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What Survives the Morning: Democrat Socialists Are Winning & The Ass Crack of the GOP is Showing
A fearless breakdown of Democratic Socialist victories, GOP fractures, Senator Hawley's record, and the survival strategies we need when power turns cruel—rooted in resistance and what endures.
![Communist conspiracy theory (1940s–1960s)
Water fluoridation has frequently been the subject of conspiracy theories. During the "Second Red Scare" in the United States during the late 1940s and 1950s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s, activists on the far right of American politics routinely asserted that fluoridation was part of a far-reaching plot to impose a socialist or communist regime. These opponents believed it was "another aspect of President Truman's drive to socialize medicine."[100] They also opposed other public health programs, notably mass vaccination and mental health services.[101] Their views were influenced by opposition to a number of major social and political changes that had happened in recent years: the growth of internationalism, particularly the UN and its programs; the introduction of social welfare provisions, particularly the various programs established by the New Deal; and government efforts to reduce perceived inequalities in the social structure of the United States.[102]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:l6rqkccti66y7om5dnpggjoa/bafkreibaxvfolckh77luntdr7arc7hogpi2pzj3l3cwmqkwei4sj6nnj3a)
![The communist conspiracy argument declined in influence by the mid-1960s, becoming associated in the public mind with irrational fear and paranoia. It was portrayed in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the character General Jack D. Ripper initiates a nuclear war in the hope of thwarting a communist plot to "sap and impurify" the "precious bodily fluids" of the American people with fluoridated water. Another satire appeared in the 1967 movie In Like Flint, in which a character's fear of fluoridation is used to indicate that he is insane. Some anti-fluoridationists claimed that the conspiracy theories were damaging their goals; Frederick Exner, an anti-fluoridation campaigner in the early 1960s, told a conference: "most people are not prepared to believe that fluoridation is a communist plot, and if you say it is, you are successfully ridiculed by the promoters. It is being done, effectively, every day ... some of the people on our side are the fluoridators' 'fifth column'."[11]
Later conspiracy theories
In 1987, Ian E. Stephens authored a self-published booklet, an extract of which was published in the Australian New Age publication Nexus in 1995. In it he claimed he was told by "Charles Elliot Perkins" that: "Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination by slowly poisoning and narcotising a certain area of the brain and will thus make him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him ... Both the Germans and the Russians added sodium fluoride to the drinking water of prisoners of war to make them stupid and docile." These statements have been dismissed by reputable Holocaust historians as untrue, but they are regularly repeated to the present day in conspiracy publications and websites.[103]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:l6rqkccti66y7om5dnpggjoa/bafkreifued5kwoeyo74jw6vn3gomv55ywfka5fbrkeqyfgiqjzsiizt57a)
![In the 1930s and early 1940s, H. Trendley Dean and colleagues at the newly created U.S. National Institutes of Health published several epidemiological studies suggesting that a fluoride concentration of about 1 mg/L was associated with substantially fewer cavities in temperate climates, and that it increased fluorosis but only to a level that was of no medical or aesthetic concern.[113] Other studies found no other significant adverse effects even in areas with fluoride levels as high as 8 mg/L.[114] To test the hypothesis that adding fluoride would prevent cavities, Dean and his colleagues conducted a controlled experiment by fluoridating the water in Grand Rapids, Michigan, starting 25 January 1945. The results, published in 1950, showed significant reduction of cavities.[31][115] Significant reductions in tooth decay were also reported by important early studies outside the U.S., including the Brantford–Sarnia–Stratford study in Canada (1945–1962), the Tiel–Culemborg study in the Netherlands (1953–1969), the Hastings study in New Zealand (1954–1970), and the Department of Health study in the U.K. (1955–1960).[111] By present-day standards these and other pioneering studies were crude, but the large reductions in cavities convinced public health professionals of the benefits of fluoridation.[29]
Fluoridation became an official policy of the U.S. Public Health Service by 1951, and by 1960 water fluoridation had become widely used in the U.S., reaching about 50 million people.[114] By 2006, 69.2% of the U.S. population on public water systems were receiving fluoridated water, amounting to 61.5% of the total U.S. population; 3.0% of the population on public water systems were receiving naturally occurring fluoride.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:l6rqkccti66y7om5dnpggjoa/bafkreif4ycg5rmelzdr3w4zfbed3yeukmk353xp4vjqc4scjgnw6ldq464)
