Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday declined a request to appear voluntarily before a second Senate panel after majority Republicans on the Homeland Security Committee voted along partisan lines last week to hold the longtime infectious disease expert in contempt.
In a pointed letter to Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, a lawyer for the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said any effort to compel him to appear before a Senate subcommittee, after a contentious July 29 hearing, would be to "impermissibly harass or degrade Dr. Fauci for political purposes.”
Which parties are rising over there?
Far right extremism seems to be on the rise everywhere.
That’s the hardest thing for me to wrap my head around. How are people so shitty fucking everywhere?
The recent rise in the far right in western countries is probably a combination of American influence and the massive growth in immigration. There have always been fascists and neo-nazis in these countries, but they have grown in popularity due to American influence and rising immigration.
The growth of English as a lingua franca on the internet has created a lot of cultural and political exchange between the US and western countries. The consistent parade of jingoism, fascism, and white supremecy in the US has inspired similar far-right movements in these countries. The US was an apartheid state only 60 years ago, and the civil rights movement ended in political violence, with MLK and Malcolm X being assassinated. That’s not to say American culture is evil or that the world shouldn’t have cultural exchange with the US, but problems that the US has failed to address have spilled over to the rest of the world.
The spike in immigration, caused by cheap transportation, the Internet, Schengen, and the Arab Spring, has also helped trigger far right thinking in Europe and other western countries.
Because conditions are getting worse. People are being stretched thin, so they’re looking for a radical change. And the far right is promising radical improvements, even if those promises are full of shit. It also doesn’t help that many leftists have made a sport out of purity testing, pushing away many people who skew left in their political opinions but don’t follow the hive mind.
I think it’s just been too long since a lot of people have been exposed to the horrors of conflict. I think wars tend to harden a people and make them more conservative and insular, and then in the peace they remember how awful the war was for their parent or something and swing the other way. But eventually that awful feeling goes away and everyone wants to see who has the biggest dick all over again.
Propaganda, which is a form of highly-crafted group emotional manipulation much more than it is any form of informational content, has a LOT to do with enabling and perpetuating emotion-based thinking, which in turn enables this lurch to the right which benefits only a scarce few among us, who are the ones paying for all the emotion-triggering propaganda.
Mexico and Brazil beg to differ.