How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right; Woody Harrelson Eviscerates Fauci Over ‘extraordinarily evil s–‘ During Joe Rogan Podcast Interview: ‘He knows what he did’, and other C-Virus related stories

By admin On Mar 5, 2025

How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right

Research suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific and political authorities.

For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.

Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump’s advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people’s apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend.

“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.

What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first.

There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.

Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s. —>READ MORE HERE

Woody Harrelson eviscerates Fauci over ‘extraordinarily evil s–‘ during Joe Rogan podcast interview: ‘He knows what he did’:

Woody Harrelson demolished Dr. Anthony Fauci on Joe Rogan’s podcast Saturday, accusing the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of some “extraordinarily evil s–t.”

The 63-year-old onetime “Cheers” star slammed Fauci for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and for his controversial push of azidothymidine, or AZT, during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the Daily Mail reported.

“He started with the AZT thing,” the three-time Oscar nominee said. “And, you know, AZT was known to be a highly toxic, really ineffective drug, and of course, that was the one they picked.

“And so they started using that again, and I don’t know how many people got killed,” he told Rogan. “That killed friends of mine. AZT was very toxic and they finally had to yank it. And now they use different chemical cocktails, but like, Fauci did some extraordinarily evil s–t.

Fauci, 84, has been a favorite punching bag for conservatives, including over vaccine mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, which anti-vax advocates criticized as overbearing.

Fauci, who took over as head of the NIAID in the mid-1980s, was given a preemptive pardon by former President Joe Biden on his last day at the White House amid fears once President Trump returned to office he would be subject to charges that he lied to Congress.