| Articles like this that miss out the primal tribalist nature of politics always make me wonder when the author started paying attention to anything. Yes, everything since 2015 or so has been exhausting, but do they not remember the mental gymnastics of "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", or any other number of farcical political expressions in the last couple of decades? The examples in the article are pretty easy to rationalize once you understand the tribes. Modern anarchist antifa types are more keen to fight right-wing reactionaries than the government itself; thus anti-vaxxers, as a grassroots movement coded as right-wing, would be higher up on their agenda. (Historically who would the SPD Iron Front rather fight- the Weimar government, or fascist paramilitary street toughs?) By that same token, "liberals" (who? Establishment Democrat Russiagater types?) support federal law enforcement agencies out of the perception that if far right forces take control, things would be even worse for them than rule by those existing bureaucracies. Ditto for deplatforming- but that hardly confers "blind faith" in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives "casting off" Christianity seems to ignore decades of the American right falling into lockstep despite the personal flaws of its leaders, from '80s televangelists to Gingrich's infidelities to Bush's alcoholic past to all sorts of scandals. And any religion can have some degree of malleability to support cognitive dissonance and selective reading, so it so crazy to see Jon McNaughton pictures of a pious Trump in prayer? "Democrats gin up a new red scare and call out for war" - the (D) focus on Russia is somewhat of an ironic turn after Romney was likewise mocked for some Russia caution in his 2012 campaign, but this is just a natural consequence of foreign interference becoming the narrative to explain the rise of the previous president. But are they even the ones calling for war, or is that a simplification of a situation involving many shadowy and mutually-interchangeable diplomatic and military agencies, foreign relations think tanks, and military contractors? "Republicans care more about trans swimmers than small government" - has the author been asleep for the entirety of culture wars, which date back to the '90s if not the Reagan administration? "You can easily imagine a world where vaccine skepticism was left-coded - indeed, in the Trump years it was!" - not really. There is that one high-profile quote of then-Senator Harris publicly distrusting a Trump-created vaccine, but the anti-vaxx movement has been around for a long time and it has been a pretty even stew of both far left lifestyle Green/New Agey and anti-pharma psuedoscience and far right and libertarian anti-government mandate sentiment which dips into anti-NWO conspiracy theories and the Mark of the Beast. Vaccine skepticism was not left-coded two years ago because that was when anti-5G was big too, and that definitely had conservative elements in it, and there was also not really any vaccine boosterism that was right-coded other than from the administration itself because they were trying to make a vaccine via Operation Warp Speed. WSWS.org declaring Corbyn a "pseudo-leftist" is the easiest thing to understand of all. Leftist firing circles have been going on since like French Revolutionary times, and there are plenty of purist/kooky socialists online. Beyond the viscerally ironic image of anarchists protesting in favor of government mandates (and are they really, or are they there because they're protesting the protesters?), his examples are easily deconstructed and understood. |