If you want to know where natural cures and veganism etc got folded into authoritarianism I would look a lot less to Hitler and more towards people like John Birch Society officer turned "take B17 not chemotherapy" snake oil pusher G. Edward Griffin. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Edward…
Griffin took the fluoride/vaccine-averse strains of Bircherism, wrote a book that blamed chemotherapy use on everyone from the Nazis to the Rockefellers to a dictatorial AMA and doing so found a template many since have followed
That was the early 1970s. And it's interesting because you read World Without Cancer and a lot of it is there -- suspicion of globalism, vast elite conspiracies, heroic contrarians of history silenced by scientific elites for fear of losing their influence.
Not everything in the book is garbage. Most of it is, but it raises some half-decent points about the relationship between industry, doctors, and regulators. It figures out how to create a conspiracy screed that is simultaneously anti-industry and pro-capitalist.
The key is to see the *regulation* of capitalism as something which allows shadowy forces to control most *current* industry. And, not coincidentally, it kicks back against regulation of areas like supplements where there's a viable business for conspiracy theorists.
Anyway, not nearly the only historical strain, one of many. But point in general is these alliances are pretty old, and often have a connection not to just what people believe but what sorts of profit they can make off what they believe.
Back of later edition of book for those interested
It's just so darn modern, but it predates the web by ages
I haven't been able to find a first edition btw, to see how much was changed, if anyone reading this thread has the original, I'd love to get a table of contents from it.
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This is likely a touchy example for a class, but this "Trump Manatee" story here is a good prompt for a class discussion if the class is not defensive. And it shows some important things about how CRAAP methods fail. chronicleonline.com/news/local/fed…
If you want, you can start the students at this tweet. It's from a blue checkmark, and a media person, but a hover will show his area of reporting isn't relevant to the news item.
This really is must-read, but I think it can also be applied to a group of people with much less clout than Gionet, who are suddenly excited to be little micro-thoughtleaders in their circles as the share the latest conspiracy theory.
I think of this in some ways like flat earth groups. To get some respect in a science group needs work, but a relatively avg person can become an esteemed scholar in flat earth quickly.
People porting conspiracy theories to friend groups find an audience that will say things like "I'm so glad you're doing this important work" when they are the first person in a friend circle to, say, bring the dominion conspiracy in.
I think there is more than enough evidence now that had the mob reached Congress members of Congress would have been either harmed, held hostage, or killed. Let's keep that in mind as folks try to frame this as speech.
Sometimes you don't know what someone is really arguing until it's followed by action. If someone says "Pelosi should pay the price for treason" are they saying people should make that happen or saying a judicial process should be launched.
On the other hand, this is a group of people, a movement, that spent a couple weeks on Facebook saying Mike Pence would pay the price for treason on January 6, said at the event they wanted to find and hang him, then broke into the building with rope.
I stopped giving to the ACLU when they backed Nazis in Charlottesville, and they seem to have learned little here except to frame it as a marginalized populations issue.
The problem of course is the banning of Trump is not the top of some slippery slope, it's the bottom. The rules that ban and shadowban violent rhetoric and various activism are weaponized successfully daily against these populations by hordes of the worst people on twitter.
This sort of thing is as dumb as saying look, if Manafort goes to jail for his crimes for perjury, next they'll use perjury charges to put people of color in jail.
OK so here me out. I know it seems weird to talk about the worth of Trump's Twitter account compared to everything, but think about incentives. If Trump had actually believed he would lose a $41 million asset, I argue it might have put some guardrails on his actions.
But everything Twitter did told him that *wasn't* at risk, so it never factored into his decision.
This morning in a press availability I mentioned that what determines the future right now are the personal incentives governing the career decisions of a few hundred instances.
Big conspiracy theory right now is that NPR "mistakenly" published news on what conspiracy theorists believe was a planned faked invasion ahead of time. Just look at the time when this was published and look at the headline they are saying! Here's why that's idiotic.
Here's the URL to that story. Notice something about the end of it? npr.org sections/congress-electoral-college-tally-live-updates/ 2021/01/06/953616207/ diehard-trump-supporters-gather-in-the-nations-capital-to-protest-election-resul
The end of the URL often encodes a page's original headline. And in this case that looks like "diehard-trump-supporters-gather-in-the-nations-capital-to-protest-election-resul" not the violence piece.