What is the most severe case of brainwashing you have seen?
What is the most severe case of brainwashing you have seen?
...whether it was by a cult, by propaganda, by an algorithm, etc...
And did the person ever recover from it?
Maybe not the worst but the most recent one is my father in law. You know the type: baby boomer who had every advantage growing up but didn’t avail himself but still managed to eke out a comfortable life while working at the business his dad started and he inherited. He doesn’t take in the bucks but it allows him and my mil to own a comfortable home in an area that is only going up in value. Anyway…
As you can imagine super religious, super right wing, trump loving, gay hating (has a gay brother that he’s estranged from), you know… the usual. What gets me is remember trump did an interview a week or two ago where he said that all federal employees are “crooked and dishonest and must be held accountable”? He couldn’t agree more! Guess who my wife (his daughter) and I work for? Yeah…
Pandemic.
Person who I used to consider a friend was relentlessly posting anti-vax and anti-lock down stuff constantly. I would continually refute what he posted, with references and data etc but he wouldn't listen.
Highlight was when he posted pictures of an anti lock down protest in "Lisbon" and I went to the lengths of finding the pictures that had been stolen and they were of a dance music festival he attended.
Even though I cross referenced his own photos with those that had been posted, including one that showed him next to someone who was in on of the pictures from the supposed protest, he still wouldn't listen to reason.
He is no longer a friend or even an aquaintence.
Happened recently actually.
TW: Talks of SA, Maga
Tap for spoiler
In class we somehow got into a debate of politics and it went as you expect. Teacher asks if abortion should be legal, which she agrees but the two guys in the class disagree. The idiot guy starts arguing that the anti abortion laws are warnings for """"the girls who can't keep their legs shut"""". Even when the teacher tried to give examples of rape cases, he just kept repeating it like he was right. The girl, which I'll call Jessy, tore his shit up. Teacher stops the debate and we take a break. I have a lot more respect for Jessy.
I sincerely don't understand how someone can be that fucking deluded, and not see a problem with it.
Less people using public libraries (and reading books to learn stuff) around me because 'who needs to read books when there is everything on the Internet and I can Google anything'?
And, at least as saddening and frightening to me, seeing more and more people willing to censor whatever book, author, or idea, they hate or even they just don't agree with (most often, without even reading it). It's even worse when I see librarians supporting that — it doesn't matter how 'good' their motivation is, censorship's only success is in the promotion of stupid ideas (if not of sheer ignorance), hate and fear.
My brother got fucked up psychologically from murdering Iraqis and Afghans and then came home and started "self-medicating" with meth while spending all day sitting in his house alone while listening to far-right propaganda like OAN. He tried to check himself in for treatment at the VA but they committed malpractice which nearly killed him, and he responded violently, which put a flag on his record making it difficult for him to get help in the future, while at the same time giving him a deep distrust of doctors. He was incredibly paranoid and accused everyone of being part of some sort of conspiracy against him and would make violent threats, veiled just enough to not be actionable. Eventually, he went over to someone's house with a gun, but the cops had been watching his house and they showed up, he pulled a gun on them and got shot in the arm, which he lost the use of, but he eventually recovered somewhat on account of getting off the meth while in jail. He's still a fascist and still listens to all the same shit, but he's at regular fascist levels of paranoid-schizophrenia now.
I don't give a shit about him but the pain he put my family through, a memory is burned into my mind of tears in my mother's eyes as she gets another text and it's another crisis and she can't enjoy even a single night out at dinner because she has to act like a 911 operator 24/7 - and whenever I think about any of the people responsible for the stupid, pointless wars that caused all this, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and all the rest, I remember that we got off incredibly easy, that our suffering was absolutely nothing compared to the actual victims of our country's wanton slaughter and pointless wars of aggression, and I multiply the pain I felt in that moment and the trauma throughout the whole experience by a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as my mind is even capable of comprehending which is still only a tiny fraction of the reality, and I focus it into pure hatred directed towards all the people responsible for the wars.
There are six companies that control a very large percentage of the media consumed by Americans. They are all mega corporations. The media Americans consume is mostly corporate propaganda, and it's invisible to us. It's the water we swim in.
Whatever opinions the oligarchs want us to have are dictated to us.
It is not a coincidence that all our national political races come down to a wire, that we are divided almost 50/50. We are being intentionally divided so that we don't unite and challenge the oligarchy.
The Goebbels speech for total war:
MAGA
COVID, MAGA, Q Anon, support by poor people for defunding of schools and infrastructure even as bridges collapse and water systems are becoming poisonous while supporting building new tactical nuclear weapons that the country doesn't even have a use for unless the intend to start nuking Mexico which would mean more refugees, not fewer....etc.
The COVID denial was strong in so many people. I remember some stories where people would go to the hospital with extremely low oxygen saturation, be told that they have COVID, and for them to go into a blind panic about getting microchipped or tortured by experimental government treatment, and immediately discharge themselves - only to drop dead pretty much immediately after they left.
I met a guy who believes the government wants to turn the country communist, ban meat, and make everyone eat insects. He seemed to have fallen for every Facebook boomer conspiracy theory, but these were the highlights. He just talked and the conspiracy theories kept coming out. He couldn't think of much to say that didn't tie into a bizarre narrative.
Not anyone I know, or even the most brainwashed, but I did watch this video last night on YouTube that was pretty disturbing and although the events are now 15 years ago they ended not long ago and the court case only ended last year.
Guy who is extremely good at manipulating people ends up manipulating like 6 or more of his daughters college friends into somehow dropping out and living with him and forced to do all the requests he has.
I've met a couple Mormons that were reaaaally deep into the shit and talked and acted like robots just parroting all the religious nonsense they'd been fed. But to be fair, I've also met some cool Mormons who were less into it and generally just good people.
My step brother got turned into a redhatter. Trying to stick magnets on my arm where I got the covid shot, the crazy pizza shop basement q thing, it's so bad it's like he has an earpiece in his ear being told what to say by rightwing media
My example is not the most terrible, but it's still so strange to think about...
20 years ago, before the Iraq War began, there was a bunch of fake intelligence, aluminum tubes and the CIA, and Colin Powell got on TV saying the war was necessary, but it was all a bunch of lies, and any smart informed American would have known. I did my part and protested and spoke with dozens of people trying to convince them that they were getting played. Unsuccessfully. That's not the strange part.
The strange part is that after the war started, it was revealed that all of the stated reasons were wrong. The facts came out, and my position was vindicated. Obviously it wasn't just me, but I'm focusing on my personal experience. So you might expect that some people would be embarrassed or upset with the government or the media. After all, that war killed large numbers of people. But no one that I spoke with before the war started ever showed signs that they understood that they had gotten it wrong. Why not make an about face, why not blame the media or the president? It would be so easy to find some integrity, but apparently it's easier to pretend that the past didn't happen.
Ginni Thomas.
I've seen people who would act like the sky isn't blue if they had so much as a friend say it wasn't. Sadly the same friends who would go on to successfully erase people's innocence out of existence via gossip, in contexts that rank up there with asking for someone's ID at a bar out of skepticism and then getting the ID and saying "I don't care about your ID, you're still not in the required demographic". And these channelers of peer pressure who outweigh the issue of cults wonder why I am deep into misanthropy.
I'm not allowed to say.
Wiccans. Hands down the craziest, dumbest, most unstable group I've ever had the misfortune of meeting in real life. They genuinely believe some random guy is god incarnate so they tormented him his entire life to try and get him to kill himself, and the gov just allowed it cuz "religious freedumb". Execute the Wiccans and anyone that has allowed them to exist.