Jen Senko, a documentary filmmaker, looks at the rise of right-wing media through the lens of her WWII vet father who changed from a life-long, nonpolitical ...
Feels yucky to do that with an adult to be honest, but I am also quite at a loss what to do with my anti-vaxxer mom that clearly picks up right-wing / pro-Russia missinfo through that vector from YT as well.
I can understand feeling a bit underhanded from it, as she almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to do any of that had I asked her.
But if the alternative was standing by to let the right-wing propaganda do its job and slowly melt her brain, morphing her into a hateful person who’s so painful to be around that it might result in the need to go low or even no-contact… Feeling a little underhanded is a tradeoff I’m willing to make, personally.
My mother did not receive a good education (I recently discovered she did not know how gravity works on even the most basic level, like that the mass of the earth is what made things be pulled down), and has virtually no ability to critically investigate false claims, instead relying almost entirely on gut feeling and intuitions, which makes her particularly susceptible to harmful propaganda.
I suppose I reasoned that my parents would’ve tried to actively prevent me from viewing harmful material that would’ve turned me into a bad person when I was growing up, I’m just doing the same for her in her old age by shielding her from material specifically designed for that very thing. Not terribly unlike someone blocking Fox News stations on the TV at old-folks homes.
I tried appealing to her reason with logical arguments for years, but Fox could always offer a quicker, simpler, less nuanced counter argument that fit her pre-existing feeling or intuition, and thus any effort I put in to convince her of some truth would be rendered meaningless. Blocking it was the only thing that finally made a difference.
But perhaps the ends of removing those sources was so beneficial, that I’m now trying to rationalize resorting to those means, having my own much smaller Captain Sisko moment 😅
Feels yucky to do that with an adult to be honest, but I am also quite at a loss what to do with my anti-vaxxer mom that clearly picks up right-wing / pro-Russia missinfo through that vector from YT as well.
I can understand feeling a bit underhanded from it, as she almost certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to do any of that had I asked her.
But if the alternative was standing by to let the right-wing propaganda do its job and slowly melt her brain, morphing her into a hateful person who’s so painful to be around that it might result in the need to go low or even no-contact… Feeling a little underhanded is a tradeoff I’m willing to make, personally.
My mother did not receive a good education (I recently discovered she did not know how gravity works on even the most basic level, like that the mass of the earth is what made things be pulled down), and has virtually no ability to critically investigate false claims, instead relying almost entirely on gut feeling and intuitions, which makes her particularly susceptible to harmful propaganda.
I suppose I reasoned that my parents would’ve tried to actively prevent me from viewing harmful material that would’ve turned me into a bad person when I was growing up, I’m just doing the same for her in her old age by shielding her from material specifically designed for that very thing. Not terribly unlike someone blocking Fox News stations on the TV at old-folks homes.
I tried appealing to her reason with logical arguments for years, but Fox could always offer a quicker, simpler, less nuanced counter argument that fit her pre-existing feeling or intuition, and thus any effort I put in to convince her of some truth would be rendered meaningless. Blocking it was the only thing that finally made a difference.
But perhaps the ends of removing those sources was so beneficial, that I’m now trying to rationalize resorting to those means, having my own much smaller Captain Sisko moment 😅