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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now

I was also a kid in the 70s and while it did seem pretty gloomy then, I think people are gloomier about the future now.

> And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads")

In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide.

The other thing about the 70s compared to now: it felt like pretty much everyone was on the same page back then. There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.

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> In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide.

Just out of curiosity, who are we talking about here? And are we sure it's not just because of more coverage? Lots of racist stuff that would have gone completely unnoticed in the 70s now makes national news.

militias marching heavily armed in the streets? marching in military formation up the capitol steps?

I'm asking specifically about the racists. If we were talking about bad things in general, that would be at or near the top of my list along with climate change.

I'm sure many of the marchers happened to be racist but I'm not sure that can be characterized as the main point or driver of why they were there.

You can definitely make the case that a lot of Trump supporters are driven by reactionary racial attitudes, but it's not quite the same as open racial intimidation with white robes and burning crosses.

You forget the bombings and assassinations of the 60s and 70s. Nowadays even racists don’t like being called racist. The majority of the population at least want to be more accepting of people not like themselves (even though execution of this attitude is still pretty poor). As I say, the derivative is positive.

There would be coverage of a KKK march through some town, for example, but it was always kind of a man-bites-dog kind of story. There'd be like 20 KKK'ers marching and hundreds of anit-KKK people on either side of the road. They were viewed as fringy.

Do you see in the news that these days KKK type orgs are marching around frequently and without massive opposition?

The last thing I can think of like that was Charlottesville 2017. That went pretty badly for the racists and AFAIK they failed to stage any meaningful follow-up.

These things usually happened in small towns in the midwest or south back then, not in places like DC or other large cities as often happens now.

Maybe I don't consume enough or the right news but I just haven't heard about these events. I googled "white supremacist rallies" and the first result other than Charlottesville was this https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/white-supremacist-grou...

Some white supremacists tried to join an anti-abortion demonstration earlier this year and they got booed out.

> There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.

Perhaps in part due to the revocation of the FCC fairness doctrine [0] in 1987. I wasn't old enough to understand what news broadcasting was like _before_ this, and there are some criticisms of the doctrine, but what we have now _feels_ so much worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

It's definitely related to the revocation of the fairness doctrine. Watch some newscasts from the 70s on YouTube [0] and compare to now - it's like night and day. Sure, the news was a lot more boring back then, but that's probably how it should be. Certainly sometimes there would be opinion, but it was clearly demarked as being the opinion part of the broadcast and it was towards the end of the broadcast. You could watch the 6PM news on ABC, NBC or CBS back in the 70s and they were each going to be covering pretty much the same news items in pretty much the same way.

[0] Here's one from '79: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvX25IG4tvY

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