The story became news after the woman, who now lives in Australia, wrote an op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald detailing her anger and disappointment.
Aubrey Perry reportedly discovered that her mother was a California delegate for the former reality-television star after she saw her name while scanning through the delegate list looking for white nationalist William Johnson — who was “accidentally” made a delegate due to a “database error,” according to the Trump campaign.
— Barbara Jensen (@BarbaraJensen1) May 13, 2016
“I’d known for a while that my mum was open to the idea of Trump as her candidate,” Perry wrote. “My dad has been a Trump supporter from the beginning.” Perry communicates with her family mainly through Facebook as they are located in California and she has lived in Australia for the last seven years.
After finding out about her parents’ support for the candidate, she dug up her mother’s Twitter account, which she says contained offensive memes.
“Hateful memes, ugly language, and appearance-based attacks, targeted at Hillary Clinton, stacked up,” Perry wrote. “And not just hateful, but off-topic and malicious calling Hillary ‘ugly,’ ‘old’ and ‘screechy.’ An ‘unlikeable old bag. The ‘woman card’ stinks!’ my mother wrote. My mother! A college instructor! She should know better. She’s no internet troll. Is she?”
Perry, after seeing the barrage of hate on her mother’s Twitter account, then recalled hearing racist slurs frequently used in her home to describe people from Mexico.
“After the Obama election, my mother had said to me: ‘You know, I think I only voted for Obama to prove to myself that I wasn’t racist.’ I walked away from that conversation,” Perry recalled.
Disappointed by her discovery, Perry tweeted at her mother.
“I commented on my mum’s tweet and asked her if she’d really written those words. Her response: “(American Flag emoji) You don’t share my beliefs, and you don’t have to. (smiley face emoji).”
— Barbara Jensen (@BarbaraJensen1) April 30, 2016
Unsatisfied with her response, Perry tweeted at her mother once again, expressing her embarrassment.
“Your Twitter feed makes me disappointed and embarrassed of you as a person, a supposed critical thinker, and my mother. Shocked,” she wrote.
Soon after, much to Perry’s dismay, she found Fox News clips showing her parents at Trump rallies, where her mother proclaimed support for the candidate.
“I was overwhelmed with shame for my years of silence for not opposing her ideologies sooner,” Perry writes. “Look where it got me. Look where it got my family. Look where it got us as a nation, a country of closet racists and enablers.”
Perry then took to her Facebook feed to post screenshots and put her mother on blast. Her mother blocked her in response, something that her father had reportedly done years ago.
Now, there’s a war within the Perry family, and her father has demanded that she stop airing the family’s dirty laundry.
“I know you have never said anything you might not like to be made public,” he reportedly wrote in an email to Perry, “so if you want to continue this attack mode, please remember all things have consequences.”
Instead of taking the warning, Perry turned to the Sydney Morning Herald, explaining that shaming her family publicly was the moral thing to do.
— Aubrey Rhodes (@arperry24) May 11, 2016
“My husband and I found no other way to be honest with ourselves, to be moral, and to protect our daughter than to sever all ties with my parents as long as they promote these ideologies of hate and xenophobia,” Perry wrote.
“To ignore is to accept,” she explains. “If I don’t oppose my parents’ behaviour and objectives, if I don’t reject Trump and all that he stands for, if I don’t change my family’s vocabulary…I’m undoing the progress that generations before me have fought and died for. And that, I won’t accept.”
