I got to stay at home with my parents through the pandemic and watched them become increasingly old and misled in real time as they attached themselves to the U

I got to stay at home with my parents through the pandemic and watched them become increasingly old and misled in real time as they attached themselves to the US alt-conservative news, called the mainstream sources "fake", but still watched both, one in adoration and the other out of spite. This trend was evident before, but simply accelerated by the fact that they were not out in the world in any real sense as an actor engaging with specific consequences. They used to participate a little bit in comments threads on the local paper, posting cherry picked sources for their views with the assertion "I'm just providing information". Then the comments section closed down, so they stopped. Now they just spend two or three hours of each day rabidly agreeing with each other that the world is insane and someone or some conspiracy is to blame. Any suggestion that they should try to disengage a little is met with the justifications of addiction. But I have an aunt who is slightly older and rebuffs attempts to broach political discussion. And she is, so far as I can tell, stable and content with things, even after the passing of her husband. I recall visiting when I was young and the husband carefully managing the TV remote to mute commercials - there was a definite control over exposure and conscious decisions about faith that my own parents would never attempt and only enacted on us children haphazardly. With people of roughly my generation, I can see the long-term indoctrination creeping up as they settle into careers. It comes and goes more easily early in life, for sure. By eighteen you're molded roughly into whatever society said you should be, and the onset of that is precisely the thing that makes so many teens commit suicide, and so many others foot soldiers to some ideology. But afterwards things become a little more self-inflicted, built off subconscious voices trying to justify how you ended up where you are. Many people do make a break away into "standing for something" that can take them away from the political sphere and engage with life in a more concrete way like my aunt. The terrified, reactionary elderly, I think, never got there, and ended up in a place where they have no pursuits or rules of conduct that would ground them and make them reconsider their concerns about new information. Once you're attached to bad ideas and you have a media source to reinforce them, all your energy starts going to their defense and you have nothing left for yourself - you just hate everything all day and your personal decline only motivates going deeper and rejecting friends and family; additional socialization by itself doesn't do it, it leads to "drama at the dinner table" as the entire conversation is pulled towards their topics of choice; every word out of their mouth inevitably leads back to their attachments. It's really on society to cut off the supply and deescalate, but for now, the war continues, I suppose.