My nephew back home in Swansea has got into this kind of shit. He’s 14 and he’s saying stuff like “I’m not far-right - just right so far”. My sister asked me to talk to him on Skype, and we went back and forth on some things, then he brought up “post-birth abortions”, which are apparently prevalent in liberal America. My reaction was exactly as you describe.
I love him, and I want to hear him out because I know shutting him down isn’t helping anybody, but how the fuck am I supposed to have a reasonable conversation with the boy?
The internet, I assume. He watches a lot of fundamentalist Christian sorts on YouTube. But he’s not the only one. All his friends are “alt-right” wannabe streetfighters. I wouldn’t fancy being a shade too dark in UK schools in 2024, outside of maybe London.
I remember that there was a controversy a few years ago relating to an article in the BMJ which was discussing the ethics of treatment for non viable infants, but I don’t think this is related to that.
In the UK, this was all stuff that the 1967 abortion act was meant to prevent. Are backstreet abortions a big thing in the states?
Even if you add in appearances at the RNC and the 30 min horror show with the NABJ this is an amazingly light public schedule. Liberals complaining about the media tires even me, but even ignoring the focus on Biden this time, how do we explain in both 2016 and 2020 the press making issues of the health and frailty significant parts of their coverage of the Democratic candidate yet giving Trump a completely free pass over a schedule like this?
One thing that characterizes our political press is they handle an election cycle terribly, belatedly realize how badly they fucked it up, and then go an apply none of those lessons to the next cycle. The swiftboat attacks against Kerry were not just some of the most despicable ads in modern presidential history, but were covered pathetically by the press who treated them as something Kerry needed to address rather than as evidence of how there is no bottom to the depth the GOP will go to. They collectively belatedly accepted that, yet this campaign have rehabilitated Trump’s campaign manager, the brains behind the swiftboat campaign. All the coverage has been about how he has profesionalized the Trump campaign, when he should have continued to be persona non grata. And yet here he is, rerunning the smears, showing us exactly who he is, despite them already run and debunked in Walz’s previous local elections.
You have to wonder if at some point, this just snaps. Bush Jr. was very clearly ushered away from any risk of service in Vietnam, while Kerry was in fact in combat in Vietnam. Yet the service record became a Kerry liability. Now, Walz has made very modest claims about what he actually did in a 25-year military career, while Trump magically developed heel bone spurs for his fifth deferment, and the GOP are trying to run the same game plan.
