Honestly, it is hard to credit how stupid the Right has become (and an anecdote about certainty)

Over the weekend, I noticed this widely mocked D'Souza tweet (and I'll just add the commentary on it too, because it is completely accurate):

Some people wondered whether he meant the "is the Earth heading to a new ice age" issue raised in the 70's;  but not, his response seemed to double down on this being a valid analogy.   It's breathtakingly stupid, yet he had plenty of support from Trumpers on twitter.

Then other people notices a tweet from 2015 from someone who now works for Trump:

As the Raw Story report explains, though, she followed it up in 2015 with this:

Lots of people were sceptical and think that this was a mere attempt at a "save" when she realised the wild stupidity of her first tweet.   A Fox News contributor being sarcastic toward the then candidate Trump policy on building a Mexican wall?  I don't think so...

And apparently Hugh Hewitt used to be considered a reasoned, moderate conservative voice:  he's now a Trump suck up like 95% of former "reasonable" commentators on the Right:

  

Update:   I also read over the weekend about how Steve Kates used to be a long haired, pot smoking, fornicating (by the sounds) hitch-hiker through Europe in his younger days. 

Sounds like he would have been very certain of his Lefty (quite hippy sounding, actually) views back in the day;  now he is very, very certain of how appalling the Left are and how "damaged women" are ruining politics, etc, etc.   Here's another recent rant, about the Trump impeachment process:

We just get used to it but these people on the left, these people in the media, these socialist nobodies, wish to overturn the democratic process. They should be put in jail. Not only are these people corrupt to the core, not only are these people ignorant, not only are they attempting to overturn our political system, they are as incompetent in their inability to make sound policy as it is possible to be. We treat much of this like a joke, but that is only because they have been unsuccessful. In fact, they have only been partly unsuccessful. They should be treated as the traitorous scum they actually are.

AND LET ME ADD THIS about the person the left is trying to overturn as president: Trump will lead the NYC parade he saved. The Democrats are soul-sick and vermin. Their leading presidential candidates are policy fools with not a single moral scruple between them. They are liars and thieves, all of which is known.

I've said it before:   it's a good rule of thumb not to trust (or at least, have reservations about) people who were once 100% certain of one political or cultural thing, who then swing around to be 100% certain of the opposite.


I would even apply this to the religious.

I remember once, as a teenager, meeting with a group a good humoured country (Catholic, 50's-ish) priest (in a casual setting), and while I can't remember how it came up, he make a joking reference to the question of whether Heaven really existed.   His quip was something like "well, I certainly hope so, or else I've wasted a lot of my life."   I remember thinking at the time that this was somewhat endearing - a man who had devoted his life to the practice of a faith, but at some level intellectually willing to contemplate the possibility that it's not based on reality.   And take that possibility in good humour, not despair.

Even someone like CS Lewis (who switched from atheism to theism to Christianity) I put in the "not as certain as he liked to make out" category:  I think it fair to say he suffered a bout of late life grief induced doubt as a result of his wife's death.  Also, as we now know, Mother Theresa was worried about her faith, too.

Who knows, maybe Kates sometimes wonders whether he is on the right track.   But at least with silent doubters like Lewis and Mother Theresa, they were (for the most part) making generous gestures and statements towards others based on a faith that they sometimes had doubts about.

Kates, on the other hand, is just nasty and dumb - using extermination linked, fascistic language towards the Left while pretending it is only the Left that uses it against the Right.   A complete sucker for the Right wing spin machine that is uninterested in truth or fairness, and just absorbed in a culture war that isn't interested in facts or science.  Terrible.