Everybody’s Doing a Brand New Dance Now
1st July 2024
We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.
If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. That’s basically what happened to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which began putting dots on its annual “Hate Map” to represent alleged threats that reasonable people might doubt were very harmful. One of the tricks the SPLC employed was to list every local chapter of, e.g., the Eagle Forum as a separate “hate group.”