> He was curious, smart, kind, and optimistic, then came Rush Limbaugh.

This is the story I never believe. My reaction to hearing Rush Limbaugh is the desire to shut it off ASAP. Don't you have to willingly invite him into your life? To listen and enjoy and want to listen more, to even "experiment" with the drug of anger with an object of blame, is not very indicative of kind and optimistic IMO.

The thing is, people are complex. They can be very kind... to their own kind, if you know what I mean. Alternatively, some parents can be kind to everyone else's kids and be abusive toward their own. It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person, even if you think you know them better than anyone else.

Rush Limbaugh wasn't the beginning though. For example, listening to Coast to Coast AM where they talk about alien stories and conspiracy theories which start off as a way to pass the time when you've got a 12 hour haul across the middle of nowhere and very few other options. Keep in mind, most of this started well before podcasts and Bluetooth so your options were extremely limited across vast sections of the country. I can see how a show like that could appeal to someone intellectually curious about things who initially just dismisses some of the wackier stuff. But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush. They work their way up through softer, easier to swallow drugs first.

This is similar to how I view 4chan. I almost went down that path because I started viewing it as an edgy teen and thought it's just fun and memes, no one takes this stuff seriously. But over time it becomes normalized and they do start taking it seriously. Looking at it now and I assume as a "normal" person seeing it for the first time, it's crazy.

> But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush.

This sounds more plausible. However, it's in direct conflict with the claim "I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh".

I feel that there's a whiff of "Reefer Madness" in the hysteria against partisan media, as if mere exposure will drive unsuspecting innocents mad.

I take your point but I feel like that’s not unlike saying “a good person would never abuse alcohol because they’d know it was a risk to their family’s happiness”. Dad definitely had a lot of frustrations - he was low income and a single parent, and I think the draw of AM talk radio was that it provided an explanation as to why his hardships weren’t his fault.

> that’s not unlike saying a good person would never abuse alcohol

It's more like, I wouldn't say that the vodka distillery is the cause of alcoholism.

By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.

Anyhoo, I agree with you on the politics of the matter, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.

> By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.

The crucial difference is that cigarettes are targeted at children, and the majority of smokers become addicted before they become adults. Whereas the audience for Limbaugh, Fox News, etc., skews much much older. Everyone is complaining about how their dad was brainwashed, not about how their child was brainwashed. How many smokers start as dads rather than as teenagers?

(To further clarify: Alcoholics are a minority of alcohol drinkers. The majority of drinkers drink simply because they enjoy drinking, and they could quit if they wanted to without withdrawal symptoms. In fact I quit drinking entirely when the pandemic started, for several reasons, and I'm fine, I feel like I could continue abstaining indefinitely with no ill effects. Thus, I don't consider the purpose of the alcohol industry to be hooking junkies, whereas that's almost unavoidable with nicotine, which is medically established to be highly addictive.)

> we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.

I don't believe in such black and white, good and bad people. As I said, people are complex. "It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person". I think we're all flawed, just in different ways. My claim is that Rush Limbaugh is not a magical snake charmer, he's a guy who tells some people what they want to hear, otherwise how do you explain how you yourself are "magically" immune to his charms?

This is the missing piece in the explanatory puzzle about propaganda. It's easy to point out, but you can't jump to conclusions about its effectiveness without explaining why you who are pointing it out were not affected.

It depends on many factors.

If propaganda comes in small amounts, it will not be apparent and one can fall victim of it.

If it comes in a sudden, big quantity, people may react with disgust and be more wary of similar content in smaller amounts.

For an example, younger people can easily be effected watching videos with slight racism. Yet if you were to put a straight up neonazi speech in front of them, they would probably be disgusted.

> it provided an explanation as to why his hardships weren’t his fault.

I think that’s the core of the problem on both sides.