...of sorts. They were erected in 1979-1980, which was arguably the peak of the Cold War. It's possible that whoever designed the monument believed that a future nuclear war would reduce the world population significantly below 500 million. So that number would be both a goal and a recommended limit, presumably because humanity would have much less technology available in the aftermath (farming, medicine, communications, etc.).

...is landing him interviews with the execrable Raymond Arroyo on EWTN, not to mention the sanctimonious talkers on (Ir)-Relevant Radio. In fact, that's probably already happened.

He'll fit in real well on Roosh V's web stream show as well. A while back, Roosh did too many 'shrooms and slipped over the edge into full Orthodox (ROCOR) radtrad psychosis. (No, I'm not joking).

https://twitter.com/davidfutrelle/status/1112011618034970624

...are busy pushing alt-right conspiracy memes like "Eat the Bugs". Next up will be "Live In the Pod", no doubt. This is how they "top" Fox News, folks, mainstreaming people like Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer, and RooshV. In the words of Richard Pryor, it's "the logical conclusion of the logic".

Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/taking-the-risk-out-of-democracy-alex-carey/1101616582

Chomsky wrote the foreword for this version. I would be surprised if Nancy MacLean didn't use it as a reference for her own book.

...whether we would get to grow up before being incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, so I get it too.

Actually, this has been noted about Republicans for a while now (their sucking up to Putin and the Russian mafia state). Eric Alterman (I think) wrote a piece--I believe when he was still with The Nation--that had a title like "Where is a good anti-Communist Republican when you need one?". This had to have been at least a decade ago (and probably longer ago than that). I think Alterman was writing about the neocon unwillingness to recognize both Chinese and Russian human-rights problems as long as they were favored in our foreign policy calculus. At the time, neocons like Bill Kristol had become pathetic apologists for really horrific human-rights abuses in those countries.

...their moronic lingo. The big new fad in Christian nationalism is converting from radtrad Catholicism (e.g. the idiotic "Groypers", followers of Nick Fuentes) to Russian Orthodoxy. The writer and "intellectual" Rod Dreher (a real piece of work) very publicly converted to Orthodoxy a few years ago. It was the usual thing with him like many other far-right converts: as he became more alt-right-adjacent, Catholicism--even of the radtrad variety--wasn't "based" enough (e.g. not homophobic, misogynist, and generally bigoted enough). ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) is the latest "radtrad-ism" with these people. They're really loathsome. Lauren Witzke, another real piece of work, is also a public convert to Orthodoxy; she even has an Orthodox Cross on her social media accounts.

...to look at the explosion in far-right "think" tanks that has occurred since the late '70s. Initially, these institutions were national or even international, because the startup costs were substantial and there was a risk that many of them wouldn't pay off. But during the rapacious Reagan years, it became clear that there was almost no way to lose, and the risk was so low that the "think" tanks started showing up everywhere. The institutions went from international to national, then they went to a regional or state-level focus, and finally even local "think" tanks were created.

Some of these state and local institutions are actually highly dependent on funding from the much wealthier national ones. There was a report that came out probably two decades ago called The Feeding Trough about what happened when the Bradley and Olin foundations (among others) began funding lower-level regional and state institutions. The report showed how this funding helped ram through the disastrous school voucher system in Wisconsin and also began turning the state into the dystopia it has become today.

...radtrad media like EWTN and (Ir)-Relevant Radio, this has been the de rigueur thought-terminating cliché for the last decade (at least). I don't know why it hasn't had more exposure elsewhere. But the fundamentalists and radtrads are always into one-upmanship and poaching each other's followers, so it was bound to go "mainstream", if you can call it that. And that's how you have a politician deep in the (fundamentalist Protestant) Bible Belt of Mississippi who sounds like one of the talking heads on EWTN rhapsodizing about "life from conception to natural death".

Garbage like this is what Richard Pryor called "the logical conclusion of the logic".

The financialization of the economy really took off with the end of the Bretton Woods system, for example. And there were early harbingers of an increasingly hostile stance toward labor by the Right. There was a lot of labor unrest, particularly in the Upper Midwest, e.g. at International Harvester.

The '70s are really overlooked when it comes to how predictive they were of what was to come in the following decades. There is a really good book by Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, that covers a lot of the history of that time really well.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stayin-alive-jefferson-r-cowie/1026661181