She’s almost 70, spend all day watching q-anon style of videos (but in Spanish) and every day she’s anguished about something new, last week was asking us to start digging a nuclear shelter because Russia was dropped a nuclear bomb over Ukraine. Before that she was begging us to install reinforced doors because the indigenous population were about to invade the cities and kill everyone with poisonous arrows. I have access to her YouTube account and I’m trying to unsubscribe and report the videos, but the reccomended videos keep feeding her more crazy shit.
Here is what you can do: make a bet with her on things that she think is going to happen in a certain timeframe, tell her if she’s right, then it should be easy money. I don’t like gambling, I just find it easier to convince people they might be wrong when they have to put something at stake.
A lot of these crazy YouTube cult channels have gotten fairly insidious, because they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips, then they will direct you to their affiliated Qanon style channels. You have to watch out for those too.
it took a total of one hour of youtube autoplay for me to go from “here’s how to can your garden veggies at home” to “the (((globalists))) want to outbreed white people and force them into extinction”
My sister always mocked her and starts to fight her about how she has always been wrong before and she just get defensive and has not worked so far, except for further damage their relationship.
See if you can convince her to write down her predictions in a calendar, like “by this date X will have happened”.
You can tell her that she can use that to prove to her doubters that she was right and she called it months ago, and that people should listen to her. If somehow she’s wrong, it can be a way to show that all the things that freaked her out months ago never happened and she isn’t even thinking about them anymore because she’s freaked out about the latest issue.
Going to ask my sister to do this, it can be good for both of them.
The good part about it is that once she writes her predictions down (or maybe both of them do), they can maybe move on, and talk about something other than the conspiracies.
Assuming all the predictions are wrong, especially if your mom forgot how worked up she was about them months ago but completely forgot about them after that, it can be a good way to talk about how they’re manipulating her emotions.
It’s not going to work.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You have to use positive emotion to counteract the negative emotion. Literally just changing the subject to something like “Remember when we went to the beach? That was fun!” Positive emotions and memories of times before the cult brainwashing can work.
Holy crap. I had no idea. We’ve heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.