going to church because they disagreed with some doctrinal minutia and shortly thereafter turned to the internet for church. My mom has become infatuated with the infamous "pastor" Steven Anderson and his little cult in Arizona. You probably know him for being a holocaust denier, an antisemite, and being such a huge homophobe that he goes so far as to advocate for the murder of homosexuals. Here are his greatest hits:





I'm still weirded out by my parents sudden shift to this extreme. Growing up, they loved Jews. My mom was obsessed with Jewish culture and had Jewish friends. And now they're telling me about the conspiracy of "zionists." And they have always been a little homophobic but never growing up could I picture them thinking that gays should be killed.

They've also embraced the wackiest of the fringe right: Alex Jones. My dad particularly gets like 80% of his "news" from him (the rest comes from Bretbart of course). They even buy and ingest all the weird vitamins the guys sells. With every meal, they take like 10 vitamins. When I visited them last Christmas I went into their shower and found this bulky contraption attached to the shower head that had Alex Jones' "InfoWars" logo on it. They told me it filters out fluoride supposedly. 

In the past two years, they've also bought guns for the first time and going to gun ranges is their new favorite thing to do. That in itself wouldn't be bad I guess but I know they're investing in guns now because they believe they're going to use them eventually to fend off evil liberal minions of the anitchrist.

I've always beens somewhat concerned about their mental health, particularly my mom's. Well, during my visit last Christmas my mom scared the shit out of me. She took me to my new room. I walk in and see this giant and very grotesque painting she made hanging in my room. It showed a guy being riddled with bullets. It was very gory showing blood and guts. She told me it was an unbeliever being killed. I was obviously very disturbed and I told her to take it down but she wouldn't and she was very confused why I didn't like her painting. Growing up, all my mom painted was like birds, Bob Ross landscapes, and shit. Not executions. WTF. (the room also featured a poster detailing the timeline for the end of the world, and by my bed were dozens of fringe books, most notably a roughly 800 pages long book about the "jewish conspiracy").

I haven't told them that of my two roommates in Boston, one is Turkish, and the other is a gay Jew.  They'd freak out.