| curl-6 said: Yeah a big problem is that the left in recent years has been really bad at not distancing themselves from the extremists in their own ranks, so you get the perception that the majority of the left is those raving blue haired crazies just cos those ones are the loudest and the more sensible ones never seem to call out or condemn the radicals. In this case, I don't think any rational person equates a smoking hot girl in jeans with Nazism, yet this message gets blasted across the internet anyway because the media hands a megaphone to the crazies and immediately it becomes a left vs right thing and everyone starts fighting for their "side" instead of stopping for a moment to think "actually, this is fucking stupid". |
Really, this is something that's been going on at least since George W. Bush's presidency, if not earlier - the right have spread this idea that they're the side of free-thinking and individualism, therefore when some random conservative starts denying the holocaust or dressing up like a KKK member, they can just dismiss them as a lone bad apple. By contrast, they'd have people believe that the left are all about groupthink and don't tolerate dissenting views, and therefore any individual liberal is indicative of how all left-leaning people.
Of course, that whole myth likely got started as a way for the right to distract from how eagerly they cancelled people for speaking out against Bush or the War on Terror during his first term, but it's still a very pervasive one to this day.
