Political Memes

Well, only kinda. They don't actually know what the word "fascist" means.

In 2015, it was people=them during the Jade Helm Scare. Abbott was so convinced in the Russian propaganda that he sent the national guard to watch a military exercise. He was convinced that Obama had shuddered several walmarts, emptied them, and was going to use the army to imprison them in said Walmarts. The russians even came up with blueprints for the Walmart prisons.

The reason they hated the idea of pedo dems is because of the implied heresy in imaginary blood drinking or whatever. The idea of them being atheists, pagans, or gay satanists or whatever. Screaming about pedos was just a marketing avenue and protective tactic because if you tried to defend people who were accused of pedophilia you ran the risk of just being pedojacketed yourself.

They're already starting to say "Epstein was based, actually" in some rightwing political spaces. Saying he understood power or masculinity or whatever.

They never actually cared about children or pedophiles. They just hate "the other". They're OK with children being married to adults in number of US states law-wise and rightwingers will defend that, as long as its "trad" or "christian" or whatever.

Tread on me, daddy! 🐍

Conservadongs were ludicrously outraged over Ruby Ridge and Waco for fucking decades.

Republicans did have an anti-government libertarian side in the past. But this has basically died after the post-9/11 rise of the security state.

If Waco happened again today, most republicans would side with the government, not with the cultists.

Maybe much of what you see if a Psyops to divide people to keep them infighting.

It was written in manuals by the CIA and KGB over five decades ago, before we even had an internet, how you can destabilize a democratic nation's social discourse and undermine elections simply by creating a small group of agents who can slip into every major social debate or issue and immediately take the most extreme positions on both sides of every issue.

This creates and draws in contentious debate and arguing about the most radical extremes of every position until the average citizen tunes out of the debate, stops trusting what's real, and just defaults to whatever state-media says is real because there's no other option that makes sense.

That's not to say the CIA and KGB were primarily responsible for the erosion of our society, the people doing this have been from all over the world and right inside the USA's borders, each trying to do it for different reasons and agendas, but also each succeeding in creating a massive middle-class population with zero interest in following politics and social issues. The 2024 exit polling backs this up, showing that most Trump voters had no clue what Trump represented or what his policies were, despite it being his second term.

We get tunnel vision in places like reddit or lemmy and forget that for most people, their news comes from either nightly network television while distracted and cooking for their family, or from 30 minutes of browsing Facebook memes on a sunday night while preparing for another 6 days of working 10 hours a day.

And it's still going on, and yes right here in Lemmy has PLENTY of these sock-puppets, astroturfers and bad-faith shills, as well as bots, designed to invade posts with wild takes and stupid derails in order to make people argue, so casual browsers start scrolling past the mess and lose interest in the issue.