Why I Don't Read Right-Wing Blogs Anymore

Apparently it is a matter of faith on the Right that our current inflation is caused by those stimulus checks we got in the middle of the pandemic. (See the link on Nicole & Maggie's blog here.) This is so hilarious I wish I had discovered it earlier, but I've stopped reading the blogs on the right.

It is not my fault. I used to have five or six RW blogs I read, simply because I like to understand what those living in the world with me are thinking. But post-Trump, most of the Right degenerated into a tangle of fact-free nonsense, both boring and hateful, that eventually was not even useful for understanding their world -- their world was no longer understandable. Rod Dreher, for instance, spends all his time ranting about how evil the trans agenda is; and Hoyt has gone so far down the rabbit hole of QAnon that her posts don't even make internal sense.

The Right these days reminds me of back when I used to ride Greyhound or Trailways to travel back and forth to school, or to visit friends. Nearly always, when I was waiting at a layover, some old man (or rarely an old woman) would sit down next to me and start telling me about the aliens (or the liberals, or the lizards) that were controlling the world market (destroying the economy, making people gay) and how it had all been caused by infiltrating communists (fluoride, aliens, lizard people, radio waves). The most recent example was a guy who was next in line with me at the post office who started explaining to me that wood alcohol in diet soda was a direct cause of the drop in intelligence among the American people, and that "soda companies" were doing this on purpose, because they were owned by some big liberal company, and that was why the commercials were full of gay people.

I suppose it's possible that some of these people are mentally ill; but most of them, I'm afraid, have fallen victim to Right-Wing propaganda. (I know left-wing propaganda also exists, but oddly I've never had anyone come up to me while I'm standing in line and start squealing about them. And, as a whole, leftists are much more likely -- in my experience -- to check their sources, and to have good bullshit detectors, making them much less likely to go about repeating obvious lies.) (Did you know public schools these days have to provide litter boxes for their students who identify as cats? It's true! My cousin's best friend knows a janitor who works at this school in Michigan, and he says --- )

Nothing the Right is saying these days makes sense, or is based on reality. All of it is some talking point they received from Fox News, or talk radio, or (as with Rod) from commenters who have bought into similar propaganda outlets. 

This might just be mildly funny, if the Right had not weaponized this propaganda, using it to punish those they don't approve of, and as a method of state control. (That's why they're going after abortion and birth control and screeching about inflation and student loan forgiveness. When someone has six or eight kids, no real education, and is working a low-wage job, that person is very easy for a fascist state to manipulate and to control.)

I'm beyond being able to think of what to do about all this. I used to believe education and voting could save us, but at this point too many people have been brainwashed from infancy, and others are happily swallowing down nonsense because it justifies their sense of bigotry and their desperate need to feel important. So I don't know what the answer is now.

Persist, I suppose. The arc of history and all that. 

I used to want to understand what the Right was thinking, with the hope that we could find common ground, and thus live in this country together. But it's clear that's not what the Right wants, and that there is no common ground. So that's why I don't read what the Right is saying anymore. What's the point?