Dangerous Faggot

[Emiliano]

A world traveler from Australia I used to know told me that you could find crazy conspiracy theorists and hate mongers all over the world, but for some strange reason they only built up a significant following in the United States (enough that he knows of more than one that moved to the US because of that, or at least target American audiences). Heck, we used to have a European member (I think from Italy) here always posting about Harry Potter taught actual Satanic witchcraft and similar things and he always quoted American sources (rather than from his own nation) as far as I can recall.

That world traveler was also shocked by our FOX News. While such news sites can be found in other nations, they're typically mocked or derided for the most part, but in the US that kind of media makes for celebrities. (I actually thought Glenn Beck was dry satire of right wing talk radio myself and couldn't understand why everyone around me seemed to be taking him so seriously until I realized it was the infamous FOX News I'd heard about.)

But it seems nearly half of Americans (US only) believe in Creationism and take a literal view of the Biblical mythos, among many other strange things. And kids expelled for making teachers sick with witchcraft aren't unknown. We're a very silly nation.

Along the same lines, I just finished listening to the most recent episode of This American Life http://m.thisamericanlife.org/radio-arch.../seriously called Seriously? and it's all about the amount of just lies and false information that has been perpetuated by the right wing in recent years and this election cycle. It really is disturbing that pundits can just make stuff up and people will eat it up and pass it around, and that facts have been politicized. The podcast gave examples of how even when fellow conservatives try to correct the misinformation, they get attacked and accused of being anti American, communist, a fake republican, and so on. My life experience is just not long enough to have a point of reference to know if this is just a human nature thing, or a modern thing, or an American thing. But it's definitely a disturbing thing...