How to handle my son's troubling far-right views and online influence

[TheCatCushions]

DS (14) is extremely bright, highly intelligent and adhd/autistic. He has recently been coming out with troubling views about wanting the UK to be all white again like in the 1950s, he talks about immigration and closing our borders and stopping the boats etc and doodles pictures of Hitler with worrying slogans. He has admitted to saying certain things deliberately to shock but he genuinely believes that the UK should be all white and compares us to say, Zimbabwe remaining all black.

He has not been brought up to think like this and I am concerned that he is going down a rabbit hole online. I teach him the benefits of other cultures and how the UK has evolved, what it means to be British has changed over time and that we are now multicultural. Although he is highly intelligent, he is also very black and white in his thinking.

He also believes that we should go back to the 1940s where it comes to gender roles and women need to stay at home and men be the providers. He also talks about feminism meaning women that hate men. I try my best to gently correct these views and question why he believes this.

Does anyone have any advice on how to approach this? Thank you.

For the avoidance of any more torturous hypotheticals, @CanSeeClearlyNowTheRainHasGone could we perhaps agree:

1. Two intelligent people can disagree on a subject.
2. Giving women fewer rights than men is not an intelligent position to take.

And we could leave it there?

The original premise was about whether there can be an intelligent argument to reduce women to second class citizen. (To be clear IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS DISCUSSION, OP’s son is suggesting reducing them to second class citizen. The son did not say “in a hypothetical future, where women become the oppressor class, then things should be rebalanced” he argued women’s rights should be rolled back. Now. That’s reducing women to second class citizenship. What you are doing is trying to shift goalposts.)

You argued there could but then provided an example that would not be considered an intelligent argument.

I was just pointing that out. (I don’t believe there is an argument that is intelligent at least not one that you or the son have provided.)

Giving women fewer rights than men is not an intelligent position to take

Thank you for making clear this is the position OPs son is arguing.

Not a weird alternative future where women oppress men!

That’s exactly what will be happening.

The original premise was about whether there can be an intelligent argument to reduce women to second class citizen

No - below is the comment that started this conversation. It's rich that you want to accuse me of shifting goalposts.

"You can't dismiss someone who has different views to yours as, by definition, not intelligent.
I think we keep going there, just writing people off as stupid and thick, rather than taking on board their ideas/concerns and trying to highlight errors of fact or illogical leaps."

But the person in question with 'different views' who was being discussed is a 14 year old boy who thinks women should lose their rights 'like in the 1940s'. It's you and only you who wants to take it to some farfetched generalised place where nothing has any meaning anymore.

Do I believe that anyone who thinks differently to me on any matter is stupid? No! Do I think that a kid swallowing bullshit online and parroting that women should be subservient to men is not a highly intelligent person? Yes, that's what I think.

The only person shifting goalposts is you, bringing in tedious analogies that don't hold up about vegans and imagined dystopian future scenarios to those of us challenging the description of this particular boy who is the actual subject of the thread as 'highly intelligent' by pointing out that he doesn't have the ability to interrogate and evaluate his sources and he doesn't have a deep understanding of history and social context. The reason for us doing that is not because we enjoy calling children stupid or anyone who disagrees with us stupid, but because the OP is worried that she can't argue with him because he sounds confident and knowledgeable. But he actually has a paper thin argument that can't stand up, because he can't actually present an intelligent argument for stripping away women's rights to make them inferior to men.

That's all that's happened here - we have been talking about this boy and this situation. You have jumped to conclusions, generalised wildly and gone off on a lengthy tangent to try to disprove something that was never stated in the first place. Someone swallowing far-right misogynist propaganda online and spouting nonsense about going back to the 40s or 50s is not an intellectual powerhouse; they are misguided and manipulated as is clearly the case for this kid.

OP - Please contact your local Prevent team. They will be able to provide advice and support.