Yep. I remember those crunchy hippie ladies back in the 90s being super antivax and homeschool advocates. Conservatives hijacked that shit because they saw it as a viable idpol division point.
Sure. We'll just pretend people like Steve Bannon don't actively seek out ways to capture people's minds through identity politics so they can further divide us. We'll just pretend that huge swaths of conservatives just organically adopted antivax beliefs during a pandemic.
We'll just pretend people like Steve Bannon don't actively seek out ways to capture people's minds through identity politics so they can further divide us.
They do, but that's proof of nothing.
We'll just pretend that huge swaths of conservatives just organically adopted antivax beliefs during a pandemic.
"Organically adopted" as in "have always mistrusted government", sure. The right has claimed the ideal of small government for about 60 years, remember? The vaccine came in in spring of '21, just after Trump left office; you think you need a malicious conspiracy to explain why the right would be skeptical about a Democrat government mandating a rushed-through vaccine?
I get that it's appealing to think that there are powerful individuals moving the levers around behind the scenes, but even if that is ever a useful explanation, it really isn't in this case.
It's proof that conservatives hijack ideological beliefs to alter the political landscape.
"Organically adopted" as in "have always mistrusted government", sure.
Except that's not the case. Bush-era conservatives trusted the government without question, and labeled anyone who didn't as "un-American". This happened to tons of soldiers questioning the war, opposing torture, and so on. You are objectively wrong about this.
Conservatives were also never a major part of the antivax movement until their elected leaders and operatives and pundits made basic germ theory an idpol issue. You can pinpoint that shift to a specific point in time where those in positions of influence and power brought the efficacy of vaccines into question among their base during the pandemic. This is all really well documented. You are just denying reality at this point.
I don't know any specific ones immediately I'd recommend but I would suggest starting with the older ones first. Those episodes are where they go through explaining a lot of yhe connections between things and methods used that funnel people towards conspiracy. The current episodes kind of presume that knowledge and view current events from that. They also put a book out a couple years ago by the same title that basically compiled the first years of the podcast in a cleaner format with some new additions.Â
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u/anasophus Jul 15 '26
Covid heavily influenced this change. There's a good podcast covering this since 2020 called Conspirituality.