I continue to be amazed at how smart, caring, compassionate, well-read people (I'm not saying your mother's one of them :-P) are still being pulled towards the weird conspiracies. I mean, in some cases you can really just follow the spiral and see them go. i've got a guy on FB, friend from uni, who's all that and more - he's a great guy! He's got a doctorate in CS and a masters in Physics (I think, or math, whichever)! He's a warm, loving family member, good parent as far as I can tell, he's well aware of the dangers of statistics and bad input, he started out the Covid period being all on board and positive, "come on folks all together, we can do it, solidarity, don't be individualistic". And now he's polluting my FB with crazy, fake numbers "proving" masks don't work, that vaccines are government overreach and we should all be terrified of the fascist superstate, everybody but him's a sheep who just won't look at the actual facts, etc etc and it's just sad. In... 6 months or so he's gone from a smart likable guy to crazy tinfoil hat nut.
And I deliberately keep him (and some others) on my FB because I do want to keep seeing "that" side of the story to know what the F people are claiming now, but it's exhausting. It's demoralizing.