There’s always some minimum amount of Background Crazy in any society. We’ll never get rid of that completely, but in my life, up until 9/11, the general consensus was that the crazy people were the fringe. Left wing, right wing, we at least all agreed to mostly just ignore the underpants-on-their-heads crowd.
But of course, “9/11 changed everything.” It was the first Great Conspiracy Theory of the internet age, and got the claws of crazy into a lot more people. You no longer had a few people like the Lyndon Larouche fanatics setting up a table in the park, you had Alex Jones leading thousands of people on street marches. It was next-level crazy, both in intensity and numbers.
I think your whole post is well said, but this bit in particular was my observation as well.
The way Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others ginned up national fear around non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction™ in Iraq as their pretext to invade together with their “with-us-or-against-us” faux patriotism, was really the beginning of Trumpism as we know it today. I was appalled at how successful the tactic was. People just lost their minds.
Bit of schadenfreude that Liz Cheney is now the one whose back is against the wall as she tries to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Daddy has a lot to answer for.
First an old story about Nancy Reagan went viral. Now a story involving Jimmy Carter when he was in the Navy as a young man has been shared a lot. Hard to accept he was kicked around for a long time as being a posterboy of weakness.
He was a student of Hyman Rickover who was known for taking no prisoners. If you were tough enough for Rickover that’s as high praise as you can get.
I feel like the naming of the “Patriot Act” was the most Orwellian thing I’d seen in real life up until then (at least from the US). I mean, there was always rhetoric, but does Doublespeak (US) go back further than that?
Republican candidate for Governor of Colorado claims that the state’s openly gay governor is really straight and only pretends to be gay to get gay votes.
This IS a wonderful opportunity to take back the word “crook,” and reserve it for the use of those referring to long stout poles with a hook at one end.
San Diego County DA Summer Stephan is bringing conspiracy charges against leftist demonstrators who were involved in a brawl with Individual 1 supporters. She isn’t bringing conspiracy charges against the Individual 1 supporters. When she was campaigning, she ran against George Soros because he “backs anti-law enforcement candidates over experienced prosecutors, trying to tip the balance to the criminals.”
“ANTIFA is known to use force, fear, and violence to further their own interests and to suppress the interests of others,” the DA’s charging document reads. “This tactic is referred to as ‘Direct Action’ and is known to mean acts of violence such as assault, battery, assault with deadly weapons, arson, and vandalism.”
amazing what people can imagine
