I (21M) live in an Ohio household of hardcore Trumpers who, unfortunately, found out that I voted for Kamala Harris.
My father and brother are fascists. They believe in killing anyone who disagrees with Trumpism. My mother is not violent, but drank basically all the QAnon Kool-Aid and is batshit insane.
I am disabled. My cognitive ability suffers severely if I sit up or stand up for more than a few minutes. I also have another condition that requires me to avoid bending my neck, so I have to keep it straight. I also can’t safely lift anything that’s heavier than a few pounds, so anything more than that is very risky. I can push and pull fine.
I am also financially-dependent on my mother at the moment.
We moved to a new house recently, and the walls are very thin. That allowed me to overhear a private conversation between my father and brother.
My brother said that he hates Harris supporters so much that he wants a day of retribution where he goes on a violent rampage to kill everyone he knows who supports her, especially gay and transgender people. When my dad asked if that included me, he did not hesitate to say “Sure.”
My brother is in peak physical condition. He owns guns and has military training. I had long suspected that he is the biggest potential threat to my life, but gaslighted myself into thinking I was overreacting. Today, he confirmed it.
My brother isn’t the type to throw out threats of violence willy-nilly. He has also physically abused me in the past when we were younger and has major anger issues. I believe that I have to take this threat seriously, and that means that I need to evacuate ASAP. I think the most likely day for him to act is on election night or shortly after, which would give me just over a week. But then again, I can’t be sure. Maybe he is planning a surprise.
My mother is too unreasonable to take any of this seriously.
I have a few thousand dollars and Democratic relatives from the South who might potentially take me in, though I don’t know for sure if they will, since we’re not close emotionally. I also don’t know if my brother will go out of his way to target them once he notices my absence. He is going to an out-of-state Trump rally this week, so I know that he doesn’t have much trouble crossing state lines.
I don’t know where my birth certificate and social security card are, other than that my mother has them somewhere. My father is home the entire time and stays in one spot where he can see everything. Even if I knew where they were, there is no way for me to retrieve them without him noticing.
Fuck fascism. I was born to a family of vile abusive sociopaths. It was hell the whole time. I won’t miss any of them. Fuck them. They are a disappointment to the rest of my family line. I spent my entire life learning how to become a decent human being in spite of it all and now the fuckers want me dead. FUCK. THEM.
The thing that separates me from the rest of my family is empathy. I refused to hate the people they wanted me to hate. Instead, I listened to their stories and befriended them. I care about everyone, not just straight white Christians. I voted for Harris because I wanted the best for everyone, which means preventing the installation of an authoritarian regime. And for that, I must pay the ultimate price.
I may never get to experience love or deep friendship, but no matter how this all ends, I vow to spend the rest of my days pouring out as much love and joy as I can out to every last ally I meet.
Any advice would be helpful. I don’t want to wait, but I also can’t do this without some kind of plan. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, so any input is appreciated.
Thank you.
I really curious how they found out that you voted for Harris. Was the party dumb enough to send you a thank you letter with blue stickers or something?
That’s my question too, do they not have a secret ballot in the US? If they do (and I’m pretty sure they do) my advice to OP is to deny who they voted for until they can get to safety, “was just joking about voting Harris” is a perfectly reasonable lie if your safety is threatened, the family would have no proof or way of finding out.
In the US our actual vote is secret and anonymous, so it is possible to hide who you “pull the lever” for. When you vote in the primary however, (in most states) it is recorded which party’s primary you choose to vote in (but again your actual vote is secret) . This is a matter of public record (don’t ask me why) and campaigns use that info to target people based on their likelihood to vote for them. So if OP chose to vote in the Dem primary, their name would be on record as having participated in that Dem primary, and the local/state/national Democratic Party probably would have sent campaign materials to their address (not like thank you notes, but more like ads for Dem candidates and causes), and their family may have deduced that they had an “outsider” amongst them. Another scenario is that OP may have just been honest with them when they asked.
At least in some states it’s because it’s illegal to vote in more than one party’s primary. Can’t enforce that if you don’t know who voted in which.
You would think they could store that information privately, and have it be accessible privately, without it needing to be entirely public.
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Our vote is not secret. You should probably go read up on just how “private” our voting information js.
I would love to be proven wrong. Source?
The entire scenario sounds completely fabricated. Voting in the US is completely private unless the person asks for assistance. Also the amount of detail the OP provided reads like fan fiction.
Cards against humanity/Super PAC’s disagree.
Its actually stupid easy to get information about who you voted for.
That’s not who you voted for but that you voted in the election.
Do you really not know who your family likely voted for, or your roommates? People like this don’t need a registered ballot result to make an inference that lets them act violently; unless he’d had the foresight to play at being a Trump convert months ago, I think this story is extremely credible.
Some states will tell you just about everything about a voter with only their name and birthdate. Not that far feteched
It’s absolutely fake
I would wager an average US mail carrier could correctly assume who a household has voted for just from the correspondences delivered during any given election season.
For people who are worried about what their family members would think, probably they’re not donating or signing up for newsletters, so their postal mail is not going to give you much information.
A lot can be inferred. OP probably has talked about his political beliefs before with their family present (or eavesdropped). Either that, or OP had some arguments with his dad and his brother and they’re now taking leaps of faith thinking he must be a democrat.
It’s the latter.
Arguably a stupid mistake in retrospect, but all I said was that genocide against LGBTQ+ people is evil because genocide is evil, period.
I believed that opposing genocide was still in the Overton window and they hadn’t gone full fash yet.
But then they told me who they really were.
That’s when they began to constantly accuse me of voting for Harris. Because I opposed the mass killing of innocent people. I was already the oddball in my family for not spewing hateful rhetoric every day, so it was a believable narrative to them.
Maybe my brother doesn’t believe for sure that I voted for Harris and just included me in his hit list because I oppose the killing that he wants to do. Either way, the end result is the same.
Damn, I can’t believe how toxic some people can be. I hope you find a safe spot asap, OP.