> Yeah, these looneys existed in the past, but they weren't as common as they are now. They were rare, and now they are not. Tell me how that's a good thing?

I don't know, man. We fought an entire Civil War against these looneys, and they came back in the form of the Klan and Jim Crow. We had vaccine denialism, anti-maskers, creationists, and conspiracy theorists all over the joint since well before the Internet as well. We had Nazis holding huge rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, xenophobic immigration laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act, people were teaching quack science like phrenology in universities. Every time a new medium rises it presents challenges. Everything we are seeing has happened before and will happen again.

I don't think we're regressing so much as we're realizing just how much we never really progressed in the first place.