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.

Forgot to add I thought this and it had nothing to do with social media

Designated Safeguarding Lead.

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Counter by broadening his mind beyond online

But surely you were conflating race with citizenship? If you were born in China and had one parent who was a Chinese citizen, you would be a Chinese citizen irrespective of race. It’s the same here, you don’t automatically become a British citizen just because you’re born here.

There also is no uniform British race in the way there is a Chinese race. It doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be Chinese if you were a citizen, just because you were a different race.

Im not judging because I stupidly and naively let my teenage daughter have tiktok she got stuck on the mh algorithm she diagnosed herself with allsorts and start copying dangerous behaviours. I took it away and after a couple of weeks of strops I got my old happy daughter back. Tiktok is the most dangerous social media there is for teens and I would strongly advise any parent from letting there children on it

England wasn't "all white" in the 50's (I was there) and women in the 1940's went out to work unless they were well off enough not to. I don't know where he is getting his "facts" from (and I think you should find out and put a stop to it) but they are not accurate.

Yeah you’re going to make yourself look stupid if you go in insisting Britain was a multicultural paradise in the 1950s, it wasn’t 100% white but it was 99%. At 14 he’s not dumb.
I remember being in school assembles on transgenders who identify as the opposite sex because they like pink and dresses or whatever.

Blaming social media only goes so far when kids are being told complete bullshit and they know it, the temptation to go the extreme other way as a teen is probably tempting kind of how punk rockers and goths rebelled against their religious parents.

I wonder if the kids with the edgy hitlerish views are more likely to have extreme liberal parents

You need to restrict the access to TikTok etc, yes friends seem to be playing a part, but that doesn’t mean he should also be left to go down racist and sexist holes on TikTok, remove TikTok and put on the parental blocks for adding/removing apps. Talk to the school about these views and that his friends are also apparently down this hole.
if you can afford it, therapist would be good but also just try and use up his time, when he’d normally be on TikTok or on the computer, redirect it to something else whether that’s clubs, hobbies, lego, a bike ride

Agreed. Panorama did a docu on it a couple of years ago and I’ve never allowed my teens to have it as a result. I’ve also gladly never used it. YouTube is also dangerous though and X is one of the worst but most Gen Z’s don’t use X. As I said earlier in the thread too, Discord has some dodgy sub forums so I’d definitely be looking out for that too. He’s 14 so you have every right to search through his phone, block apps or even remove the phone and insist he uses a brick.

It isn’t wildly inaccurate, it was 99% white in the 1950s and most married women did not work.

The thing about facts / evidence is that they're not the whole story. Instead, it's about which facts are chosen to produce the interpretation ... In the end, that's the bit you're struggling with.

If he loves history and is super bright you could point him in the direction of David Olusoga (British prof of history and recently on Traitors). If he has a particular interest in the 1940s, you could ask him to compare the interpretations of A J P Taylor and Hugh Trevor Roper.

It's a tough one. As a teacher I encourage open debate in my classroom and never tell the children they're wrong. I try and help them to understand that there are different interpretations of history and they need to make up their minds about which interpretation is most convincing. Once you get them to look at it dispassionately, generally they can see where the attempted points of manipulation are - and they don't like to think that they're being manipulated.

The other thing about kids (well people overall) is that they get a kick out of believing they have access to some special sort of information that eludes others. There's a massive history site called 'Spartacus' which is excellent for this.

If I was born and raised in china and went around saying I was Chinese I would be laughed at.

If someone with two Chinese parents was born and raised in the uk and went around saying they were British people would accept it.

Im not sure what you mean by no British race unless you mean because there were celts, Saxons etc in that case you do realise there are also different Chinese groups? Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu etc.

Kid can see this double standard for what it is and is questioning it

Stopping the boats is Labour, Lib Dem, Reform and Tory policy. It's not 'far right'.

Saying that Britain must be all white is far right. No mainstream party says this.

It must be confusing for him if he says things that are legitimate, like stop the boats, if that's being treated the same as when he says the UK needs to be for whites only.

Could it be this that's pushing him to these extremes?

Zimbabwe is definitely not all black. Tell him that just over 20 years ago, the ruling party in Zimbabwe (ZANU-PF) was losing popularity and at risk of losing power to a younger more dynamic party (MDC). They resorted to violence and manipulating the rule of law, and Britain spoke out against them.

That resulted in ZANU-PF using race as weapon to try and hang onto power and the Zanu leader (Mugabe) decided that all white people were to blame for Britain taking a stand on human rights violations. He regularly said white people should go back to their “kith and kin” - meaning white people should go back to Britain. Your son might think white people would like that, but ask him how he would feel if he was told to leave everything he knows and loves to go to a place he doesn’t know and doesn’t feel comfortable in. I imagine an autistic person will find that even more horrifying than a neurotypical person. His views are in step with a human rights violating dictator.

The people he is reading online are as manipulative and as destructive as Zanu-PF. I’ll bet he thinks white people are safe from these views. Zimbabwe is proof they are not.

Maybe trace your own ancestry and work out if you are 100% pure British. Odds are you aren’t. Ask your son how he would feel if the British ‘pure-bloods’ decided to kick him out back to where he came from. Nazi Germany is proof that there are people who think along the lines of “pure blood”.

I think Zimbabweans are the best people in the world. Despite ZANU-PFs best efforts it is a peaceful country where different races co-exist happily.

I do not believe in unfettered freedom of speech for children. I’d be taking action to restrict social media instantly. My son is only allowed to watch YouTube if I am in the room with him on our family TV.

I worked at an in a London autistic six form. There was a couple of kids with these very right wing views. I’d go to the school talk to the school about what they’re doing to counteract this one dimensional framework.

https://www.educateagainsthate.com/parents/

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-help-if-youre-worried-about-someone-being-radicalised

https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/safeguarding-child-protection/radicalisation

Try these OP, plus check his phone/SM/internet use.

Swap his smart phone with a dumb phone

Get him off tiktok, youtube, insta etc his algorithms will be feeding this now. This is why CHILDREN shouldn't have access to social media.

Report to school immediately tomorrow and look up prevent.

i guess it depends on where you lived and what social class you were in. I lived in South London and, while not as multicultural as it is now, foreign immigrants were very much part of who we met on a daily basis. All the kids in my classes at school had working Mums, any care that was needed was done by grandparents, or the little ones were brought to school and taken home again by their older siblings who would have been still under 11

I don’t say this to be dramatic, inflammatory or to provoke a reaction, nor am I trying to scare you unnecessarily, but I need you to understand how serious this is.

The extremeness of his views, his vulnerabilities (age and disabilities/neurodiversity) and his unregulated access to online platforms means he is more than likely being self-radicalised and is at high risk of his views escalating from words to actions. This means inflicting physical harm on people because he believes they should not be in this country and/or should not be alive.

I am not saying he is going to commit violence tomorrow, but I am saying he is extremely vulnerable to absorbing online content which supports and encourages behaviour like this. Any act carried out for this reason would be considered terrorism.

You need to intervene and you need to do it now.

• remove access to the internet
• speak to the school safeguarding lead - this will probably result in a Prevent referral. If it doesn’t, do it yourself
• Call the national police Prevent advice line for guidance tel:0800 011 3764 0800 011 3764

You obviously know this is concerning otherwise you wouldn’t have posted, but I really need you to understand just how serious this can become if you don’t take decisive action immediately. Radicalisation can happen extremely quickly and you are already on the back foot, so it’s time to get clued up and help to protect your son and those around him.

I certainly don't claim Britain was particularly multicultural in the 50s, just that it wasn't entirely white. Agree it's nitpicking but I still think worthwhile to say it wasn't the fascist utopia that the far-right fantasise about. There is a lot of ill-informed shit about how lovely and wonderful it would be to 'return' to a 50s dream that never really existed.

My parents were born in the 50s; my widowed grandmother on one side worked and my married but very poor grandmother on the other side did too - and in fact built an impressive career in a charity that she stayed in until retirement age. So the tradwife nonsense never applied in my family. My grandparents were very liberal/left wing (I remember as a child hearing them rant about Thatcher), my parents were too, so am I, my husband and our teenage children too. Our siblings/in-laws and their teenage/young adult children are also very liberal. The left-wing values we hold and have always held as a family hasn't resulted in any of each generation's children turning out as Hitler supporters! We have all carried it through.

Get him off YouTube if he uses it! My son was watching a Minecraft video and then all of a sudden the lad started talking about how Christmas was being cancelled and we weren’t allowed to be Christian in the UK no more. This worried my 10 year old as we attend church every week and they are well aware of religion

Op have you watched the manosphere documentary? It’s sounding a bit like that, he could be idolising some men like that

In my town it would have an extremely rare event to see a person of colour even thirty years ago, let alone the 50s. That’s the reality for most of the uk in the 50s outside of certain cities. Trying to bullshit kids by claiming otherwise will just push them further the other way.

I haven’t got time for tradwife nonsense personally, but I often see it said on here that only rich women stayed home with the kids back in the day. Another thing that most people can see isn’t true if they trace back a couple generations, my grandfathers both had rubbish jobs (one was even in prison for a bit) and neither of my grandmas works while their kids were young. Yes they were poor but they still didn’t work I mean where would the kids have gone for one they didn’t have all the nurseries they have now back then?

It doesn’t, the stats back it up. In the 1950s the UK was 99% white and only 25% of married women worked.