antifainternational:

Oh Anon - we’re so sorry to hear how objectively awful your parents are.  Tbh, if they’re buying into QAnon bullshittery, they’re probably waaay too far gone to have a rational conversation with.  You’re just never going to convince them about reality if they’re so invested in conspiracy theory paranoia they’ve fallen down the QAnon hole and you might be better off figuring out how to cut your losses and get some distance between you and them.

First and assuming they’re not too far gone, let’s talk about how to talk to your parents.  We’re gonna guess that you’ve tried arguing with them and debating them and haven’t been able to get them to budge.  Instead, we’d recommend learning about active listening methods.  

Karin Tamerius has written a lot on this topic.  She recommends using five points to start with:

1) Ask open-ended, genuinely curious, nonjudgmental questions.

2) Listen to what people you disagree with say and deepen your understanding with follow-up inquiries.

3) Reflect back their perspective by summarizing their answers and noting underlying emotions.

4) Agree before disagreeing by naming ways in which you agree with their point of view.

5) Share your perspective by telling a story about a personal experience.

This is also what you learn when you take any sort of training on “active listening.”  To practice, Tamerius has created an “angry uncle bot” that coaches you through responses to a Fox News-loving uncle’s rants over the Thanksgiving Day table.

OK? Now let’s look at what to say to your ‘rentals:

We doubt your parents read books very much, but in case they do and in case they’re willing to have an open mind, we’d recommend trying to get them to read Mark Bray’s Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook or Stanislav Vysotsky’s American Antifa: The Tactics, Culture, and Practice of Militant Antifascism, maybe with the rationale that they should “know their enemy.”  But they’re probably more about watching random videos than reading well-researched political non-fiction, though, right?  Maybe you could convince them to watch this video about antifa from PBS or Philosophy Tube’s comprehensive introduction to antifa.  With the latter, if they don’t have the patience to watch an hour-long video, you can have them skip to the 29:08 mark, where he goes in about violence + antifa - what we’re presume their main concern is if they think antifa = terrorism.

In your conversation, your parents might say that terrorism = violence or threats of violence designed to achieve a political goal.  The immediate problem with that definition is that a LOT of people and groups your parents wouldn’t consider terrorists  are terrorists as per that definition.  Any police force or military.  The Founding Fathers (assuming you’re in the U.S.).  The combatants in any war in history.  So very clearly, this definition is way too broad to be useful.

But let’s say that in your conversation with your parents you confirm that their main objection to antifa is terrorism, which would mean their main concern is terrorist violence.  There’s good reason to be concerned with terrorist violence in 2020, but maybe if your parents are truly concerned about about terrorist violence, their concern should be focused on those committing the largest amount and the most severe terrorist violence.  So who is doing the lion’s share of the worst forms of violent terrorism in the U.S.?

• Between 2002 and 2017, 73% of all fatal terrorist attacks on U.S. soil were committed by the fascist/racist extreme right. 
• In 2018, every extremist killing in the U.S. was committed by a member of the fascist/racist extreme right.  
• In the U.S., you are two times more likely to die in a terrorist attack committed by a fascist/racist right wing extremist than you are to die in a terrorist attack committed by any other movement.  If you’re in Europe, you’re actually five times more likely to die in a right-wing extremist terror attack than one committed by any other movement. 
  
  Our social media collective has been doing our best to document fascist violence around the world.  In 2017, we documented 49 deaths and 84 injuries attributable to bigoted/fascist violent hate crimes.
  
  In 2018, that shot up to over 300 attacks that resulted in the deaths of 114 people and injuries to 400 others. 
  
  In 2019, we documented 576 violent attacks by bigoted extremists that killed 373 people and injured 1156 others.
  
  This year?  So far, we know about 340 far-right extremist attacks that have left 181 people dead and a further 845 injured. We’re on-track to having one of the worst years of fascist violence in recent memory. 
  
  Let’s put all of that violence, which surely your parents would consider terrorism up in comparison with “antifa terrorism,” shall we?
  
  How many confirmed violent attacks have antifa committed this year or last year or any year?  How many people have antifa killed?  How many people were seriously injured by antifa violence?

Or, you could take the tactic of asking the question: “if antifa are terrorists, what do they want?”  It’s pretty clear to us as anti-fascists that what we want is to stop fascism.  IT’S IN OUR BLOODY NAME FFS!!! Now, why would we want to stop fascism?

Fascists want to take groups they don’t like (disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, racialized people, religious minorities, immigrants, women, etc.) and make sure they are either subservient to them, deported to somewhere else, or exterminated.  Anti-fascists want to stop them from doing that, so the people fascists target can, you know, exist and live their lives without fear of persecution and death.

Because fascists fetishize violence and because (as we’ve seen above) fascists commit a huge chunk of violence to try to achieve their aims, anti-fascists some times have to defend themselves and their communities physically.  But the level of restraint and the magnitude of the violence committed by anti-fascists, and the reasons why makes any comparison with fascist violence or terrorism generally a false equivalence logical fallacy - something we suspect your parents are particularly vulnerable to falling for. 

Going back to the active listening thing, maybe this starts off with the question: if your parents are right and antifa = terrorists, what is their goal?  What are they trying to achieve and what evidence do we have to know what they want?  One good source of evidence would be what anti-fascists like us having been fucking saying for years and years and years. 

Alright, we hope that’s a bit helpful to you.  But if all else fails, you could always just say fuck it and leave these lying around the house:

GOOD LUCK!