I think about the bathtub-filled-with-acid detail of this story way more than I would like to

a "fun" addendum here, to paraphrase an @eliasisquith.blog observation: many (though not all) of these "anti-alarmist" types also cheered on the Iraq invasion

It is a very very very bad episode. There are a lot of... choices. And I don't mean good ones.

There's definitely a big overlap, but I can kinda make sense of how those born up to 1945 would be more prone to (re)radicalisation leftward now--that's my dad's story, really--while the worst traits Boomers and Gen X are typified by would be logical products of later formative periods.

I kinda think there's maybe a broad smooshable transition from the sort of beatniks who got into politics & folk music & wrote kitchen sink realism & *created* the counterculture of the 60s, civil rights & rock & roll included, & the sort of hippies who grew up more in the wake of that progress?

That's the Greatest Generation, I think? Silent Generation is those born after them up to 1945, so still kids in the 40s mostly, teens in the 50s/60s? My dad just slips in with a 1945 birth year and is just into his 80s. It's gonna be porous as I say though.

The Katie Hopkins “machine gun the migrants” stuff was in the Sun in 2015, lads. These are cartoons published in the Daily Mail the same year, or earlier.

also the generations are a made-up rough-hand rule-of-thumb anyway, the reality of shifts in mindset bound to be porous and overlapped, so whether it's Boomers or Silent Generation is mebbe kinda just quibbling on boundaries

I'm guessing some of the moaning MAGA shitlords may be millennials with Boomer parents rather than Gen X, but as a Gen-Xer with Silent Generation parents I can very much see even less politically aware elders than my folks being radicalised now by the fascism, so that's my default assumption

It would be better IMO if the fascist far right, British MPs of the three top parties and the national press did not relentlessly speak with one voice and collaborate on very obviously bullshitty stunts and shenanigans.

white and republican women will fully invent a GIANT horde of snidely whiplashes in dresses (or a "GAY AF" tshirt!!!) waiting to abduct them in order to justify being homophobic and transphobic to every non straight non white person on earth. don't let them fool you for a second

also: while this is obviously a different context, “your mere presence is a threat to the safety of all women” is….a pretty striking parallel to TERF discourses that are used to defame and attack trans women. obviously gay men are not as threatened as trans women, but this stuff all mixes together