One of my red in the blood union commie friends started going off about flouride in the water and when he saw I was looking at him with abject horror I got to explain the whole history of the John Birch Society and it's relation to, like, all of this.
A million years ago when I was young I learned just a tiny bit about them. They seemed beyond batshit. Once every decade or so - I'd remember them (and groups like them). In the 2000s it was clear to me that Pat Buchanan was on their wavelength.
But I was comfortable in the knowledge they were crazy outliers. Every country has them. It's a fact of life. At the very most Buchanan was going to run for president a few months and then be forced to drop out due to the majority of even right-wing people seeing he was nuts.
But Trump changed all that. He was a vector for the crazy. The alt-right was simply a rebranding of old toxic ideas the same way creationism was rebranded as intelligent design. Vocabulary changes but not much else. I was stunned that so many people didn't seem to grok this.
Then later Trump became the number one source of misinformation about covid. He became the vector of a literal disease. Biden said he'd "follow the science" but after he got elected he said "Fuck that!" and treated covid like a political problem. The US has 1,100,000+ covid dead and counting but covid is not news anymore.
They are literally getting worse every day. Stuff that was insane fringe wingbat thinking in the 90s is now core parts of the plank.
I tried and failed to make a John Birch joke as my title.
I respect that :rat-salute-2:
One of my red in the blood union commie friends started going off about flouride in the water and when he saw I was looking at him with abject horror I got to explain the whole history of the John Birch Society and it's relation to, like, all of this.
A million years ago when I was young I learned just a tiny bit about them. They seemed beyond batshit. Once every decade or so - I'd remember them (and groups like them). In the 2000s it was clear to me that Pat Buchanan was on their wavelength.
But I was comfortable in the knowledge they were crazy outliers. Every country has them. It's a fact of life. At the very most Buchanan was going to run for president a few months and then be forced to drop out due to the majority of even right-wing people seeing he was nuts.
But Trump changed all that. He was a vector for the crazy. The alt-right was simply a rebranding of old toxic ideas the same way creationism was rebranded as intelligent design. Vocabulary changes but not much else. I was stunned that so many people didn't seem to grok this.
Then later Trump became the number one source of misinformation about covid. He became the vector of a literal disease. Biden said he'd "follow the science" but after he got elected he said "Fuck that!" and treated covid like a political problem. The US has 1,100,000+ covid dead and counting but covid is not news anymore.
We are living through an insane time.
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