I was born and raised in the PNW and first saw the LaRouchies at the UW, with a large display of Obama with a Hitler mustache… though I did not spit at them lol.

Kero kero.

Other posters have already come up with Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Lyndon LaRouche…

No American Presidential candidate before Trump has been so widely popular whilst also having a cult following of people who basically believe in an entirely different reality whilst also being so brash and brazen about it.

There have been demagogues before, with cultish followings, but they’ve not been anywhere near as popular as Trump.

To attempt to add a few:

Technically, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, attempted to run for President back when Mormons were basically what we would now call a domestic terrorist group, and when most non Mormons viewed them as a dangerous cult.

He was assassinated by a mob, who stormed the jail he was in whilst awaiting trial for treason and other charges, before the election took place.

Also, you might be able to consider the fairly brief existence of the Anti-Masonic party at least somewhat akin to the living in a totally different reality attribute of MAGA people.

Basically, following the inciting incident of the Morgan Affair, where a William Morgan was apparently planning to publish a book outlining the evils of a Freemason conspiracy to control government and business in the US, but he was jailed, a bit of a circus trial ensued, and then he disappeared.

The Anti Masonic party was the US’s first third-party and basically it was built off of what we’d now call conspiracy theories stemming from the Morgan Affair, and called for Masons to renounce their fraternity or to be uprooted from positions of prominence.

Much like the modern MAGA movement, it was full of highly religious conspiracy theorists, but it didn’t really coalesce into also being a cult of personality around any of their more prominent members the way such reverence exists for Trump.

Alex Jones and others have been pushing this notion for over a decade, that Planned Parenthood actually operates a black market for baby parts and organs.

I think they used some shitty, vastly out if context stealth footage from Project Veritas, if memory serves.

Hell, the whole crazy Q Anon adrenochrome shit at least partially spawned from this: Live, scared babies have more or more pure adrenochrome, therefore thats how we know they do post birth abortions!

Its a delusional reinforcing loop of explanations for things that are not happening leading to explanations for those explanations… evidence is no where, but if you’re prone or susceptible to the idea that there is a true, objective, hidden evil in this world, then uh, well facts don’t care about your feelings and if you feel scared and angry, any ‘facts’ will do.

Except that you can effectively screen for basic interpersonal skills with a casual conversation of 15 to 30 minutes where the interviewer throws in some flashpoint / hot topics and asks a few more pointed or consequential questions after a general report has been established.

Or better yet, do that with their possible coworkers, or get said coworkers to suggest topics and questions for the recruiter in the above scenario.

Why ask?

To further solidify the notion that you, as a recruitee, must show total devotion and unwavering loyalty to a potential employer.

Obviously recruiters know that people jump around after contracts or when they feel they are not being paid enough, that people scatter shot apply to anything like guys swiping on tinder because their prior experience trying to get a job has shown them that there’s really no rhyme or reason to it, that desired qualifications are nearly always absurdly niche or dramatically overinflated, and that there’s a hundred or a thousand people applying to every job opening.

It is literally their job to facilitate this process. Of course they know how all if this works.

This rhetoric is basically an attempt at conditioning you into being servile. If you ‘play ball’, you might get this particular job, and then they’ll basically lie to you about upward mobility, job stability or repeating contracts.

They are salesman. They sell the job to you and you to the company.

Why would they be anything other than slimy underhanded liars?

Any baddie capable of being hit by you, in a river or bog or lake, with a ppsh, is going to have an exponentially easier time shooting you than visa versa.

Popped condom cork.

He’ll require every American to write the IRS a multipage letter each year where they must explain why they deserve their tax rebate.

Personally I’m a fan of Smurf Juice brand colloidial silver.

I used to know sooo many people that would justify this, a cryptoscam, shilling literally any outright fraud or vastly overpriced bs on their social media.

‘They’re just getting their bag, you’re hating cuz you broke!’

This is the cyberpunk dystopia.

• Made in a facility staffed by boned babies.

• • We mean babies with bones.

If this was a real lemmy shitpost it would be blinding bright beans splattering all over the windshield.

I have no inclination or standing to doubt you.

Hrm, Im on mobile, shittiest phone in the world, but maybe you can read these images. I can’t copy paste the latex formulas so… lemme see if i can throw this all in a spoiler so it doesnt take up half this thread:

I mean… on the right side, we have what you are describing, as well as many conservatives just outright being pro-Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some now literally moving to the former Soviet Union they despised 30 years ago so that they can legally beat their wives and never have to see an openly gay or trans person.

This is fairly straightforward: They’re religious, traditional conservatives who love hierarchy and hate and fear ‘weird’ people as an animating drive in politics. Y’all Qaeda, just another flavor of fundamentalism.

On the left side, you have people who take their support for anything standing against American dominance and imperialism so far that they are openly in favor of China taking over Taiwan, totally denying or massively downplaying the Holodomor or Uighur encampments/persecution, saying they support Yemeni pirate-terrorists just shooting missiles at any cargo ship of any nation or destination that cruises nearby.

A person I used to be close to, and thought I had reasonably similar politics with, described Hu Jintao being basically arrested and disappeared extremely publicly as part of a CCP conference as… him being placed into witness protection due to a threat on his life.

That makes literally 0 sense.

Hell, I myself started in a conservative family, got lost in the ancap sauce for a while, then discovered oh, there’s basically nothing anarchist about any kind of capitalism, capitalism’s prime function is to aggregate power, replace all ‘free markets’ with monopolies and oligopolies, ancapism is basically total bullshit that stole the word anarchist from left wing movements, and then I read Baukunin and Kropotkin.

Now I’m just tired lol.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650524001130?via%3Dihub

Whole thing is still loading for me.

Horseshoe theory is sadly real, for a small number of hypervocal people.

Millennial here: I think what Gen X and Boomer authors mean when they say ‘GenZ is more tech savvy’ is basically just that they use social media apps on phones and play video games, and that more of their culture derives from such things.

Maybe tech-immersed would be a better term.

As far as actual tech competency goes?

Yeah I agree with you. Phones and apps are generally reliable enough now that there’s far less need to figure out anything under the hood, unlike in my day where you kind of had to learn more about a system to do what is now common, and you had to type on a keyboard.

Obligatory reminder that Dick Cheney literally does not have a heart or pulse: his heart was replaced by a continuous flow pump.

So, this has yet to be peer reviewed, and I am far from a theoretical physicist … I certainly can’t say its correct or incorrect.

It does seem … too convenient. As in, how could it possibly have taken so many physicists so long to not just try this decades ago?

Basically, they throw the Planck Length and Planck energy (from Quantum Physics) into the Einstein Field Equation (from General Relativity) …

… and are then able to mathematically derive basically the rest of the laws of physics, which seem to be quite close to or totally in line with the Standard Model (of Quantum Physics).

Unfortunately I do not see any direct comparisons if their predicted values for MeV’s of fundamental particles with experimental data…

Anyway, the paper notes 2 interesting, direct implications:

1. Dark Matter is not real, there’s no need for it in this model. Galaxy rotation speeds work out to what we see without need for additional, unseen, mass.

2. Either A, our universe is mirrored by and entangled with an antiuniverse of antiparticles which all travel backward through time (antitime?), or B, our universe is part of an evolution of … prior(?) universe(s?) which generate black holes, which do not form singularities but instead create entangled white holes as other universes, expanding spacetimes.

Bonus conclusion:

The Fine Structure Constant may not actually be constant.

I believe nuclear war was censored because the song came out in 2003.

FCC had temporarily banned a whole bunch of songs from live radio broadcast after 9/11 (Learning to Fly by Tom Petty, literally everything from RATM, many more) and in 2003 a while lot of Americans were terrified that Saddam would nuke us, or Israel, or terrorists would get a suitcase nuke or assemble a dirty bomb and blow up Chicago or something, as basically every journalism outfit in America was credulously reporting everything Bush admin officials were claiming about threats (which they knew were of dubious legitimacy), while the Bush admin itself was basically fabricating a claim to invade Iraq.

The uncensored version released in their album, but the music video and radio versions was censored likely so it could reach a larger audience on MTV and be allowed to be broadcast by the FCC.