Rural Youth

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TPM Reader MG shares a Thanksgiving experience …

We just finished a Thanksgiving dinner between my immediate family and some old family friends. The adults are sitting around the table sharing stories, and the three college students (my nephew, who is an undergraduate at a state university in Kentucky and the son of the other family, who’s an undergraduate at a fundamentalist Christian school outside Nashville) are sitting in the living room listening to YouTube videos peddling conspiracy theories about Walmart stores being converted into concentration camps. The videos are well-produced and uses real events as evidence but preys upon the ignorance of my nephew and the other young man about the true context of those events (for instance, the truck-full of migrants who died in a Walmart parking lot). Anyway, they eat this stuff up and are being radicalized. There’s nothing more to say: rural youths are being radicalized.

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