Anybody having trouble with close family members now who are donOLD supporters?

[happybird]

30. My Mom's not a maga

but she has been sucked in by right wing bs on Facebook. Sadly, she’ll vote for him simply because he’s the R candidate. We used to laugh that our votes just cancel each other’s out, but the light hearted, friendly jabs died during the orange blob’s term, when every little thing became so horribly divisive.

She doesn’t vet anything and her feed just keeps sending her the same type of harmful lies, conspiracy theories, and crap. It’s frustrating. When you try to point out lies, she gets offended: “You all just think I’m stupid.” I swear they are conditioned to respond that way to us “elitists.” Dad is a Democrat and we just don’t discuss politics with her in order to keep the peace. We tried. Now, if she makes a crazy claim from some “news” she read, I skim over the comment and change topics. She’s not a QAnon of anything super crazy, she’s just very trusting of what she reads. I’ve tried to explain how to fact check and how to look up source bias, the whole “if it evokes an immediate, strong emotion or reaction, it’s 100% worth fact checking,” thing, and how FB feeds and algorithms work, why she’s being inundated with so much negative, false bs every day, but she’s just not tech savvy. I think it’s a kind of tech-phobia, tbh. Trying to explain how streaming services work was a nightmare and that was just trying to share my Netflix log-in with her so she could watch certain shows she likes. Plus, no one wants to believe they’ve been suckered or have fallen for misinformation. She certainly doesn’t like tcf, especially all the misogynistic garbage, but she believes the Democrats in power are evil. Ugh. I hate it. Anyhow, I don’t want our time together to be full of arguments and hurt feelings so I just ignore it.

My sister and her husband are evangelical magats. BiL even made a snarky “Woke County” (aka Wake County, NC) comment in his speech at my niece’s wedding last year. They have since happily moved to a red NC county by the coast. I love them very much. She’s my only sibling. Her husband treats her like gold and has been a very loving and involved father with my nieces and nephew. We speak maybe once a year and never about politics or religion.