The Brainwashing of My Dad: How the Rise of the Right-Wing Media Changed a Father and Divided Our Nation—And How We Can Fight Back

by Jen Senko

he

would buy up all ...

Literally I knew people who *still* believe Obama “bought up all the ammo.” And people thought that when Biden was elected too.

Barack Obama won the race for president against John McCain in a landslide and became president in 2009.25

In one email, he wrote, “If Obama gets elected again, it will be the last American election.”

I heard shit like that too

The only view from Dad’s former self that remained, surprisingly, was his thoughts on the right of a woman to have an abortion.

Watching my dad transform into someone I didn’t recognize was chilling and infuriating. I could see what was happening to him but didn’t have any power to stop it, and I couldn’t find any way to make him see that he had stopped

thinking for himself.

It was during the ensuing Kickstarter campaign that I came to realize just how broadly shared my experience was. People across the country found out about the film, people whose experience mirrored mine.

That’s when I realized my experience was not unique.

The Boston Tea Party was staged as a reaction to being taxed without representation, while Obama, who had been elected to represent the American people, cut taxes and expanded health care, but that irony was lost on the Tea Partiers, who were woefully misinformed by the messages they had been fed.

But then in 2010, my parents moved to a retirement community, and things with my dad slowly and miraculously began to change…for the better.

and without Rush Limbaugh dominating the kitchen, my mom started eating in there with my dad again.

My parents went back to chatting.

And just as quickly as Limbaugh had taken over my father’s life, the talk radio host disappea...

my parents happened not to be eating together, my dad, not wanting to bother figuring out how to use the new remotes, ended up watching whatever news show Mom had left on. And she never watched Fox News.

As she went along unsubscribing and seeing more of these messages, she then got the idea of subscribing him to some of her more moderate and even liberal political emails.

Lol I should do that to my boss

We finally began experiencing peace in the family. My dad was mellowing out; the anger he had been experiencing for years was eroding.

Even from his home across the country in Oregon, my brother Greg could tell there had been a change in Dad.

One day, my mother called me and told me, “Guess what? Daddy said he liked Obama!”

thought he would vote for Obama in the 2012 election. He said, “Yeah, he’s doing all right. He’s a pretty good guy.” That moment became burned into my mind.

But that November, Dad voted for Barack Obama to serve a second term.

He became the best of his old self, the dad I remembered and then some.

I wouldn’t even have cared if he was still identifying as a Republican. I was just happy that he was content and no longer held prisoner to rage.

Amen!

Also, he never gave the Democrats praise for fixing the Depression, because he never knew there was a Depression. Everybody was a poor immigrant in his neighborhood growing up.

All told, it must have added up to thousands of dollars. And to what end?

This is one reason I have not, as yet, donated to any political cause. To what end? That is exactly what I think sometimes.

am grateful that our family—mostly my mom, really—rescued my dad from the anger, paranoia, and hatred that imprisoned him for almost twenty years. Some may take issue with my mom’s means, but I see in my mother a woman who stuck it out when her husband’s personality changed, who was there with him through the arguing and anger, patiently nurturing and drawing out the man she had loved, a man who had almost disappeared. Mostly through her simple act of distancing him from harmful messaging, he returned to his former self.

This paragraph is very important to me.

Dad was successfully “deprogrammed,” something I honestly wouldn’t have thought possible when he was at his worst.

It took time and patience—lots of it. And love. Lots of love. But he eventually returned to us and to himself.

What this shift in my dad showed me was that when his media sources changed, his demeanor, thinki...

There’s hope in Dad’s journey, because understanding that he could change means others under similar “deprogramming”

may be able to as well.

Many folks mistook his authenticity for sincerity; if he wasn’t a “real” politician, that meant they could trust him.

better because they believed he was a successful businessman who dared to ‘tell it like it is” (except it wasn’t).

One of Trump’s outrageous and made-up accusations, which he returned to over and over again in the lead-up to the election, was that the election was rigged against him.

When he first took office, I at times wondered if it was possible that Trump, who is a former registered Democrat, was himself brainwashed by right-wing media during the 1990s and 2000s.

Whether he became a Republican for expediency or because he was brainwashed, we can’t be sure.

Russian interference through bots and trolls posting misinformation and spreading conspiracy theories infiltrated the social media networks that millions of Americans had come to rely on as important news sources, heavily influencing the public’s opinion about what was true and what was false.

With Crosscheck, if two voters had the same or a similar name and had the same birthday—it didn’t matter if they were in two different states—one or both would be flagged as a “double voter” or as fraudulent voters and then thrown off the rolls.

I wonder what would then happen to the person…like, does anyone notify t hem? What happens if they go to vote?

During his long career in media, Ailes succeeded in creating a right-wing behemoth media machine.27 His genius was to tap into the wants and needs of television viewers, especially those of a vulnerable older audience looking for validation.

Later, he handed the reins over to his son Lachlan, whose political views leaned even farther right than his father’s.

I didn’t know this

It had been surprising to me to see even mainstream corporate media and social media referring to Fox News as state-run TV.

What did Trump know about governing and ideologies? Nothing. So he got his information and ideas mostly from Fox and sometimes Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and other similar far-right kooks. It’s not a surprise, then, that as mentioned before, Trump ordered the FDA to keep all the TVs in their break rooms, reception areas, or anywhere there is a TV tuned to Fox.

while another event page called “No Unite the Right 2 DC” by a seemingly feminist-oriented group called “The Resisters” organized an opposing rally on the same day (the latter being fake).

Wow. It never occurred to me there were fake *event* pages!

The content contained the perfect ingredients for violence by using the online platform to instigate what would likely be the meeting of two opposing groups of people meeting in real

Because 62 percent of U.S. adults get their news from social media,

Stop that, folks!

Although the First Amendment only applies to the government’s limits on restricting speech (corporations like Facebook have the authority to limit content on their own platforms), Americans tend to get feisty when they encounter any form of suspected censorship.

Whether social media ends up contributing to the strengthening of our democracy or to its downfall remains to be seen.

Over time, I found that many people with similar experiences to mine felt the same way.

What had started as my own anecdotal hypothesis and pure speculation on the topic turned out to have scientifically proven foundations.

The more subtle means of brainwashing—which is what I feel many are subject to by media—is brainwashing by stealth. Dr. Taylor says the person: