Last week I was passed by two trucks flying a flag with the profane message “F*** Biden,” proof that even imbeciles possess freedom of speech.  It also occurred to me that maybe I had been wrong.

I have had the belief that as the country became more educated, we would see less extreme views, more examining of complex issues, and an increase in civility.  Instead, the United States and Utah are becoming a geography of tribes, making our politics less about accommodation and governance than about painting the other guy as evil.

I blame much of it on the internet where anyone can say anything and attract believers.  Say “Hitler didn’t kill Jews; the Holocaust was made up by Jewish bankers who control the mass media,” and millions of people will nod their heads. The internet has also made us less patient with each other. We want information instantaneously, just as we want our delivery of Amazon packages.

The growth in podcasts hasn’t helped either.  Apple podcasts feature the rantings of Steve Bannon who suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci be beheaded, while Goggle podcasts allow the spouting of InfoWars’ Alex Jones who tells listeners that no children were killed in the infamous Newtown, Connecticut school shooting. (Tell that to the grieving parents.)  

You can say these people are the “fringe,” but they have planted the seeds of mistrust and wariness leading to the current widespread silliness that Trump actually received more votes than Biden.  And beliefs create actions, like the man who sprayed lighter fluid on a tray of medical masks and set them aflame at a school board meeting or the similar warning to a school board member that they could be “tracked down” and “would never be seen in public again.”

No wonder a 2019 Pew Research survey found that a majority of Americans say “most people can’t be trusted.” 

Compromise has become a filthy word for those aligning themselves with so-called freedom movements.  As a constitutional scholar from southern Utah, David Farnsworth, wrote in the Deseret News, the Founding Fathers referred to “We the People,” not “We the Selfish.”

Wrote Farnsworth, “the …blessings of liberty…arise only in the context of a complex and varied community that those Founding Fathers envisioned. We travel only because others have built cars and planes as well as roads and airplanes paid for by taxes. We eat because others grow, harvest, pack, and transport food. We are educated…by the efforts of teachers. We live in homes we did not build. We are alive because thousands of people who cared worked together to stamp out smallpox, polio, and dozens of other diseases that limited the average lifespan of our ancestors to less than 40 years and killed almost half of their children in infancy.”  

The angry young men in the trucks with the foul anti-Biden flag have been raised in an internet world, not one where history is appreciated and actions are reviewed and examined with facts and community context.  Yes, they are the fringe, but they carry a social disease which is spreading despite our strides in education.