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

Since the election of Donald Trump, this cultlike mindset has even gotten worse.

Over the course of two years, my wife and I have lost many connections we thought were unbreakable.

The good news is we have made so many newer ones

Once, he ordered a large batch of ammo for his hunting rifle, as he got convinced new rules would soon make ammo impossible to buy.

Each week, I deleted a “conservative” subscription from his email and added a progressive one in its place. Ring of Fire, Salon, the Guardian, Daily Kos, Join the Coffee Party. They weren’t obvious by title. I also signed him up for Democracy Now and Truthdig. TYT [The Young Turks] is one of his favorites now. My husband now adores Bernie Sanders.

he’s transitioned from a meat-eating, alt-right, if-you-don’t-like-America-leave-it conservative to an almost-vegan, can’t-we-just-leave-the-brown-people-in-peace, no-wall progressive who thinks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bernie Sanders are the only good politicians! He also wants to save the earth and whales and hates guns.

That’s almost too crazy the other way. How introspective can a person possibly be if changing his email groups surreptitiously changes his views so completely? I would be worried he is too easily influenced in any direction.

I was driving in for work, and I found Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! on NPR. Never really listened to this before. So I discovered they had great shows on the weekends and throughout the week. I stopped listening to Hannity and switched to All Things Considered.

My question to myself was, How could someone fully engaged in politics and who watches four to five hours of news daily not know that Sarah Palin couldn’t form a coherent thought? My conclusion: Fox had to be making a concerted effort to hide it from me.

I discovered this about Palin as well…

wondering why they believed in the things they did, like why do they care more about illegal aliens than the military, or why do they want to take our guns away. Through the dialogue with her and a lot of others, I’ve learned that conservative media was wrong. I’ve also learned they were wrong about Democratic politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton. Everything I believed turned out to be false because I learned it was fear-based that turned to hate.

led me to question, were they wrong about Trump? And they were. He was not the patriotic businessman I thought I voted for; he was a corrupt draft dodger who aligned himself with a corrupt Republican Party.