He doesn’t buy it because he’s dumb or because he doesn’t realize it’s wrong, he buys it because he wills it to be true. That is the narrative your father wants to believe, and that’s the end of it.

Too often we assume that people are just being brainwashed by conservative media, that they are trapped and we can somehow just break some spell on them to bring them back to reality. The reality is most people that watch fox do so because they hear what they want to hear. Their ideologies weren’t formed because of fox, fox exists because of their ideologies. It’s mainly a result of the world they grew up in and the way they feel out of place or less prominent in a new global society. America before the 60s was incredibly inward looking, extremely isolationist pre-WW2, and very very homogeneous.

Now if I grew up as a white male in a society where white males were king and my country was the center of the universe then I’d be upset/confused if all of a sudden we have China rising abroad and Latin Americans increasing at home. Fortunately I wasn’t born in that world so I’m quite ok with a new global society and diverse homeland - it’s a time of opportunity and cultural richness.