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Comment by rangoon626 | Hacker News Reader

All Facebook really did is show blue city liberals how their fellow countrymen actually are. Yes, they have been like this the whole time, you just either didn’t care or were insulated from it your entire life.

If any of this is news to you, you should probably think twice before blaming it on Facebook, alone.

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This is revisionism. There have always been cranks in the Republican faithful, but never have they been as detached from reality in as large of numbers as with Q Anon. Consider all the stories of people "losing" their relatives to increasingly deranged Q-adjacent conspiracy nonsense. These aren't just the cranks that were always there, they're fresh converts.

They lost their relatives due to a declining living standard in the US. Qanon is a thing not because of Facebook, but because it gave people hope that the horrors and apparent wrongness of the globalism that has wiped out their communities, would be addressed.

Things like Qanon and BLM are a result of that declining living standard. No one would care if the country hadn’t been sold out. It absolutely is the slow death of the middle class and working class has led to all of this civil unrest and jumping at shadows. In a heathy, growing society, you just wouldn’t see things like this.

I agree. But the idea of declining living standards as a causal factor is not mentioned, nor even hinted at, in your original comment.

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