CW boomer mind poison

My ma is a fundamentalist Christian Zionist. She just sent me a video about why she thinks Gaza has it coming, and it's a Jordan Peterson interview. Since her religious radicalization she has also said homophobic and transphobic things to me, though I cannot tell if she is getting these from the computer or her church.

My father cannot use a computer but has Fox News playing in his home at all hours of the day. By sheer coincidence, he wants all "the illegals" deported and asks me about crime in my neighborhood constantly, telling me (without ever having stepped foot here) that it is "out of control".

Sometimes, in the very short time frame before I am enraged, I try to teach them media literacy and how to scrutinize WHY a source is saying what it is saying. They both basically just believe that whatever is said on the TV or the internet must be capital-T True. Because they are both so fucking stubborn and opposed to learning, this often devolves into a shouting match.

I try to move the conversation away from this-or-that source and just prompt them to imagine themselves living the life of, e.g., an undocumented immigrant or a bombed Gazan child. But they think they know better than those people, and that if they would just follow the "right" channels (that they heard exist on TV and have never investigated further), they would not be in their situation in the first place.

It is this fundamental lack of human empathy which makes me truly, deeply detest my parents, and which makes my visits to them shorter, and our phone calls less frequent.

They have both made remarks to me along the lines of, "our family bond should exist beyond our political ideologies." But I have no place in my life for people without human empathy, whose idea of casual conversation is to bay for the blood of brown people.

My partner is of a nationality that my father loudly wishes for deportation, and if we get married (I really hope so bc we really love each other!) I am strongly considering not inviting him or his family. Maybe seeing a normal family of this nationality would be eye-opening to him, but my partner's family is not an educational tool for an old man who has had his entire life to consider things differently.

Anyway, that's why I like this website and my community and my friends, because I don't feel like every expression of human empathy is a trigger for fucking ideological combat.

P.S.: This is an impulse I will never understand, to hear one thing about one topic and suddenly claim to understand it, and reduce all conversation and counter-argument down back to the one thing you heard one time. For people with very little intellectual curiosity and interest in being challenged, they are very argumentative and sure-footed; I have never heard either one of them say, "I don't know enough about that topic," let alone, "why do you/others feel that way?"