Russian trolls target the old and senile.

The BBQ Pit
21

I’m with you. I went from talking to my dad on the phone a few times a week, to once every few months. We text on occasion. He told me he was coming to visit last month, and I had the bubble guts for a week ahead of time. He was my hero growing up, I wanted nothing more than to spend my weekends at his house with him throughout my high school years.

And my parents are an amazing case study. They divorced in the early 80s. In the mid-90s they both moved away from Metro Detroit in the exact same month-- my dad to South Carolina, my mom to west Michigan, both very conservative areas. Both still attend Calvinist churches twice on Sunday and are active in volunteering there on a regular basis. Both remarried, my mom actually married a card-carrying life-long Republican. My mom is extremely modest and “conservative” in dress, style, speech, lifestyle, has never touched a drop of alcohol, her house is entirely beige, has exactly one picture on each wall, etc. My dad, a vietnam vet, drinks, used to smoke, has smoked pot, is prone to extremely salty language, etc.

However, my mother is an Obama-loving lefty (although she’s too modest to actually label herself anything other than “independent,”) with a few conservative tendencies (gay marriage, abortion), while my dad is a right-wing conspiracy-loving Trump-adoring extremist who hates anything and anyone that isn’t white, Republican, straight, Christian, American. My mom donates her money and time to homeless shelters and food banks in the area, my dad thinks poor people are all lazy and scammers and refuses to help in any way (he was actually disgusted when my wife ran the kitchen for a twice-weekly church dinner for poor people because they were “encouraging freeloaders and scammers”). My mom supports refugees and immigrants and volunteers her time to do Bible study with prisoners, while my dad “likes” posts on Facebook that describe immigrant families being split up under Trump and celebrate Robert E. Lee’s legacy.

If anyone wanted to actually do a case study on this, man, it’s ripe for the pickin’. I honestly can’t figure out what the hell happened over the past 20 years to make my parents so polar opposite today. The kicker is my mom said my dad and his brother used to argue politics in the 70s-- my dad was the liberal and my uncle was the conservative. Today, the two don’t talk anymore because of politics, but they’ve flip-flopped on ideology.

John DiFool, there *is *a step zero, but for the life of me, I just can’t see what it is when it comes to my dad. What made him prone to these asshole beliefs? I wish I knew. The only thing that ever comes to mind: He’s dealt with a lot of PTSD from Vietnam in his life, and has told me snippets of things he’s realized about himself talking to shrinks. Is this connected? I have no clue.

22

I think they have so much more time on their hands. It is just a crap-shoot as to which group of extremists gets to them first.IMHO.

23

Check out that movie I posted about, Happy. Not sure if you’ll find answers but I know you’ll find commiseration, of a sort.

The sheer number of people seeing family and friends become angry, bitter seniors is astounding.

I’ve seen it. My Mom’s husband is a retired Air Force pilot. He spent like 30 years in the service and collects a fantastic pension. But a significant amount of his time is spent watching Fox News and hating on everything… but especially hating on the government. Ya know, that he worked for for decades. That he collects a pension from. :smack:

24

Note this happened to a liberal friend of mine (c. around age 30 note), one minute looking at me crosswise like I am insane for daring to read a Christian book (I’m not, but the book contained some concepts that appealed to me), I leave town for a few years, come back-and all of a sudden he’s a flaming Dittohead when he’s not chanting over his rosary.

My guess it that the “liberalism” there did not arise from deeply held and sincere beliefs, but as a way to fit in with some in-crowd somewhere. Someone who doesn’t actually have a solid moral center is going to flit from in-group to in-group, without said group’s actual core principles (as such) mattering very much. But WTF do I know.

25

I think a lot of this has nothing to do with particular current political issues. There aren’t many advantages to being old, maybe the only one is acting in this manner and spouting out your feelings of dissatisfaction in any context. Most people live out their lives avoiding the appearance of extremism, but when you get old enough you don’t give a rat’s ass anymore, you don’t care what you just said yesterday about the same subject, and how dare you young whippersnappers criticize me for my insane political discourse? I raised you, I changed you diapers, you wouldn’t be anything today without me you insolent whelp! Now get off my lawn!

26

what a depressing thread - but I have seen fox “news” addicts in the nursing home: it has to be on the TV constantly.

this - they are angry and they are addicted to outrage, but they can’t see it!

27

I know the phenomenon well, but it never affected my grandparents. I am a bit worried about my dad, though. I’m doing my best to keep challenging him and reminding him of this conspiracy nut job from work that he always would tell me about, in a sort of trainwreck way.

Still, what worries me more is that these people have power, and we have one who is in the highest elected office in our country. Not that I want to hijack this thread to talk about him. But just to point out how much sense it makes if you think of him in that way: the angry senile conspiracy theorist misled by dishonest conservative media.

28

I don’ think anger is it, though. Because I get pretty angry, too. I just don’t wind up spreading the bullshit. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories. But I’m also 32, and I’m at an age that never really watched TV news. And I keep my news diet low, because I know that bad news can piss me off, and it’s not worth it.

29

Keep at it.

30

Count me in as another who has lost their dad to fear and anger. He retired (from his union job at Ford) in 2008 or so and has been sitting on his couch every day since, watching Fox News and listening to right-wing radio. Thankfully he’s not on social media or email so he’s not getting the Russian shit or spreading anything but people who do get the Russian shit are calling up to the radio station he listens to and spreading it to him.

I watched that Brainwashing of my Dad documentary and was like “Yep, that’s us.”

I know that a lot of my dad’s anger and frustration comes from his body utterly breaking down and making him near physically useless and in pain all the time. His psyche was definitely ripe for the picking by the right wing anger brigade.

I try to only be around my parents when my brothers’ kids are around too. They’re happy then. It blows my mind that even in short periods of down time when the kids are visiting, dad feels the need to bring up politics of some sort. It’s sick.

31

That seems to be so common. I’ve got some brothers in law that exhibit this. It seems they’re okay until they retire, then all of a sudden they’ve got time to listen to Hate Radio and Fox and spend more time on Facebook and jeepers, it doesn’t take long and they totally hate everything outside the right wing echo chamber. It’s curious how there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding phenomenon in the opposite direction.

32

Maybe no-one complains about their aging relative becoming more compassionate and understanding of the world around them. :wink:

33

Humorous but with a grain of truth. One wouldn’t notice a sudden lack of hostility as much.

34

Many years ago Saturday Night Live had a phony commercial that was a play on those old-people-life-insurance commercials. The joke was that “Old Glory Insurance” would pay off in the event of you being killed by a robot. Presented by Sam Waterston, speaking gently and slowly so old people could understand him, he noted, with as much seriousness as he could muster (he almost loses it later in the “ad”) that it was very important to have robot insurance because “robots are strong,” and “they eat old people’s medicine for fuel.” “So don’t cower under your afghan any longer,” he reassures senior citizens, because Old Glory will be there “when the metal ones decide to come for you… and they will.”

The meta joke, of course, is the assumption, which you sort of have to have to get the joke, that

  1. Old people are gullible, and
  2. Old people are easily frightened.

Old people have been the target of con artists, usually using fear, for as long as there have been old people. How many scams directed at old people are there? A zillion? Senior citizen advocacy groups actually have web pages, literature, and stuff specifically dedicated to this problem.

https://www.ncoa.org/economic-security/money-management/scams-security/top-10-scams-targeting-seniors/

The genius of the Russian maskirovka campaign on Trump’s behalf, and the genius of Fox News, is to take what companies, con men and opportunistic relatives have been doing to years to scam old people of their money, and do it to scam them of their beliefs and votes. Sure, they fool some dimwitted younger people too, just as con men can scam people of all ages. But old people are very vulnerable to scams. Long have politicians sought out the old people vote; someone has finally fully merged true con artistry with politics.

35

I agree with what you are saying in a lot of cases, but a couple of responses are talking about people in there 70s, one being only 71, just 10 years older than I am. Most of those people have had plenty of exposure to the internet and modern scams, and are in better physical and mental condition and social awareness than my 91 year old mother was at that age. I think there may be more to the political aspect of this than just the old age.

36

I think a lot of it is the times we live in. Things are changing FAST now; very fast. I’m only 50 and I was at the forefront of the computer revolution and the internet all the way (started poking at things at IBM as a kid when my dad would bring me in to work, in the late '70s worked on an Apple ][ with a cassette player, Telenet, MCI, phreaking, etc.) and even I’m having a hard time keeping up with what the hell’s going on.

I understand and accept that I will not understand a lot of what people are doing in 20 years. I already can’t figure out what in the hell Pinterest is for or why people need to show everyone what they ate for lunch (and where, and with whom) every day or why kids today don’t want to drive, etc. But I think- no, I KNOW, that people are easily frightened by people they don’t understand. “What are their motivations if they don’t like the same things I do?” is the intellectualized version of what people feel viscerally, and since uncertainty leads to stress and tension and tension ALWAYS demands release… well, I understand how it can happen that old people become, and are perceived as, grumpy pissants.

And since the baby boomers started to hit 55 back around 2000, we’ve got a massive senior population right now. So the tendency for the behavior was already possible just due to age, and it’s exacerbated by the current pace of technological change AND the presence of those who seek to exploit it for their own political and financial gain.

37

This thread is like a support group for me. My dad (now 88) was never going to escape the Fox clutches, he was always a low-information person disdainful of any kind of nuance.

The more worrisome questions to me are: will this happen to me in a few more years (I’m retiring in three years at 67)? Is it an inevitability for the bulk of my fellow younger-boomers? And what if the new generations of voters take a dramatic turn away from democracy and freedom?

38

The answer is, probably not.

Another component I frequently see among the Fox “News”-addicted is isolation. My dad has made himself a shut-in. He rarely interacts with people except his wife. He spends most of his time in his armchair, watching Fox (especially Hannity). He rousts himself from there to his computer, where he participates on overheated alt-right forums that feed him as many conspiracy theories as he can handle. That’s pretty much his whole life, now. He doesn’t challenge his thinking, he never talks to people who don’t agree with him.

I think a lot of older people self-isolate, especially after retirement. They don’t know what to do with themselves. They don’t know how to make new friends. The body aches and it’s easy to just idle in place and let time slip by. Watching Fox is a readily accessible way to waste the day. And besides, it’s telling them exactly what they already want to believe. The world has changed for the worse and it’s just obvious what the problem is: Those Other People.

So keep yourself busy and active, find and enjoy the company of other people, get out of the house and turn off the tee vee. You’ll be fine. I know an awful lot of people in the Boomer Generation (of which I am one at age 60) and older who have no inclination to turn away from freedom, democracy or progressive values. Engaging with the real world keeps you real.

39

I tend to agree. My dad is only 67 and see my post above. He’s in it, hook, line and sinker. And it has been happening since he retired at 55. Once he stopped working he stopped socializing whatsoever. Not that he socialized at all prior to that but he was around people 40+ hours a week at work. He has always had social anxiety and now, given the chance to stay home and avoid people, he’s taking it. Super un-healthy.

My mom sort of gets pulled in to the Super Right bullshit but she is well more open-minded. She is 66 and retired at 59. She is on Facebook and uses the Internet (she was exposed to computers at work - dad, not at all). She is active with her retired friends and goes to church a lot and to be honest, Catholic church has been extremely healthy for her world view. The Pope is kicking ass right now and her church is dutifully staying out of politics and she even attended a talk by a man who explained the dire water situation in Africa and she was moved.

So yeah, you don’t have to get pulled into it. And I hope that if you’re in your 60s now you won’t take a turn for the worse.

WRT Fox News and the Russians - Fox was already making a killing off old people telling them to invest in gold and silver and life insurance. They totally knew the fear market and ran with it.

40

Not to derail the thread but this part terrifies me. I have never been a particularly social person. And I got into a habit after college that most of my non-work socialization was at the bar, and I did it for years, several times a week. Lately I have through a combination of desire to stop unhealthy activities, and annoyance at “those stupid kids today” nearly stopped doing that as well. I can see myself on the path toward having no life and being a virtual shut-in myself at all if I do ever retire. :frowning:
At least there aren’t any kids to be disappointed in me, I suppose.