Last year, Aubrey Perry, an American artist living in Australia, made worldwide headlines when she revealed she had to cut ties with her mother over her mother’s near-fanatical support of Donald Trump. She was particularly horrified to discover that her mother was a pledged Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention. Before you scream “snowflake,” Perry is married to a mixed-race man, and they have a daughter together. She found it “completely intolerable” that her mother could be “actively promoting” the agenda of a man who couldn’t decide whether to accept the support of white supremacists when she knows she has a multiracial son-in-law and granddaugther.
When Perry spoke up, she was relentlessly harassed and threatened by racist trolls aligned with the Daily Stormer. As we discovered when that same crew trashed Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered in the Charlottesville car attack, these bottom-feeders think women aren’t allowed to be strong and independent-minded.
Earlier this week, while the nation was still reeling from the events in Charlottesville, Perry took to Facebook to make a shocking announcement.
“Sick to my stomach. I can’t believe it. My mother in the US is now identifying as a white nationalist. I have lost my family.”
Perry subsequently told that her mother, Barbara Jensen, has been merrily retweeting white nationalist tweets, parroting white nationalist arguments against Black Lives Matter, and defending the Ku Klux Klan. Jensen blocked Perry after Perry posted screenshots of Jensen’s uglier tweets last year, so Perry has only been able to keep track of her mother’s Twitter activity by way of friends. Perry “never thought I could feel worse” than she did at that time. However, discovering that her mother had apparently joined hands with some of the worst people in the world left her devastated.
Naturally, I wanted to see just how far gone Jensen was, so I put on my virtual lead suit and headed over to Jensen’s Twitter feed. One of the memes she retweeted was what appears to be the standard far-right line–left-wingers are the ones using Nazi tactics.
Consistent with this, she claimed that the alt-left are actually commies.
Looking further, Jensen was also pushing a long-discredited meme that an antifa had been caught on tape beating a police officer.
She was also pushing a line we heard earlier in the week from Lance Wallnau and Bryan Fischer–that the antifa and the Klan were two sides of the same coin.
But by far the worst moments came when Jensen retweeted two attempts to spin Heyer’s murder. She first passed on this tweet saying that the counter-protesters actually provoked the attack. The first came from “LucidHurricane, a self-identified member of the “identitarian” movement, a branch of the white nationalist movement.
https://twitter.com/LucidHurricaneX/status/896857214136311808
One problem–that video was shot after Fields plowed into the crowd. If someone just whaled into a crowd, wouldn’t you try to keep him from getting away?
She later retweeted this disgraceful spin on Heyer’s death from right-wing lawyer Joni Turner.
Woman killed on video!! Twitter taking this down! This is black lives matter march, not KKK! SOROS pd white idiots https://t.co/Br2pfZXIQj
— Joni Turner (@joniturnerlaw) August 13, 2017
This despite the fact that the video came from Faith Goldy of The Rebel, who saw the crash first-hand and later unequivocally denounced it as a criminal act. If there was any doubt that Jensen’s moral compass has been severely warped, these two tweets should erase it. Attempting to spin the senseless murder of an innocent woman?
If that wasn’t enough, on Friday, Jensen retweeted this birther dog whistle.
Your Kenyan emperor is going to prison soon. Tick tock. Check the dark web if you want to know more. Svoboda
— Anti NPC Shinobi (@BrandonHathaw12) August 18, 2017
I showed this to Perry, and she was stunned–and with good reason. Jensen is an adjunct English instructor at Modesto Junior College in Modesto, California. Naturally, Perry can’t get her head around how someone who teaches such a course could reflexively retweet such bilge. That’s even allowing for Perry noticing racist tendencies in her mother as early as her childhood in nearby Turlock; she and her stepfather regularly called her mother’s Latino students “wetbacks” and “beaners,” and regrets not calling it out sooner.
While Perry believes that Jensen’s husband, whom she describes as “authoritarian,” has turned her head with racist garbage, she recalls that at one time, her mother was “so intelligent and analytical.” She currently fears for anyone who enrolls in her classes while she is in her current state, fearing that she might “convert them to her cult.”
Perry decided last year that she can’t stay in touch with her parents as long as they actively push this hateful bile. It’s a line similar to the one taken by the family of Peter Tefft, who publicly disowned him after finding out that he was at the Unite the Right rally. No doubt that a lot of other families across the country are having to make similar decisions. It says a lot about the state of civility in this country that one man and one ideology can literally tear families apart.
(featured image courtesy Perry’s Facebook)
