ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data

That political movement was basically "Fox News will save us from the Government", and of course, "Black people are their own problem"

Donald Trump can be directly traced back to shit Nixon did, and every single Republican administration since. "If the president does it, it's not illegal" is literally how Nixon tried to defend his crimes.

It's a common trope in liberal circles that Fox News was started explicitly to never ever let that happen again. Well, it worked.

IMO it goes all the way back to reconstruction being abandoned because racist people voted for horrifically racist politicians who were sympathetic to the Confederate cause. America elected many politicians, including literal presidents, who thought fixing the problem of genuine traitors should be avoided.

The confederacy was a shithole, authoritarian state who's entire purpose was maintaining the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of it's supporters didn't even hold slaves. But they needed to live in a world where a black person was inherently worse than they were. The confederacy was also working to lean on the dumbest fundamentalists Christians they could find, the ones who lapped up the "God wants us to enslave black people" tripe they spouted, and millions did exactly that. The Confederacy was exploring being an explicit theocracy, but the main reason against that was essentially that the oligarchs preferred being in control.

This happened again with the Civil Rights movement, where America has responded by pretending it wasn't real, we never did anything to black people that wronged them after we banned slavery, it's all woke nonsense, why do black people keep talking about being oppressed, "Obama shouldn't have made it a race thing" when it was definitely a race thing, etc.

Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.

Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.

That is a huge constituency that openly believes in falsehoods and has a premade conspiracy taught to their children that all scientists are in a satanic conspiracy to make you disbelieve god. Not even that scientists are wrong, but that they actively work, all over the world, every one of them, to lie to you.

They produce an entire alternative media ecosystem, one where everything they consume is made out of trivial lies you must take as axioms, where scientists have no evidence and just say things (like a preacher), where scientists don't answer questions (or invite learning and experimentation!), where you are violently oppressed (and murdered) for being "Christian", and where only a specific version of the bible is allowed and the doctrine is that anyone is supposed to be able to understand the bible because god made it that way but for some reason people only listen to interpretations from their pastors.

They aren't exactly voting for democrats.

This constituency is the entire reason Republican administrations and platforms insist on "Parental authority" in education, a thing which should never and not at all be a part of public education, and which literally means they are upset that schools teach their kids that evolution is a well understood and documented and supported phenomenon that directly explains speciation, because their religious doctrine is so far off the norm that it has to reject an earth as old as we know it is, and instead relies on an age of the earth that was incorrectly calculated by a religious scholar making poor assumptions and adding up ages in the bible and was done before we had incontrovertible evidence against it.

This constituency needs conspiracy theories because they need to somehow wave away the massive knowledge we gained from science in the time since their cults started. Of course, once you have convinced your 11 year old to internalize your conspiracy theory as ground truth or else be physically abused, it's trivial to then get them to believe any bullshit. They literally were not taught basic things like how to evaluate a source, or how to support an argument.

Check out a fundamentalist Christian textbook sometime, or a knock off of a popular movie redone to make Christians the oppressed populace by making up things out of whole cloth.

THIS is why the "war on christmas" is a thing. THIS is why they have to play victim and insist that allowing other people to abort pregnancies is somehow an affront to the individual practice of THEIR religion. THIS is why they insist the USA is a christian nation despite all the contrary evidence.

They live in a fake reality.