re: #1317 FurryOldGuyJeans

There were always kooks infiltrating the general population, they are just more visible now with our instant access tech. Now the kooks have influence outside their own little village.

I think that we may be seeing something else at work. I agree, there have always been kooks. For the most part, they were shunned and made fun of. They “seemed” to be a tiny minority, easily marginalized and discounted.

Now they seem to be everywhere. They do not look to be such a small minority, but an ever larger one. The tolerance for Alex Jones style mega conspiracies are now taken seriously enough that AJ is praised as a great American and otherwise treated as a sane commenter and observer of the human condition.

I worry that the kooks are becoming more “mainstream” because they no longer appear to be such a small minority. They are becoming legitimized in the public mind by their ubiquity and by their volume.