My husband and I are very liberal and have tried to instill these values in our children, but it appears that we've been unsuccessful. My son is a very smart boy. He's sixteen years old and will be graduating high school in just a few months. However, my husband and I have noticed that he's been getting rather distant lately, not talking much when we discuss current events at the dinner table, and spending more and more time alone in his room. Yesterday, I finally got my chance to discover what was going on when he left his laptop unlocked and I was astonished at what I found.
My son's 'Pictures' folder is truly immense, containing many tens of thousands of images. Of these, roughly a third appear to be of standard meme and reaction images (although fairly obscure by the standards of an old fogey like myself), another third are of Japanese animated women, and the final third are appallingly racist. The epicenter of my son's racial hatred appears to be an image folder simply called 'Politically Incorrect', containing many subfolders, each laden with a particular variety of disturbing pictures. For instance, I was bewildered to discover that one such subfolder, entitled 'Rare Trumps' contains over four hundred images of Donald Trump with assorted pictures of walls and crying Mexicans. This obsession with an American politician is especially odd since my family lives in Canada, although my husband and I do often voice our distaste for the fiery bigot. Could our son be trying to rebel against us by joining some racist subculture?
Another alarming subfolder, ominously called 'Did Nothing Wrong' was completely filled with hundreds of images exulting Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Augusto Pinochet, and various other notable fascists. It would appear that my son is particularly fond of Pinochet, frequently associating him with helicopters. He also has an entire folder devoted to the life and work of a Nazi artist named Ben Garrison. Many cartoons depicting horrifically anti-semitic stereotypes and promoting the idea that the world is dominated by some vast Jewish conspiracy bent on the elimination of whites. There were also many pictures of this comically evil cartoonist in Nazi regalia, detailing the unspeakable acts of violence that he's committed against POC and calling for further atrocities. When I searched this character online, I found out that he's some sort of cult figure among neo-nazis. I'm worried that my son is being radicalized by some kind of right wing death squad terror group.
Open in his tabs was his twitter profile, where, much to my surprise, he has several thousand followers. My son has always expressed distaste for social media, so I never in my wildest dreams imagined that he'd be the owner of a highly active far right twitter account. His timeline is a bizarre mixture of ironic anime images and far right extremism that borders on schizophrenic. Naturally he follows Donald Trump, but it would appear that he also frequently gets into spats with who he refers to as (((merchants))). With new cybercrime laws coming into effect, I'm worried that my son could get in trouble for online harassment and hate speech.
It would also appear that my son is collecting pdf copies of reactionary literature, ranging from Mein Kampf, to The Jews and Their Lies by Martin Luther, to the complete works of Julius Evola and Kevin MacDonald. My husband and I are very glad to know that our son takes the time to read genuine books in this digital age, but this isn't quite what we envisioned.
Our son frequently has his headphones on while studying, and I had always been under the impression that he was listening to music. However, much to my surprise, his music library is almost entirely occupied by a white nationalist podcast called The Daily Shoah. I listened to portions of several episodes and it appears to be an orgy of self-congratulatory onemanupship of who can be the edgiest, where grown men spend three hours making holocaust jokes, mocking "dindu chimpouts" (their disgusting code for #blacklivesmatter protests), and ranting about how Jews control the media. They also appear to share my son's strange affinity for Augusto Pinochet. This kind of virulent and all-encompassing racism was completely unexpected since we live in a very multicultural area and most of the students in our son's classes at school are of Asian descent. We have always regarded our son as very intelligent and respect a certain degree of political curiosity, but this is far beyond the scope of what's acceptable. We want to respect his privacy, but we also want him to use his privileges responsibly. Withholding computer access is not an option given his academic obligations, but I think it's a good idea to restrict it as much as possible going forward. My husband is not so sure. He prefers a more subtle touch, avoiding direct confrontation and trying to gently steer our son in the right direction based on the knowledge that we've obtained of his double life. In fact, my husband is more concerned over the fact that nearly all of the pictures of women on my son's hard drive are of Japanese anime girls, with the only 3-dimensional women appearing in his 'Eva Braun' and 'Aryan Women In Wheat Fields' folders. Do you have any insights into how best to deal with our son's behaviour? Which approach is best?