'member when conspiracies were relatively harmless like flat earthers and ufologists?
'member when the main source of Christian extremism (in the US) was the Westboro Baptist Church, and most people just laughed at them because no one really took them seriously?
What the fuck happened?
I'm actually very confused because the US 10yrs ago was radically different than the US now. How did everyone completely lose their minds? This is a semi-rhetorical question because I'm aware of some of the contributing factors, it's just... I feel like somewhere in the past 10-15yrs I slipped sideways into some kind of an alternate reality.
The most extreme Christians I knew didn't approve of homosexuality, but also weren't yelling "god hates f*gs" at people for being gay. They believed in a 7-day creation, but didn't lose their minds and thirst for blood at the sight of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution.
The worst racists I'd met believed in white supremacy, but weren't cruising around looking for POC to lynch (with the exception of cops, that is). They hated Hispanic people, but mostly kept it to themselves.
Maybe I was just really sheltered, but while it seems like our level of tolerance has grown, the extremes have gotten worse. Like, the graph of tolerance is still going up, but the data point distribution is getting worse.
Edit: to put it another way, my experience growing up in Texas' suburbs was that people were "tolerant" in a "I don't like you but I won't bother you so long as you don't bother me" kinda way. Not ideal, but not terrible either. Now though, it's more "I don't like you and that bothers me, so I'm gonna bother you".
Those people don't feel threatened by the groups they dislike when those groups are suppressed sufficiently to not cross into the mainstream. Pride used to be a San Francisco thing, Hispanics and other various 'Brown people' stayed in their own parts of towns, etc. As those groups make further inroads into 'mainstream' the groups who used tho think they were the majority, the racists and homophobes, etc, (or, maybe were the majority if you look back far enough) who saw those groups as an inconvenience now see them as an active threat and are responding accordingly, lashing out at any soft target that presents itself.
It didn't start suddenly, you just only became aware of it recently. Which is fine, no one was born knowing any of this. This has been happening for decades, and Regan was the first real idiot president, but Nixon also helped start this bullshit train. They've always been like this, Republican radio has been at Alex Jones fever of blatant hate speech for a LONG ass time. It's like fox news on... whatever drug makes you a worse racist asshole calling for a race war. Meth. I think it's meth.
Anyway.
It's always been here, we're just clearly getting very close to a breaking point.