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.
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.