Husband has got extreme views

[UnsureDifferences]

Name change on this to protect myself and family.
So my DH has over the past few years got more and more what I would call extreme views. He is into conspiracy theories, it started off by watching a few videos and being curious and now he full thinks that the illuminati are out to enslave us and talks about the earth being flat, which he is not sure about but goes on about it.
He is also fearful of immigration and is saying he will go on the marches and that we are being take over and that we need to be prepared.
I am an easy going educated person who leans slightly left and believes in science.
This is really getting me down as I am not sure I can be with him anymore if this is who he is now.
Aibu to leave him for having these different views. Or is it managable to continue on.
One part of me thinks it is similar to two people of different faiths being married, is this possible? Has anyone had a good relationship with someone with opposite political or religious views to them?
Any ideas as to what to do here.
Everything else is fine in our relationship

I think the difference between belief in conspiracy theories and belief in religion is that by and large people with faith accept that their faith is a parallel aspect of their life. Even if they are fundamentalist, they compartmentalise it. It's something which sustains them spiritually and guides aspects of their life and sometimes they proselytize about it but they don't see it as a worldview which underpins everything, or if they do they tend to keep it to themselves.

Conspiracy theorists in my experience want to talk about their "theories" all the time and feel on some sort of mission to push them at people all the time and without any sort of respect for the other person's intellectual agency or emotional space. It's draining to be around, partly because its impossible to talk about anything else and also because its very hard to argue with the warped logic.

I personally couldn't deal with this in an intimate relationship. I've just cut ties with a friend who did a 180 degree volte face recently over the space of about a year from having been very left wing to being a hard right "anti woke" crusader (triggered mainly by the trans debate and elements of what's happening in the Middle East). Overnight she went from being someone with strong views but with whom it was possible to have a healthy debate, to being someone who would rant at you about the trans movement and how it was an attempt by men to kill women for hours without any sense of self-awareness.

It's often said that conspiracy theorists are all thick. Some are, for sure, and some conspiracy theories (moon landings/flat earth/lizard people) are palpably bullshit. Others are superficially more plausible but allied to the same tendency of relentless intellectual arrogance. But I don't think its stupidity, it's an obsessional desire to be right all the time, to put yourself and your views above all other people and to feel this messianic, paranoid sense of having to believe stuff which you know other people find hard to tolerate. I don't think its consistent with healthy relationships.

In my experience some religious people don't compartmentalise their beliefs. Perhaps I am unusual in that I have a few religious friends who to my mind are very similar to my conspiracy theory friend in how they engage. I have other friends who I didn't find out for years that they had a faith so I do know the type you mean.

@Slimtoddy maybe. In all fairness I don't have many close friends who are religious and the ones I know who are have discovered religion in later life (or reapplied themselves to a previously lapsed family faith) and are self-aware enough to understand that they need to approach with care in a secular society.

But people with faith seem to understand that while they may privately believe themselves to be "right", its not acceptable to go around telling everyone else they are wrong.

Conspiracy theorists, or people with extreme political views (I see them as part of the same tendency) seem to have this sense of zeal that not only are they right but they need to constantly assert to other people all the time that they are wrong and misguided and just need to "see the light".

I could possibly tolerate this in someone if they were able to keep it as one side of their personality and be self-aware about it. But all the people I've met in this category can talk about very little else. It just becomes incredibly tiring and boring.

My guess is that the need to feel like someone is in control is so great that that surpasses everything. So if everything's a bit rubbish, it must be part of someone's plan. Not a million miles away from 'it's all part of God's plan' I suppose.

Just get rid - honestly, life is just too short to waste on this prize nutter.

This isn't about a difference of views - this is about sanity vs not sanity and you have your children to consider.

You come across as thoughtful and considered, @UnsureDifferences - and like you, I too would struggle as to why I would react viscerally to a conspiracy theory belief/beliefs but not to religious ones.

Several observations:

1. I'm told by my sister - one of whose intelligent and successful in-laws has now become a conspiracy theorist - that when you go to the dark side, it tends not just to be just one conspiracy theory you subscribe to but a whole cluster;

2. given that you're otherwise happy with the relationship - apart from this red flag elephant in the room - I would suggest relationship counselling rather than heading to LTB;

3. I don't knowingly subscribe to any conspiracy theories. However, given some things that have happened in recent enough history I would have dismissed as wild conspiracy theories were it not acknowledged they were true and constituting some disgraceful episodes (eg US deliberately infecting black men with syphilis as part of a medical experiment; the fake polio vaccine programme in Pakistan as part of the efforts to flush out Bin Laden), I get how people can find conspiracy theories actually not that preposterous;

4. there is a difference, I think, between meeting someone for the first time who has conspiracy theories and where you shy away from because of that fundamental mismatch. And someone you know quite well who then subscribes to a conspiracy theory where you can get over it. I am still close with an in-law who believes homeopathy is a real thing, outside a placebo effect, and still regard her as intelligent and credible, despite her belief in homeopathy. Ditto a friend who believes covid was a conspiracy of sorts;

5. finally, there is a difference, I think, between subscribing to an 'extreme' conspiracy theory that is not inherently evil (eg flat earthers etc) and subscribing to an 'extreme view'. When you referenced 'extreme views' by your DH in your thread's heading, I was thinking like extreme racism or supporting the abolition of the age of consent. Which would be a LTB. So I have terminated a friendship with someone I've known for many years because I find their stated view that Israel should exterminate all Palestinians in Gaza (kill, not 'ethnically cleanse') so repugnant.

It doesn't sound like your DH is in the racist/Nazi/genocide camp - so I think the question may be whether you can sever his current flat earther tendencies from the man you love or whether your view of him is irrevocably changed and there's no going back

I think you need to have the well-being of your children's minds very much at the forefront of yours.

So replacement migration is not an outlandish conspiracy theory then. Glad we agree.

Oh dear, yes this was the rabbit hole my last bf was going down when I dumped him. It's all the red pill videos on YouTube. So depressing

That's your takeaway from the post? The pp you're replying to specifically negates the bit that is controversial "getting rid" of the native population but you still want to frame it as such? That's quite a good illustration of what conspiracy theorists do...thanks.

Mass immigration is literally replacement by default, especially when the birth rate amongst migrant groups is significantly higher than amongst the native population. What do you think people on the right mean by replacement theory then?

I remember the fun old days when terfs were routinely smeared as conspiracy theorists by trans activists.

This thread hasn’t gone the way OP expected.

OP - I listened to this podcast and I very much thought of your situation:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/320-misguided-matthew-facciani/id521594713?i=1000722364721

"What is misinformation? How does it differ from disinformation or just plain ‘ole propaganda? How do we protect ourselves from people with nefarious intentions using all of these things to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior? That’s what we discuss in this episode with Matthew Facciani, social scientist and author of Misguided: Where Misinformation Starts, How it Spreads, and What We Can Do About It."

Do have a listen and see a lot of the death to this. It's not about really thinking the world might be flat.

In fact - everyone else on this thread could do with a good dose of reality and understanding humans are NOT rational actors and our identity and belonging is way way more important to us than the truth....

But it's not a Machievellian plot with sinister racial undertones, just a demographic shift in response to incredibly complex global factors. Being the OG occupiers of a land doesn't necessarily confer any more moral right to it than anyone else. It's just how populations evolve.

Here's a pdf from Skeptic magazine that's an edifying examination of the mechanism underlying conspiracy theories.

But it's not a spontaneous demographic shift given that European governments have effectively allowed it to happen. People aren't birds. They can't just migrate across borders unless they're allowed to, or even encouraged to.

As for moral right, are you honestly arguing that indigenous populations don't have a greater claim on a nation than any johnny-come-lately? If so, why is there so much fuss about colonialism? By that token, the Brits had as much right to be in India or Africa as the natives.

Im saying that if you go back far enough, everyone has come from somewhere else. Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Anglo Saxons, Normans....usually taking a land by force eventually morphs into settlement and intermarriage over some generations. Where Invaders and "native" populations keep artificially separate, as in the Empire, that natural process of assimilation and integration fails. People shift around the globe all the time under the forces or war or economics. People are people and countries are lines on maps drawn by the ones with the biggest armies.

The Great Replacement theory. How nice.

Yes, we were discussing how that related to the UN's Replacement Migration report. And whether that report existing negated the accusation of it being a conspiracy theory. You point?

My point is that it's a far right conspiracy theory.

Yes, but do you understand that those movements coalesced into nation states? And that those nation states are now the foundation of how everything works in the modern world, and have firmly established distinct languages and identities over hundreds of years. Lots of things that happened in the past are no longer relevant today. We also no longer have feudalism, for instance, or rule by monarchy.

You seem to be advocating for open borders, which as every sane person knows is absolute lunacy.

And my point is that it is one explored and endorsed by the United Nations itself.

The UN are giving credence to the Great Replacement theory?