How Fox News & the Right-Wing Media Machine Totally Changed My Dad's Character & Made Him Crazy

[Amaryllis]

This is from March but well worth checking out if you missed it. Friend just told me about it. Documentary chronicles how her dad changed completely over time from listening to right wing media.

"How Fox News and the Right-Wing Media Machine Made My Dad Crazy"

Jen Senko, director of the new documentary ‘The Brainwashing of My Dad,’ writes about how the right-wing hate machine drove her father to the brink of insanity.

Lots of snip

Slowly, my Dad’s openness to all people began to change. He started mocking feminists and defending SUVs. Now, I didn’t tell you something essential about my dad: he was a ‘saver.’ Coming from the Great Depression, he’d learned to be thrifty about everything. When we got old enough to drive, he had us mark down our mileage and how much gas we bought in a little book. This was his way to keep track of how many miles to the gallon the car got. So it shocked me when, after picking me up from the bus station one time, he became livid when I cracked a sarcastic joke about all the SUVs I saw on the road.

When he retired, he continued with his talk radio habit and started listening to Rush Limbaugh. He would rarely miss a Limbaugh lunch. And that’s when my Dad became angry all the time, argumentative, and hateful of particular groups of people. Of all things, he began lashing out against gay people. I couldn’t believe it. He would get red-in-the-face angry whenever I tried to ask him why he suddenly hated all things gay. And didn’t he still like my friends? I never got a coherent answer other than, “I just don’t want it in my face!”

When Clinton came into office he hated him so much it was disturbing—something I figured had to do with his hero, Rush Limbaugh. He called Al Gore an “asshole,” and even after he saw Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth years later, said it was “stupid.” He railed against “liberal universities.” He railed against illegal immigrants and Mexicans, and literally started telling my mother she should wait on him because he was the man of the house. He started calling my mother and aunts “girls,” and did not like it when I would correct him and say “women.” “Girls,” he’d repeat, his face filling with blood.

I saw the writing on the wall early on and mentioned it to my mother. She didn’t know what to do about it, so she downplayed it. No one took it too seriously at first. Then email came into play. My Dad joined and/or contributed to every right-wing organization, from the NRA to Christian right groups. Both of these choices struck everyone as especially strange considering he wasn’t a hunter and was a medic in WWII. And only a few years earlier, he’d announced he didn’t believe in God anymore.

He started sending us all a constant stream of far-right emails. Some of the stories were so clearly apocryphal it baffled me that he believed them. He would even pester me with them at work, like the one he sent me railing against the minimum wage. I couldn’t understand it. This was not an issue he’d ever talked about before and I could not imagine him even taking a side—but I was especially shocked at the side he took. It wasn’t until later when I was researching the subject that I discovered many of these “homespun”-sounding emails were simply written by a bunch of guys sitting in a room at some right-wing think tank, made to sound as if an “average Joe” wrote them.

snip

Once I started chronicling this character change in my film The Brainwashing of My Dad, I discovered I was not alone. This was a phenomenon. People from all over wrote me asking for advice about what to do to restore their relationship with their sister, or their brother, or their mother. Their concerns were many, from “We can’t even talk about the weather because then global warming comes up” to “My Dad keeps buying guns and ammunition waiting for the new Civil War.”

I often find myself pondering this new “civil” war. It’s truly become a war against civility that has poisoned families and divided our country in a way that it has not been divided since the Civil War, and it’s because of the concerted effort by right-wing media over the last 30 years to mislead and divide people.

snip

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/17/how-fox-news-and-the-right-wing-media-machine-made-my-dad-crazy

[niyad]

1. thank you for posting this. how sad--and how very true.

[Skittles]

2. "I don't want it in my face" is a common complaint from conservative snowflakes

seriously, they are driven by absolute fear - that's why cling to their guns

[underpants]

3. I've been meaning to watch this

Thanks. Bookmarking

[TNLib]

4. this happening to me

My mother, my father and stepmother have all been brainwashed.

My mother her whole life was for open boarders and fairly liberal on issues. Now she constantly complains about illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorist and praises Trump. My father is more quiet on politics but gets drunk and shouts in restaurants how much he hates Muslims. My stepmother a life long democrat, hated Hillary and complained constantly about Benghazi.

They are in there 70's and starting to show signs of forgetfulness and mental decline at times and their personalities have completely changed along with their world views. I can't tell if it's senility or they're being bombarded with RW propaganda because they mostly stay at home and watch TV.

But it is driving me nuts.

[kimbutgar]

5. You know you can block fox on their Tv's in a sneaky way and tell them there is problem with the

Network. Sometimes, I have been places that is broadcasting fox on tv and sneakily I have gone into the menu of the cable/ satellite then settings and channel favorites and have deleted or blocked fox.

[TNLib]

6. Lol