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Okay buckle up, this is a bit of a crazy ride.
I'd say a big event that kicked up a load of the racism we've got today was 9/11.
Right wingers went on a big public islamophobic tirade against anyone who they thought looked slightly Muslim for nearly a decade. This is where they got used to being confidently racist. This actually happened all over the western world, but I'm gonna focus on the American events after this.
Then Obama got elected, and relatively quickly a vast number of them had expanded their confident racism to include him, because they could hide it behind the flimsy excuse of criticising the opposing politicians. Then you had people banging on about the Kenya thing, which was just more emboldening.
This is also when we saw a lot of these "free thinker" talking head fuckos show up, and they start filling gullible viewers heads with lies and a tiny bit of racism sprinkled in.
One of the guys behind huge amounts of that, Steve Bannon, expressly targeted "angry young men" as a specific demographic he saw as easy to manipulate. Believe it or not GamerGate was one of the sources of angry guys he specifically manipulated to great success. So all these podcasts start getting funding and certain kinds of guests, and before you know it we have the manosphere, MAGA and an openly racist, criminal president.
Then of course COVID comes along which gives another angle for them to be racist through sinophobia, and also a new hook to pull people in and then get their brain warped slowly by the other cryptofascist topics that get dripfed from people talking about it.
Basically, the original event showed some Machiavellian right-wingers that a big enough enemy can be used to brainwash people towards racism, once there, they're incredibly easy to manipulate. They then used Obama becoming president to test the theory and got the results they wanted. Next was to get the presidency in the hands of this new right-wing, and finally the January 6th coup was supposed to be the final touch.
That failed so they're back in recruitment mode, and now they've got it down to an almost industrial process whenever some celebrity/influencer espouses a right wing view, a podcast set appears around them and suddenly all the funding they need to make the pod full-time, just as long as they get some certain guests on or discuss some topics in particular.
Edit: worth noting I tried to trim this down a bit, so a fair few events have been left out.
This is a great post (ya fuckin nailed it) but you somehow missed Barack HUSSEIN Obama.
The Hussein middle name absolutely made post-9/11 racists lose their fucking shit. Associations with Saddam were made all over the place.
Oh man, I'd completely forgotten about that
Actual nutjobs
I know I've already responded once, but this line reminded me of that absolute motherfucker Sam Harris.
I am staunchly atheist and at the time it was nice having some outspoken and seemingly thoughtful atheists promoting the idea that you don't need religion to be a decent person.
However, that quickly became an excuse and cover for racism. People like Richard Dawkins soon showed their ass and how they were just as adamant about their own unhinged beliefs as religious people. (Dawkins lost me when he suggested that children shouldn't be allowed to read fiction or "fairy stories" so they "know how to separate fact from fiction." What a fucking yutz.)
What's even wilder to me is that the pipeline to racism ended up also turning into a pipeline into religion for men through the Manosphere. We literally have seen a drop in atheist men and an increase in atheist women. This is after nearly two decades of "outspoken atheists" who happen to mostly be male!
Pushing the trad-wife lifestyle and Christianity are popular as hell with young men, especially under the auspices of "controlling women."
They still like to selectively act like they care about things like "evidence." They are right now disingenuously presenting the long-well-known-among-women side-effects of birth control as a pretense to try to ban it.
As an atheist, watching men who started out in an atheism pipeline be brought into the religious pipeline through racism is fucking wild.
EDIT: Sam Harris was also one of those early "Won't take no for an answer about a debate" guys when you're absolutely not interested in a debate with them. His emails with Chomsky are a perfect example of two people talking past each other, because Harris isn't actually as interested in listening to Chomsky (especially at first, when he says he does not want to debate.) as much as he is interested in getting his opportunity to voice his opinion at someone whether that person wants to hear it or not. There's a lot of these fuckin guys around now. Debate me!!!
Oh yeah 9/11 ruined all kinds of things. Seriously I want to be in the timeline that diverged when 9/11 never happened.
I wonder how different things would be now if Roger Stone (still politically involved Roger Stone who was a major player in the last Trump administration and who has a back tattoo of Nixon) hadn't caused the Brooks Brothers Riot and fucked up the counting of votes in Florida allowing the supreme Court (whoch at the time had multiple clerks that Trump put on the court) to declare Bush the winner.
Yeah, it's been all the same people, fucking stuff up, all along.
It wasn't even 9/11 itself that did it. It was the government's and right-wing public's insistence on LETTING BIN LADEN WIN by overreacting to it that did it!