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?
Yes and no.
My parents are thankfully at the age at which they just don’t give much of a shit. They think that there was a lot of shady political shenanigans surrounding the whole thing (and I’d say they’re objectively correct about that), but they cynically expect that and mostly ignore it. They talked to their doctors and came to understand that covid is real, and dangerous, and that the vaccines do have some risks, but the benefits outweigh the risks, and that was enough for them to take it seriously and take proper precautions.
My brothers on the other hand…
I’m the oldest of three, and they’re both… well… angry, spiteful, delusional, Fox News and talk radio consuming, gun-toting, Trump-voting, road-raging reactionaries. So they both lined right up and marched in lockstep with the expected dogma, to my complete lack of surprise.
So yes - our relations have been strained over it, but really it’s not quite accurate to say that it’s because of that, since that’s just one of the many, many MANY things on which we disagree.
Did they also waffle along with their leader about how Covid is not a big deal, but the vaccine was the best thing ever, and China is responsible but Biden is responsibler, that it can be cured by over the counter or, uh, through-the-horse methods but you can’t trust a damn thing Big Pharma’ll sell you?
Last I knew, yes. In fact, I almost mentioned that, just because it amuses me so much.
I sit and listen (well - more accurately, I used to - at this point I leave the room as soon as they start), and it’s honestly astonishing.
The middle one is the one that does it most obviously, since he’s actually very intelligent and just fell down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and hasn’t found his way back out. I think what happens is he cones to see the holes in his current conspiracy theory, so he… just replaces it with another.
The younger one constantly shifts too, but that’s because he’s mostly defined by who he hates, so as his focus shifts, so does the purported blame.
Not family, probably because my father passed away just before the pandemic. But it has changed friendships forever. I was surprised by the lack of empathy from people. Like the mild inconvenience of wearing a mask was worse than people dying…
“I WiLL nOt BeCoMe a ShEeP!”
[breathes on strangers while running errands, spreads COVID, kills vulnerable people in their community]
To be fair that sounds very un-sheep-like.
I got my shots in secret due to needing them, didn’t tell my family (they went full Q) until a recent health crisis had me hopeful admitting to it would get a member to get their shots (they’re hilariously high risk).
It did not work, but they shut up about all of the BS and basically exclude me from it now. So I will say it’s a win; they also shifted goal posts so I’m no longer going to die, be sterile, or autistic from getting shots.
As somebody vaccinated and autistic I’m VERY disappointed my autism didn’t level up when I got another vaccine.
Seems you have already maxed out your autism level with other vaccines.
My family became very Anti-Vax during that time. My wife and I had just had a newborn about a year in to the pandemic and demanded everyone get their vaccines before they got to be around the baby.
My parents didn’t get any and didn’t see the baby for a while.
Then when we did start seeing them, they had completely lost their minds. Blatantly racist, blatantly homophobic. Even when it wasn’t things political, it felt like they had forgotten how to properly talk to people in an appropriate way. My mother made comments about my DAD having relations with my wife and that the baby wasn’t mine.
I know they watch Fox, I know my mother watches a bunch of far right-wing YouTubers. All of it has led to them barely being functioning adults.
Holy shit, that’s basically losing your parents. So sorry for you
That’s crazy, I’m so sorry to hear that. It seems like there’s a serious problem with this kind of radicalisation.
Kind of. Father has turned into a religious right Trump supporting nutjob. COVID is bs, vaccine ‘changed your DNA’, etc. He’s 80 now, and the sad part is he used to be a science teacher.
And then he got leukemia. Because of his BS rhetoric, my mother and brother who live with him couldn’t visit him in the hospital because they all refused to get the vaccine. My brother almost lost his job over it.
Anyways get this: my dad got COVID while he was in the middle of chemo with zero white blood cell count, and recovered in like 3 days! And … is in remission from leukemia and has stopped chemo.
So I mean he’s really damned lucky, but this all just reinforces his view that COVID was nothing and he made the right choice. Meanwhile he spams my inbox with alt right bullshit all day. The fact I live in a different country and only see him once a year keeps things cordial I think.
I’m still friendly with my in-laws, but I will never respect or trust them in quite the same way.
They’re very liberal and proud to “believe the science!”, always making fun of conservative anti-vaxxers.
And yet, during a major COVID wave, they went bar hopping without telling us (we were all going to a family member’s wedding, so my partner and I were trying to be VERY cautious and avoid bringing any germs to this wedding). Then they coughed all night without bothering to test. And once they tested positive, they started googling different countries’ COVID policies looking for any guidance that would “let” them go to the wedding. With the bride’s 90-year-old grandpa in attendance.
On the plane ride back, I emphasized the importance of wearing N-95s in case we were still contagious … but as soon as I got up to pee, I realized they were both napping UNMASKED.
But somehow they’re not the problem. If only those stupid Trumpies would wear masks, then we wouldn’t have a pandemic.
We had an awkward semi-falling out over this at the time. And yet, the next time we visited his family, people were coughing all over the place AGAIN, and no one had tested AGAIN. (This was over the holidays, so I would have been “stuck” there and unable to see my own family if anyone actually had COVID, which thankfully they didn’t this time.)
At this point, I’ve just come to understand and accept it. His parents were always the fun ones - they have people over all the time, they’ll cook for you, they can hold their liquor, they’ll light up a joint while blasting Grateful Dead. They’re also politically vocal and super woke for their age.
But don’t expect them to be honest if it might interrupt their fun. Don’t rely on them. Because really, they only care about other people when it’s either fashionable or convenient.
My mother raised me to see “I’m one of the good guys” as a part of who I was. I was so sure that I was a good person, because basically I was raised to believe it. As an axiom, almost.
But as I’ve finally started to accept my shadow, that I’m not an angel, it’s given me a view into how much good I actually do in the world and I realized me having warm fuzzy feelings for cute things doesn’t make me a good person. In fact, I’m kind of shitty because I sneak around doing shit I know people would be mad at me doing, I make promises I would know I’m going to break, if I simply looked at my track record realistically.
It made me realize there’s a segment of culture where you basically see yourself as the good guys as an axiom, or as a super weak conclusion from observing your own guilt, compassion, kindness, etc.
Or because I would never consciously, deliberately set out to wrong someone. I mean, I wronged people all the time by misleading them about how committed I was, about what I would deliver, how capable I was, etc.
I’m having trouble describing how deep, and irrational, this belief in my own good-sider nature. Like, if I’d put myself into the Star Wars universe, I’d see myself as a Jedi. Despite the fact I spent days, months, decades even indulging in exactly what Yoda described as the path to the Dark Side.
This makes a lot of sense, actually.
And I bet we all have this to some degree … I don’t WANT to think of myself as the bad guy. And my first reaction to criticism is usually defensiveness. Unless I’m already feeling bad/regretful about something, then I need some time and space to consider my behavior from someone else’s perspective.
But yea in his parents’ case it seems painfully simple-minded: we’re on the correct side of history and fly BLM flags so we’re good people. Nevermind that we faked unemployment from the CARES act for a little spending money (not due to any financial hardship) or that we probably gave people COVID on our travels…because as long as they aren’t actively out there calling people names or posting conspiracy theories to facebook, they’re the good ones. They’re “inclusive”, not hateful. They’ll admit that we’re “all in this together” and yadda yadda.
Maybe it’s partly how they were raised, but in this case, it also feels like political polarization has given them the confidence to be selfish a-holes.
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.
I frequently have to nodd and smile along to people trying to tell me an illness that hospitalised and almost killed my brother didn’t exist or was overreacted to . It’s easier than trying to change minds at this point.
Hope your brother is doing better.
That’s exactly the thing that frustrated me the most during the lockdowns. Lots of people trying to inject their FB doctoral studies into all their convos and any argument, however logical, won’t work on the type of mindset that rejects scientific evidence.
Its infuriating to have to be the bigger person but I think thats the best way to go. I try to smile and make light of it when the crazy talk comes out. Maybe it helps a bit to allow people some room to change their minds if they can save face without an “I told you so crowd” waiting on them. Ive had some close coworkers who were covid-deniers come around when reality landed in their backyard and they had real people they loved and cared about affected.
His doing better thank you , annoyingly he refuses to get vaccinated which is why it was so bad. Not because he denied the severity of COVID he is just very afraid of injections and things entering his body that way. He was careful as could be otherwise but eventually it’s going to catch up with you.
My dad has COPD and other conditions that made him endangered so when it first hit we isolated for six months I literally didn’t leave my house not even to the garden . thankfully he was fully vaccinated when he eventually got it and was relatively okay as a result.
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.
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.
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.)
Ribbit
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
Yeah this is true, my parents are definitely contrarians.
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.
The correct word is reactionaries. That’s what they are.
“These people …”
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My parents have always been pretty conservative but it didn’t make too much difference until I came out as trans and then covid happened. I try not to stand up to them too much because I don’t want to be kicked out.
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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.
Probably would have if I didn’t completely cut my parents off decades ago because of their David Duke supporting religious ways. They didn’t support me being gay anyways, so I had no reason to have them be a part of my life.
And my grandmother, the only one I still keep in contact with and visit, is fully pro-science (even if such things don’t involve her life much at her age) and she got all of the vaccinations and boosters during the pandemic. She stayed perfectly healthy and never caught it as far as we know, unless she was asymptomatic, and it’s been quite an achievement at her mid-80’s age.
As for my friends, I’ve only ever surrounded myself with pro-science and supportive people. Why would I associate with anyone not like that? Certainly not going to associate with conservatives that hate that I, as an LGBT person, exist in the first place.
