Every holiday season, Americans brace for the same onslaught — not from their in-laws, not from travel delays or overcooked brisket, but from a very specific genre of media coverage that has now become as predictable as the decorations lining store shelves. It is the annual cycle of articles warning readers that family holidays are dangerous, emotionally draining, and politically fraught events that must be managed, survived, or avoided entirely.
This isn’t just a Thanksgiving phenomenon, though we were inundated with it then. It’s not just about Christmas, though the cycle is repeating now. It is a year-round cultural project: a relentless attempt to turn people against their own families by reframing ordinary disagreement as toxic and political difference as grounds for estrangement.
The headlines are revealing.
In November, the Guardian ran: “‘It’s so crushing’: US families navigate divide over politics during the holidays,” assuming political disagreement within families is emotionally catastrophic, something requiring withdrawal rather than discussion.
Newsweek followed with “Women Are Boycotting Thanksgiving With Their Trump-Supporting Family,” treating the abandonment of family gatherings as a morally righteous act.
A Yale psychiatrist on MSNBC advised viewers to skip gatherings entirely if relatives had voted the “wrong” way, prompting the New York Post headline: “Yale psychiatrist urges MSNBC viewers to avoid Trump-voting family members over the holidays.”
And the Bulwark joined in with its panel titled “Surviving a MAGA Thanksgiving.”
These are not isolated anecdotes. They are part of a deliberate editorial decision, one that resurfaces nearly every holiday season. The storyline never changes: Family is political, family is unsafe, family is exhausting, and family is optional and disposable.
What’s striking is how little “toxicity” these pieces require to recommend estrangement. In most of them, the offending relatives are not cruel, dangerous, or abusive; they hold different political beliefs. These are normal human beings who may think differently about immigration, elections, or foreign policy. Yet, the same voices who preach acceptance and tolerance insist that tolerance evaporates the moment your own mother, uncle, or brother fails to echo your preferred ideology. The champions of “celebrate all differences” draw the line at differences around a holiday table.
This holiday genre teaches that ideological alignment must precede affection, loyalty, or basic human warmth. If a conversation might be uncomfortable, the relationship is disposable. If there is disagreement, the solution is withdrawal, not empathy or an attempt at understanding. The cumulative emotional message is suspicion, aimed not at strangers but at the people who love you most.
The pattern mirrors the oldest tool of ideological movements seeking control. Anyone familiar with the history of communist regimes recognizes the playbook. The family is the greatest competitor to political authority. Strong families pass down religion, culture, tradition, and independent identity. They teach loyalty to something more profound than the state or the movement. So, regimes from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to East Germany sought to sever or weaken those bonds. Break apart the family and isolate the individual, and ideology fills the vacuum.
America is not Stalin’s Russia, but the cultural Left employs a similar tactic in a softer, subtler form: convince people that family is dangerous and progressive politics is salvation. Teach them that disagreement is trauma, reframe loved ones as threats, and elevate ideology above kinship. Once someone believes his own relatives are oppressive or unsafe, the political movement becomes his new family.
The point of pieces like “How to survive your family” is not to help people navigate uncomfortable dinners. It is to train readers to view family through an ideological lens, one that places the movement above the household, the political tribe above actual kin. It’s not advice; it’s conditioning.
And let’s be honest about whom this genre is aimed at. The intended audience is the progressive base: people who are already primed to see the world as a hierarchy of oppressors and the oppressed, who are told nonstop that their identity is fragile, and who increasingly understand relationships not as commitments but as consumable extensions of their political selves.
It’s imperative to recognize what this messaging is: a deliberate attempt to weaken the family because the family is the institution most resistant to ideological capture.
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When you see the next wave of Christmas headlines about “surviving” relatives or “setting boundaries” with people who love you, understand what you’re looking at. It’s not a trend; it’s not normal seasonal content. It is part of a broader effort to reorder loyalties, displace the family with politics, and create a culture where ideological conformity replaces unconditional bonds.
The holiday table has always been a symbol of unity, connection, and belonging. Leftists’ relentless attempt to turn it into a battleground tells you everything about what they fear — and what they hope to dismantle.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.
