My parents have always been left-wing hippies and entertained the odd conspiracy theory, but during the pandemic they got lost down YouTube rabbit holes and bought into Q-Anon and anti-vax ideas. They still don’t believe Covid is real (even though they blatantly had it…).
We’ve just kind of agreed not to talk about it anymore, but they’ve steadily become more and more batshit and I think they believe I have been brainwashed.
Anyone else’s familial relationships changed forever?
It was never about covid. These people are born to be contrarians about whatever other people are doing. I don’t know exactly what makes them want to live that way, but that’s just their preferred way of existing. Be it covid, Russia, LGBT, and whatever other “”“opinions”“” they’ve been spoon fed on their Facebook feed. They always change. Every other week/month/year it’s something else they get butthurt about. Funnily enough, it’s almost always the same type of person: no education, frustrated with life, dead-end job, in debt, and so on. I personally believe that angertainment is a coping mechanism for them. I’ve told family members before to stick to normal topics like a normal social human being when talking to me, because I do not care about their frustrations with whatever X is doing.
The correct word is reactionaries. That’s what they are.
Science makes you feel dumb. It tells you that the basic way you see the universe is wrong. Believing in conspiracy theories makes you feel smart. Some people have abnormally low tolerances for feeling stupid.
I think you’re mistaken about the type of person who can fall prey to this type of exploitation. It’s much more broad than the specific group that you described.
I don’t have any widespread data to site but I can tell you just from my own life that some of the anti-vaxxers I’ve come across come from all varieties of backgrounds with all types of financial situations and careers. That’s also true from what many of my friends have told me with regards to people they’ve met.
And I sympathize with the people who get played like violins. The 24-hour news cycle is pernicious, there’s a lot of bad things that happen in life, and it’s easy enough to let yourself get angry and confuse that anger with careful thought and progress. And once you fall into the trap, is your pride going to let you climb out of the pit that you willingly threw yourself into?
“These people …”
Yeah this is true, my parents are definitely contrarians.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
One of my wife’s friends lost her baby to COVID because her mom wouldn’t stay masked, and lied about having COVID when she visited shortly after the baby was born. The abject selfishness boggles my mind.
Holding my 3 months old baby while reading this broke my heart. I don’t think I’d ever recover.
My grandma was 100% sold on covid being some kind of left wing hoax. She died from covid.
…and now I’m the one being insensitive for acknowledging that she died an idiot, and likely took several others down with her. It’s like we’re supposed to just pretend her death was anything other than suicide by political zealotry.
I just don’t talk about it, my views are toward the end of the spectrum and definitely not inline with relatives. But then most of my views about controversial topics are. I’m just too old and cynical anymore. My wife and I are on the same page though, no problem there.
In the hippie days there was a cliché, “don’t trust anyone over thirty.” Now it’s just, “don’t trust anyone.”
Yes. All our relationships changed and I don’t know if they’ll ever recover. I’m disabled and from the start it’s been a struggle. I remember in early 2020 a family member sharing a post on fb that said only the vulnerable were dying to covid and reminding them that’s me and the ensuing kerfuffle. Several family members got it, were hospitalized, and refuse to get vaxxed later on.
What’s caused the most upset to me and my partner though is my in-laws’ reactions. My FIL has copd and MIL has cancer and received a transplant last year. They live near my SIL and her family. They’ve all had covid multiple times, 3x last we heard. FIL was hospitalized, MIL was in hospital for a year after her transplant due to one complication or illness after another. Her health is very delicate and no one seems to care about protecting her (or themselves). None of them mask not even around her. We’ve tried talking about it a few times, cancer patients have been masking and being cautious about illnesses long before covid and we have such a better understanding of mitigation tools after these last few years. But they just do not care, nothing to be concerned about. My partner is so worried about her but at this point is ready to hear the worst should it come. It’s just baffling to me.
No and I don’t really even know anyone who believes in such conspiracies though I’m sure they exist even where I live. I just feel like this kind of crazines is on large part almost exclusive to the United States
I (OP) am in the UK and it’s definitely fringe, but it’s there. Where do you live?
Depends on where you live. In Germany they’ve been quite successful with the average person.
For us, the topics just changed. After Covid, they started to talk Pro-Putin bullshit, probably Q-Anon related. It’s honestly shocking to see people who I once thought of as intelligent turn brainwashed. We rarely talk anymore, and if we do, it’s very superficial.
Is their pro-Putin stuff something like “If we push Putin it might start a nuclear war?” or more like “He’s so swashbuckling manly we ought to be glad he’s invading Ukraine”?
I tried to avoid going into details, but they started to say something among the lines of, “Well, things are not like your media wants you make believe…” (aka “The press is lying to you/us”).
They seem suspicious of mainstream media. How they find their Telegram channels to be more competent is beyond me.
It’s a bit extreme to claim the news is all lies and no effort to convey the truth, but it’s not crazy to think that the news is spinning things into propaganda, and sometimes even presenting falsehoods.
I don’t think it’s as prevalent as some people think but I don’t lose much respect for a person if they think it’s more widespread than I think it is.
Like I think it’s not gonna rain this afternoon, someone else thinks it will rain, that difference in perceptive conclusion doesn’t bother me.
I’ve got an uncle who’s super fucking cynical. To him all politicians are nothing but crooks. I see it more like there’s some good ones and some crooks. He and I get along no problem and I love hearing his theories.
My parents would watch a channel that had little pro Russia news segments thrown into commercials. The damage this constant little poking with misinformation does is not easily undone. They didn’t even notice how their opinion was formed by those few lines in-between their favorite shows. Then suddenly they had issues with their satellite dish and when I fixed it somehow, for some totally unknown reason that channel was no longer there. Woops. They found other shows to watch and don’t support the war anymore.
Ribbit
I wish it was that easy. That part of my family is a bit more remote, so I don’t see them that often. Still, I hurt thinking about how this misinformation was able to divide us like that. There’s also little point in arguing with them. We simply don’t talk much anymore, and if we do, we keep the topics light and refrain from politics and/or other world-news topics such as climate change. (Which is not really a thing, if you ask them, but I think you get the idea.)
Intelligence doesn’t seem to have much correlation with belief in propaganda. In my experience, intelligent people can be more susceptible to being hoodwinked, since they assume they’re “smart enough not to fall for it.”
Once they adopt a belief, their conception of themselves as intelligent, rational actors causes them to invent all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations, and it’s extremely difficult to admit that they didn’t actually use the logical part of their brain at all when forming the belief.
My observation during Covid was that once they are “hooked” on a certain conspiracy, they go out of their way to discredit/ignore any facts that state otherwise. My assumption is that the longer this goes on, the harder they are fighting to stick to “their truth”. They rather accept obvious false news than accept that they were wrong initially.
Why? Because they would need to go back and acknowledge being wrong, " loosing their face" in front of a lot of people. They may have had angry conversations over the conspiracies with loved ones and may have even cut ties. (Experienced that first-hand with family.) The further down the rabbit hole they go, the higher the “costs” of going back up.
There are people in my family who work in healthcare (psychiatric nurse, nothing to do with virology) and law enforcement who said the numbers were inflated because people called in sick despite not being sick, and that covid was just a flu. It’s kind of interesting how belief in this conspiracy theory turned into other conspiracy theories afterwards. I don’t really associate with them for that reason because conversations inevitably turn towards this kind of stuff and I just don’t have the energy to deal with this crap.
No, because none of my family was dense enough to support ungodly government overreach
Covid revealed just how stupid some people you know really are.
I think it’s not solely stupidity, but being isolated for a long time with YouTube and extremist “news” sites being their only source of information has radicalised them. I had to ask my dad to stop sending me links, not just because of the content, but because they were from far right organisations (which was so surreal to me, they’ve always been extremely left). So he doesn’t send them anymore and I’m just excluded from those conversations (which I’m happy with) but it does mean he doesn’t have anyone else to give him some perspective and it worries me.
Mom went full fundamentalist evangelical biblical literalist q-anon in recent years, even tried getting my sister to divorce her husband because he voted for the wrong candidate (no guesses for who was the “right” candidate). My sister, not being stupid, did not divorce her husband. As for myself, being in the military, I try to make counterarguments against my mom, which just ends with her accusing me of being brainwashed (which I probably am, but that’s another story).
My mom too. She won’t stop sending me videos about the end of days and how we won’t have any food soon. She turned an entire room in her house into a stock room. I asked her, if she is so excited for the end of days which allows her to go to heaven, then why is she spending all her disposable income on survival supplies.
To be fair, one of the interpretations of the apocalypse is called “Post-Tribulation Rapture”, in which the faithful must first suffer the years of torment of the rest of the world, or at least 144 thousand of them, before Jesus returns and kills so many humans that the blood fills up the Armageddon up to the shoulder of a warhorse. She might be prepping for the tribulation.
Having 90 days of hoarded brownie mix and frozen blueberries ain’t doing shit to help her survive. It’s just so sad to watch.
My Dad died in 2005, he was in his 60s. He was very intelligent and during my childhood he was open minded. Toward the end of his life he changed. He started listening to Rush Limbaugh and regurgitating those talking points. I always wonder how far he would have gone had he lived. Would he have supported Trump? Would he have been anti vax?
My dad was very similar, though conservative, and while not open minded he was an excellent critical thinker.
He, too, listened to all the right wingers and I’ve often wondered if he was still alive would he have been a Trumper.It’s all so weird but hearing of similar stories like yours gives me a bit of solace.
Be honest. Your parents don’t believe that “Covid isn’t real”.
They live in a very rural part of the UK on a commune (which is a bit culty) and don’t really interact with anyone outside their bubble. At the beginning they didn’t know anyone who got ill, and later on they just explained any illness away as being flu or something else.
Even when me and my siblings all got covid they didn’t believe us, which honest really hurt. I’ve always had a good relationship with my parents.
