Me too and it has made me realize there is something pervasively mentally wrong with this generation.
We are the elders and we need to figure out this safe zone fantasy world these people live in....and then help them fix it.
I have always be respectful of other people’s opinions and have never called them mentally ill, but that is what is on full display. The horrible things they believe that Trump brings to the White House are so overblown and false...yet they believe it? Why? What on earth has happened to their minds? And I ask this very seriously...what’s on display right now is clearly not normal or healthy.
What happened to their minds:
TV entertainment (Sesame Street, soap operas, music channels all the way up through evening dramas, police procedurels, sci-fi)
Public (and some private) education
Mainstream media *news*
Echo chamber social media that shuns, shames and bullies anyone who deviates from the programming
It’s actual abuse and can cause actual mental dissociation. The cognitive dissonance only reinforces the original programming, so many become real, medicated basket cases when their worst programmed terrors DON’T materialize. Cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. They associate discomfort with terror. Cognitive dissonance=terror. It is self-referential and self-reinforcing. Literally diabolical, IMO.
I’ve seen them as 50-something adults: paranoid, conspiratorial, only able to associate with those who share their delusions.
Those who attempt to speak truth to this populace are accused of ‘spreading conservative rhetoric’. There are actual nanny minders out thee, embedded in every affinity group these people might join. Their main task is to reinforce the gaslighting and quickly shut down any logical questioning.
I began noticing this in the 1970s. It reached a crescendo in the 1990s and today is simply orthodoxy. I can’t think of a cure. It takes 15-20 years of abstention from inculcation to produce a logical human being and there’s simply no way to isolate kids that long without being accused of cult-like behavior.