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cohray2212 t1_iu53g8e wrote

Absolutely. It's a cult, they need to be deprogrammed. No debate or discourse is going to snap them out of it. It takes a professional.

My mom is one of these people. In the early 2000s it was Oprah and magnets that cure cancer that western medicine doesn't want us to know about, "toxins" and an obsession with organic food. Now it's Trump, Covid is the flu, and the vaccine is evil.

We can talk about "western medicine is inherently flawed because of the for-profit system" and we can say other countries could seek cures where there's less incentive here. We can even talk about the flaws that insurance has where there's never an incentive to cut costs because higher costs means booming business for insurance. As soon as we talk about socialized medicine it's back to square one after a few canned responses about freedom of choice and wait time propaganda and how an imaginary 50% of all money earned in Canada is taxed toward health care.

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whaletacochamp t1_iu5clem wrote

Ugh, I’m sorry someone so close to you is like that.

My dad definitely has the potential to be like that but has tended more toward the liberal side of things. He will watch Fox News for the sole purposes of screaming at rhe TV for a few hours. I’m honestly amazed he didn’t have a heart attack during the Trump administration.

The funny thing is that sometimes he will pull out a SUPER ignorant and conservative point of view on something. I don’t get it lol.

I really think a lot of it comes from the older generation just taking what society feeds them on their TV channels of choice. I can’t even tell you the last time I watched cable news - instead I read a variety of mostly unbiased news sources that I seek out myself, or read stuff from a number of maybe biased sources and create my own understanding based on all the facts. Our folks are basically “they said it on TV so it has to be true!”

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random_vermonter t1_iu5v12v wrote

My dad is the same way. He'll watch CNN and then switch to Fox and sometimes he'll say a liberal talking point and other times, a conservative one. He's confusing. I think he enjoys the theatrics of it.

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whaletacochamp t1_iu5w9f1 wrote

Yeah that’s pretty much it. And a lot of it comes down to “politicians are all horrible!” Which is totally fair.

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