Fluoride used to be the prime obsession of the OCD hypochondriacs. It disappeared for a while, pushed out by more fashionable fake problems like 5G and HAARP and Geoengineering and Nanoparticle Spike Proteins. Now it’s back! I see one screech in DailyMail and three in Substack.
Welcome back to the OCD fold, old frenemy fluoride!
Here’s my description of the OCD type from 2008.
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The ‘organic food’ fetish, or the cargo-cult style of concrete religious thinking, switched from Right to Left around 1970. The ‘organic’ fetish includes a perfectly standard and predictable set of taboos:
Hates fluoride in water
Hates pasteurized milk
Hates vaccines
Hates tobacco and alcohol
Tends toward vegetarian, not always total
Favors ‘organic’ or ‘health’ foods
Loves exercise, especially mass calisthenics
These were an intrinsic part of Hitler’s program, and they came from an earlier German hippie-like movement (die Wandervogel).
From 1945 to 1970, you could predict with about 75% certainty that an American who held these preferences would be a Bircher.
Consider the right-wing general in Dr Strangelove, constantly afraid that Commies were “preverting his vital bodily fluids.” Only slightly parodied: the Birch types really did talk that way.
After 1970, you could predict with about 75% certainty that a body-purity fanatic was a Commie.
The taboo switch corresponds exactly with the official switch of American Leftism from the universalist Marx to various forms of Fascist-derived identity politics in 1968. The taboos came into the Left from hippiedom, not from the Birchers. Just as they had come to Hitler from the Wandervogel, not from prissy monarchists.
I don’t think the two changes were ever considered as a package. Ideological leaders of the New Left, like Frances Fox Piven or Allard Loewenstein, never thought about milk and vaccines. The Body Purity Syndrome just naturally fell into place, which indicates that it’s an automatic companion of identity-style thinking.
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RFK, belonging to the identitarian Left, suckered a lot of Rightists into taking back their original property after the Left instantly switched to fanatical pro-vax in 2020. Now it’s all Birchers again.
The 2020 switch of the Left was even crazier. Democrats automatically became pro-vax because Trump was fanatically pro-vax. Hating Trump requires loving everything Trump did. Loving Trump means hating everything Trump did. If you can figure this out, you’re a whole lot smarter than I am.
Polistra's Mill 