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Comment by dmvdoug | Hacker News Reader

That’s kind of sweet that you think radicalization is about policy preferences. Like the GP, my elderly parents have turned into Trump partisans. They listen to Fox News all day and night. It’s constant exposure to and participation in Two Minutes of Hate. My dad’s actually a sweet guy, and when I can address some of the crazy shit he’s clearly hearing from somewhere else, and ask him to take a step back and talk to me, not at me, we often get to a place where he’ll acknowledge that what he said/repeated really doesn’t reflect his own thoughts or feelings about something, but then it’s just right back into the vortex of propaganda, lies, and hatred spewing out of the TV, and it’s like we never talked at all.

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I sometimes wonder if Fox goes beyond extreme partisanship and into a sort of pavlovian training of their audience. I've watched Fox before and whenever there is a negative or scary story they follow it up with a story about Democrats. At what point does that association get burned into the audience so that Dem\Prog = bad?

The issue is it’s not just Fox News. It’s all right wing media from almost 24/7 AM radio (which is what radicalized my dad) to basically all organized social media pipelines to local broadcast television and even YouTube. Spotify drives you to Joe Rogan who drives people to right wing radicals. It’s pervasive. You have to literally insulate yourself from it or it creeps in from every direction.

It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.

My radicalization came from an incident a few years ago where some brownshirts yelled "trump won" and emptied a clip into my sister's friend's house party. They were uninvolved with politics, and had no obvious "marks" like gender shit, ethnicity (white); just anything that conceivably would have made them a target. Just normal, innocent 20-somethings.

I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him.

Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats.

All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say.

It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.

This is likely going into the void but I’m so sorry.

I don’t think people assume violent crime doesn’t happen or isn’t bad but this is a country that’s normalized gun violence mostly because it means the right to bear arms is secure if you minimize it. You’re bumping up against propaganda. You’re bumping up against intentional indifference. The example of my mother who is totally silent on issues and discussing these hard topics, it’s not because we disagree but instead it’s how she pushes out the terrifying aspects of it. She votes red because that’s what she’s always voted and her pursuit of happiness is limited to her self. Maintaining that void and disconnection is how she maintains that safe state.

Don’t let the radicalization turn you into lashing out at society because people have insulated themselves.

I'm a from england where we don't have mass shootings an this seems so fucked up to me, I'm so sorry for you that must be terrible even to be close to that. I've heard of shootings in america but this description just makes it so real.

I wasn't there and I don't know your parents, so I can't claim to know for sure what was going on.

I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.

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