PFAS chemicals have been used in various industries and products since the 1940s and 1950s.

We now know that PFAS chemicals cause cancer in humans.

Humans have suffered from cancer since ancient times even though PFAS chemicals are a modern invention.

How can that be?

India, Brazil, Russia, China...globally, fascism is some how rising in all these countries.

There are actually a bunch of studies that explore the role of mass media, in particular the radio, in the spread of Nazi propaganda in the years before Hitler came to power.

The radio played a big role in the Rwandan genocide as well.

Mass media was central to fascism because fascism requires the ability to build collective consensus over a broad geography that wasn't easy before mass media. It's hard to otherwise align the morality of millions of people.

I share the concern that social media will be like this, but more potent. And it won't just be a distribution channel, it'll be a breeding ground for the ideas that create extremist ideologies in the first place. It's like the wuhan wet market, but for ideas. The ideas that come from this breeding ground are not necessarily good ideas, just popular ones. And fascism is one subset of bad ideas that have been historically popular.