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Comment by msla | Hacker News Reader

No, it's what they actually want.

Destroying vaccines, for example, is something they've wanted for a long time.

They're not masterminds. They really are this crazy.

It's about disillusion with everything that is established. It has a strategic component to it as well, sowing chaos to upend the power structures and overtake them. Contrarian thinking in all domains, challenging something as foundational as the scientific method, even. This is the moment of postmodernism, just for the political right.

Is it a long time for the vaccine thing? I thought anti-vax was a California vaguely hippie-ish thing in the 90s. It's actually weird that conservatives picked it up. I guess the throughline is being anti-flouride in the 60s?

Trumpists aren't actually deserving the label "conservative". They're the complete opposite - a mashed together hodgepodge of anti-everything grievance politics. Trump's main feature is a stream of drivel that sounds honest, opinionated, and assertive if you only listen to part of it. If you try to listen to everything he says and logically reconcile the statements, it's all contradictory. The only consistency is that grievance emotion. So it has created a big tent of follower-type people who value emotion over intelligence (think the stereotypical mind-blown hippie, man), from all sorts of (what are effectively) counter cultures. It doesn't matter that they aren't implementing good solutions, and that a lot of time there aren't any good solutions. The followers are just happy "someone is talking about it [, man]".

The only difference I see between Trump and Reagan or Thatcher, for example, is how blatant Trump is about killing the people he sees as undesirable. Just get ICE to grab them instead of slowly turning off welfare and deregulating everything that pollutes, for example.

Through a narrow lens like that, sure. I'm not saying Trumpism isn't something that has been building in the Republican party for decades. I often say this is their talk radio monster that they had been harvesting the energy of, finally escaping its cage and devouring the party.

Reagan was a bit before my time as an adult, so I don't have a solid opinion of the emotional content of his speeches. But I don't think it was a bunch of everything about the US is broken and wrong, and we need to tear it down. I feel like the cognitive dissonance was much more narrowly scoped to those specific social issues you're talking about.

Also note that conservatism is necessarily a product of the times. A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.

> A position that was considered conservative in the 1980's is likely not conservative a generation and a half later.

If you want a really jarring example of this, watch Bush (Sr.) and Reagan debate immigration during the 1980 primaries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok

They sound like Democrats today. (And that's in the primaries, where people tend to be more party-line!)

we didn't have Fox News and its ilk drumming up panic over caravans back then.

But they ironically also take the vaccines (recent reference)

I don't know about that. Does a schizophrenic "really want" to stop the CIA from implanting bugs in their teeth?

I think there are a hugely under appreciated percentage of people who are essentially fantasy based too. They've been encouraged to pick a cause, some of them decide that they know the secret that scientists are using vaccines to control the population or something.

If you talk to them they won't give you any more of a rational defense than the tooth bug guy. RFK Jr is just another resource Trump and the Republicans use to distract and degrade anyone in their way.

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