Sometimes they're just so close to getting it.
My Trumpist mother-in-law, bless her heart, spends much of her time these days browsing her phone.
Lord knows what exact websites she is looking at, but I know it includes Fox News, Newsmax, the New York Post and some other right-wing sources. And besides those heavily biased but comparatively mainstream conservative sources, I'm pretty sure she also comes across those completely bogus false "news" websites that pop up over social media.
And when on her phone, she'll frequently blurt out whatever "news" she happens to come across. Usually it just gets ignored by everyone in the room; occasionally, she'll get a muted response from my father-in-law, who shares her politics but is far less openly vocal about it.
Just as an example of what we're dealing with, I recall one instance a few years back where she apparently read something that one of the ingredients of Lysol was COVID. Yes, COVID. It was cringeworthily embarrassing just to hear.
Sometimes she'll share something non-political but equally as fraudulent. Like the time she shared an alleged video of an elephant fighting a crocodile. It took 2 seconds for my kids to tell her that it was AI generated.
Anyways, this past weekend she brought up AI, and was complaining that there was so much AI generated stuff on her social media feed she didn't know what to believe. She mentioned an example about a supposed story of Elon Musk donating money to Charlie Kirk's children, which she was sad to find out was completely fake.
Now she is saying she doesn't know what she can trust on the internet.
Normally this might be an awakening moment, and maybe lead to better things. But I fear she's just too far gone.
But clearly she has inadvertently come across an inconvenient truth, which is that she has become a mark for online disinformation.
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She will just believe what she WANTS to believe. 