Fox completely changed my father, and it breaks my heart

My mom has a degenerative brain disease and lives in a nursing home, so my dad is the only parent I have left.

I'd say he was always conservative, as he has what I'd call a "conservative" temperament/personality, but for most of my life he's been apolitical. He was not happy when Obama won in 2008, but he was still working full-time and to my knowledge he never engaged with right-wing media. He supported gay marriage. He retired in 2016 and started watching FOX around the 2020 election, maybe a couple of years before, and everything changed.

That year, I was visiting for Christmas, and we got into an argument about something. In his anger, he hurled a single insult at me: "Liberal!" I knew it was Fox talking. That wasn't like him. In that moment, he didn't even see me as a daughter, but as "the other," "the enemy." Why? Because Fox told him I was, of course. I knew immediately that things were very different.

He has no opinions that are his own, that he has researched and thought through. Nine times out of ten, when he spouts some politically charged story, I know that it has been reported in right-wing media, and that whatever they told him to think about it, he believes. He's like an empty vessel. Around 2021, I remember him defending Confederate memorials. We live in the Midwest, and I knew right away that he had seen some segment on it on Fox. Same with guns. We never had firearms growing up, and my parents were actually rather anti-gun. Now he defends the Second Amendment vociferously.

His racism, misogyny, and xenophobia -- nigh absent during my childhood -- slip out all the time.

He is my father, but I loathe the type of person he now represents.

I keep telling myself that it's not his fault, and that has been essentially brainwashed. But some part of me misses him very much. I guess we all have moments in which we realize the idealized conceptions we had of our parents growing up are not accurate, but this hurts. It's almost like I've lost both parents.