I wonder if anyone else remembers this. It came to my mind because I was reading this story:
The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.
The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.
This is... horrible. I don't even know how to describe it. For the first time in my adult life, I'm genuinely horrified and fear for my LGBT+ brothers and sisters, as well as their allies (which includes me, fuck).
2013 felt... different. Two years later in 2015 gay marriage would be legalized nationwide.
I remember thinking EA was trying to pull the wool over our eyes. I remember thinking that LGBT+ acceptance in 2013 was doing well. I remember thinking they were throwing up that people voted for them as worst company over LGBT+ inclusion as some kind of way to hand-wave away their awful business practices. Going back, though...
In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT+ characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT+ policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.
Does anyone else feel like me, and feel dumbfounded and like I just didn't think conservatives were that organized at the time? More to the point, I just didn't trust anything EA said and thought they were lying. I don't think they were lying anymore. I was wrong.
I wonder, does that mean that far fewer people hated them than we thought, for their business practices? I mean, we've seen years of steady profits for EA, it's not as though they've lost a ton of business...
I'm curious what other Lemmings thoughts are on this. I just kind of had a bit of an epiphany about it recently and came back around to thoughts on the subject because of (sigh) how awful everything is.
The right has always been very organized. The church helps keep then organized. Fox News keeps them organized as they are all fed the same crap. Politically, the Tea Party helped organize the neonazis and neoconfederates, giving them a louder voice and recruited more of the like. Then the Tea Party rejoined the Republican party shoving it much further to the right. Around that time, they also figured out social media, which gave them an even louder voice.
When Obama was in office, the news wasn't as focused on them, so people that were living in Blue states weren't as aware. In the south, it was still a battlefield as you lived next to people with these beliefs.
It's their level of organization that has made the Republicans such a force to deal with. Before social media, the fringe groups stayed on the fringe of society and weren't given a voice through various forms of media. Since social media, they have a much stronger voice and we have discovered how easy it is for people to be manipulated, like with the Jade Helm scare in TX. If you don't remember this, there was a social media scare going around that Obama was going to take over TX and imprison those who didn't vote for him. The posts claimed that there were a bunch of Walmarts that had been emptied and were going to be used as makeshift prisons. The posts also claimed that Obama was hiding his plan from the public by claiming it was a training exercise named Jade Helm. So effective was the scare, that Greg Abbot (who still remains governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the US army perform its training to prevent the army from arresting civilians. In reality, the US army was just performing practice exercises around Fort Hood, which is a little north of Austin. Years later, it was revealed that the scare was the work of a Russian troll farm experimenting with social media to see how disruptive they could be.