Old Man Lee  🦯

Some factors contributing to both: 1. More screen time, particularly on social media. As lockdowns happened, people got shoved into their echo chambers & algorithms increasingly promoted extreme content. People who hold beliefs share material & the undecided become radicalized.

2. Political, economic, and emotional frustration. We are all facing a world that is nothing like we have ever imagined or prepared for. This has disrupted a lot of people and put them under extreme stress, especially as jobs and lives are lost.

4. Active encouragement from conservative political leaders such as Trump. I’m less familiar with the names of British politicians but have heard similar concerns from mutual across the pond. Stoking the alarmism and letting extreme behavior go unchecked has consequences.

And that’s not even going into the actual overlap between groups and their beliefs, as we have seen with my previous comparisons between Bilek’s article on the Federalist and a literal Neo-Nazi blog.https://twitter.com/thatweirdolee/status/1344259991885275136 …

To be clear, this is not solely because of the pandemic. As I said, these problems have been brewing for years and the gears for nationwide attacks were planned. But it did result in the perfect storm of conditions that prompted things to explode beyond what we could imagine.