My dad was one of the smartest men I ever knew. An engineer of multiple disciplines. A man who could build or fix pretty much anything. A life long liberal. To my knowledge, never a racist. Rational to a fault. I love him and I looked up to him. But I’m afraid senility is finally taking its toll.
This is just the latest in a series of racist bullshit emails he gets from his friends (who I knew to be better people than this) and feels the need to forward to me, despite my repeated requests for him to stop. Ex (translated from Russian):
It’s short, for those who don’t want to waste time watching it, it’s immediately obvious that what’s shown is not taking place in America. It takes place in Turkey. They are not smuggling drugs but cigarettes. And shockingly, it has fuck all to do with Trump or Obama.
It’s probably nothing new to those of you with aging parents but it’s fucking disturbing as hell to me to see my own dad decline to this state of mind where he is unable to distinguish truth from lies.
My dad, like yours, was a life-long Dem and a smart guy. Then he moved to South Carolina, got old, got on Facebook, and is currently believing every cockamame right-wing piece of nonsense he comes across. He shares and likes and comments on so much bullshit on Facebook, I finally had to block him. It angers me to no end that this shit is out there and that he doesn’t have the ability to filter out nonsense anymore.
He’ll be 71 next month and he readily admits to me that his memory is going fast. This is why I’ve stopped engaging him in political talk. I choose to remember him as the good, intelligent, thoughtful, kind man he was in his younger days. Now he has become hateful (toward gays, immigrants, Muslims, black people, etc) and irrational. We just talk about chickens and my kids now.
My dad, too, is a member of this sorrowful club. He wasn’t a lifelong Democrat, but he was smart and a fairly moderate Republican. That said, he has always had a victim mentality, meaning he finds it easy and dispositive to blame anyone/anything else for his failures in life, rather than look in a mirror.
Made him a sitting duck for Fox “News” and all the lies they propagate. “We’ll scare the crap out of you and then tell you who to scapegoat for it!!” He’s scared of everything now.
A couple of years ago, he suffered a heart attack and was hurriedly removed from his home for medical care. When I got there, I found the most vile, disgusting and flamboyantly false pamphlet about President Obama on the table beside my dad’s favorite chair. We haven’t talked politics in many years because of the bullshit he buys into, but I honestly hadn’t realized how far down the rabbit hole he was until I found that pamphlet. Haven’t been able to get it out of my head.
The sickness has taken hold of my beloved stepmom as well. Like they’re zombies or something. She actually defended birtherism to me a couple months ago.
Leaves me so sad and aghast at what the actual fake news has done to our nation. I warned my parents nearly 20 years ago to stop watching that shit.
I can’t imagine trolls target the old ( also the young would have a longer sell-by date ); just that spreading fake news scattershots all The People, and the stupider ones believe more readily. Just like fish being fed breadcrumbs by fishermen to draw them to the area.
Naturally in life many old people lose inhibitions as they grow nearer to death, some fighting and screaming at their carers; old suppressed resentments rise again, as well. And facing annihilation they haven’t got anything to lose — nor gain from loving the world — because it’s all nothingness once you’re dead.
My father-in-law is in his 70s and retains his liberal/lefty politics, so i don’t have to put up with all the right-wing nonsense, but his pattern of behavior is similar.
He shares and likes and comments on so much bullshit on Facebook, but it’s all liberal/lefty bullshit from idiotic clickbait sites. It’s memes with fake quotes, or pictures with completely bogus historical “facts,” or, at best, recycled news stories with deceptive and misleading headlines that do not reflect the substance of the story.
I haven’t blocked him, but i respond to a significant number of his posts with links to Snopes, or to the real stories on proper media outlets, and tell him to cut out the bullshit because we’re supposed to be better than them. He sometimes makes sheepish posts about not checking his sources, but a few days later he’ll be back at it again.
I don’t think the mere process of getting old causes this. I’m pushng 70, I can’t remember the plot of the movie I watched last month, but I don’t see these things causing me to become a tighty righty trumpista paranoid conservative anytime soon. I’d rather eat dirt. My 82 year old sis isn’t in any danger of that, either.
shrug Some people are older than others. The cliche, with merit, is, “Age is just a number.” And for some it’s a way of life. I only grab the Senior Discount when I know it’s a discount, 'cuz I’m old and cheap. Others think there is an advantage going to the Old People’s Buffet before the dinner menu goes out, just to save four bits.
I agree with your point. I think it takes a particular mind set to be susceptible to this sort of propaganda. There’s a yearning to return to “simpler times,” like everything was so perfect in the 50s, coupled with a propensity to blame others for one’s lot in life. It’s why I mentioned that particular trait in my father.
I know lots of liberals my dad’s age and older. He’s 85.
There are lots of things that lead to people believing nutty shit in their old age. A longing for comfort and stability is a huge one. For my dad, getting to where he is today was a process.
I don’t think my dad used to ever really have a victim mentality, but he has one now. He’s always belonged to an evangelical church (not to be confused with fundies); I belong to one as well and I’m as progressive as anyone you’ll ever meet. When he moved to South Caroline in the mid-90s, his evangelical congregation suddenly went from a mix of political colors to solidly conservative and WHITE, WHITE, WHITE. When he was living in southeast Michigan, it was hard to avoid black people, Latinos, Muslims, etc. Where he lives now, there are no Muslims, and it’s very easy to go about your life without ever really engaging someone who looks different that you. So now all of his friends are white, southern, evangelical Christian, straight and conservative. All of his neighbors and associates are the same.
In the early 00s, he began watching more cable news along with his nightly news on NBC and CBS and ABC. Since Fox News established themselves as the “most popular” cable news source, with a “fair and balanced” tagline, that became a must-watch for him. Then, once the Dan Rather/George Bush scandal broke, CBS was removed from the list of acceptable news sources. Then once NBC became really associated with the liberalness of MSNBC, NBC left his scene. Then ABC News became associated with mainstream/lamestream media, so the news only came from his most trusted source: Fox. He also travelled a lot for work via car, and he’s never been much for music, so many hours were spent listening to radio news. Once he realized the radio talk guys were saying the same things as his Fox News TV guys, they became a staple too.
Finally, social media allowed you to filter out & dislike anything you didn’t agree with. If it was offensive or challenging to his belief system, it was removed from his news feed. If it reinforced his views, he welcomed it and more like it. He became ever-more addicted to Facebook, and to this day is *constantly * on his phone checking his news feed, even as his grandkids (whom he sees only once or twice a year) clamor for his attention, much to my annoyance.
So step 1: Surround yourself with people who think and look a certain way. They are your primary source for ideas and opinions.
Step 2: Slowly filter out news sources that give news that doesn’t fit into your worldview.
Step 3: Create a social media bubble that reinforces your beliefs because having your opinions challenged is too difficult.
Step 4: Begin suffering from memory loss and possibly early onset Alzheimer’s/dementia.
Step 5: Live comfortably inside your echo chamber-- it’s not scary there because everyone thinks like you; everyone outside that bubble is trying to destroy you, your way of life, and America. They are scary, different, and it’s too much work to attempt to understand them at this point in your life.
The issue there is that there must be a hidden step zero, something that predisposes them to certain viewpoints like that. When I first heard Limbaugh’s spew decades ago I simply laughed and instantly dismissed him as a crank. Likewise instantly saw the “fair and balanced” thing as a deeply ironic (and pretentious) thing for a news organization to say. Even if it is simply an inability to evaluate all viewpoints without bias, there must be something there before step 1, or we would all be throwing tomatoes at Rush and Trump and Hannity and such and seeing them as the fools that they are.
As my dad got older, he began to be obsessed with the illegal drug problem in society. His worst fears seem to be around illegal drugs coming into the country and the drug dealers who deal those drugs. This is an inexplicable fear because there is no-one in our circle of friends and relatives that has ever been in any way involved with illegal drug use or trade. He wouldn’t know a drug dealer if one rolled him a free joint. But whenever he would see a homeless person, he’d reflexively make a comment about that person being “on drugs”. He’s developed other weird fears and obsessions but the drug thing remains his biggest boogeyman and I’ve never quite understood why. If I try to talk to him about it, he can’t really explain it except to insist how big of a problem it is in society.
I review flagged videos on kid-friendly forums like Roblox and Minecraft and a few others. Every single day I see dozens of videos like this presented usually in broken English and full of allcaps and exclamation points that get flagged.
So it’s not just the elderly, it’s the kids they’re targeting.
I’ve seen this one, tho: The Brainwashing Of My Dad. It’s available for free with Amazon Prime but I don’t know about Netflix or Hulu or any other services.
I am certainly sceptical that all these are directed by Vlad’s commissars or that they are automatically meant specifically for American audiences; they seem to come from all over, and to people in small countries the cash offered by American fake news sites, and Google’s AdSense, is welcome: there are plenty of stupid people, whose weak English is perhaps a function of understandable illiteracy, willing to make crap up for simpletons everywhere.
America is just the richest pool — you don’t need to amuse/influence poor Ethiopians.
It’s a very rough documentary. IIRC the lady who made it had some experience with filmmaking, but mostly she just was trying to document and explain what she saw happening to her own father (very similar to what a lot of people have posted here). When she began discussing it with people, she found a lot of “OMG mine too!” reactions; the “a lot” went exponential when she sought crowdfunding, and so she had both funds and material.
But I did think it was a worthwhile document and I’ve encouraged people to see it for a couple of years now.
The really sad part of this is that otherwise reasonable people become so filled with rage and anger that it not only consumes them, but they refuse to admit it to themselves.
Eighteen years ago I came to the realization that I was an angry, bitter man and I didn’t want to be that person anymore. I also didn’t want to die, so I had to change myself, become less angry. Part of that is to avoid things that are designed to make me angry.
I ask a question of angry right wingers on occasion: Do you like being such an angry person? To a one, they deny being angry, even as they spit back in anger. They project it on me, they project it on others. But they rage and froth while loudly proclaiming that they are NOT angry.
And yet they are. They’ve surrendered their peace to misinformation and lies.
But you can’t rescue people who don’t want to be rescued.
Count me as one of the effected too. I dread calls with my dad, and am in a huge depression about whether I can ever go visit again. It’s just non stop nonsense, unjustified blame, and anger. He is not the person I want to remember him as anymore, and I’m not sure I can deal with him at all.
