Anti-Seatbelt Protesters Sound EXACTLY Like Anti-Maskers Thanks To Conservative Orgs

​@TheDailyShow found a clip from a 1984 @nbcnightlynews segment on what were, at the time, new ordinances requiring front-seat passengers in cars to wear seat belts. The people who are interviewed are completely against the requirements, and a police officer gives a list of some of the reasons he's been given for not wanting to comply with the law. The entire clip could be replaced with people from 2021 talking about masks without changing a word. The Majority Report crew discusses the eerie similarities but also the very real right-wing think tanks that push out propaganda against requirements like this, making the similarities less eerie and more blatantly idiotic.

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Emma Vigeland: "The Daily Show" found this old NBC Nightly News clip where they spoke to citizens of this area in Michigan, and I think this is from the '80s, right? Or maybe... Yeah, 1984. And they are speaking to them about an ordinance about wearing seat belts and see if you can tell how much this echoes what we're hearing today about masks and vaccines for that matter.

Reporter: It is a new seat belt ordinance. If the town council gets its way, seat belts will be mandatory for everybody riding in the front seat of a car through Richland.

Resident: I'll have to detour the town to get to Kalamazoo if they pass a seatbelt ordinance. I don't use a seat belt.

Resident: I wouldn't wear my seatbelt. If I get caught, I get caught, I guess.

Reporter: Florida Highway Patrol Lieutenant Chris Miller hears it all when it comes to seat belts.

Highway Patrolman: I hear: It's uncomfortable; it wrinkles my clothes; it's not cool.

Man: There's no freedom no more. If you don't want to wear it, that's your choice.

EV: So, we could have transplanted that and just taken taken out seat belts and put masks, and it would be entirely the same as the conversations we're having today. It's uncomfortable; it's infringing on my freedom.

Matt Lech: And I think from my perspective, the point to stress here is not that people are stupid, but that, like Covid, there was a concerted effort to push denial about this from major Conservative think tanks. Basically, you can still find it to this day. They talk about the case against seat belts from a freedom perspective.

EV: As they, in coordination with some of these auto manufacturers that didn't want to do this.

...

Brandon Sutton: I think that's a deficiency of still exists to this day, where we're talking about public opinion but don't necessarily account for the vast propaganda campaigns that are out there shaping public opinion about everything from war to Supreme Court justices to any sort of consumer issue that we're dealing with at any point in time. It's almost taken for granted that companies have the right to engage in these kinds of practices and so it's sort of just, okay well if 60 percent of people think that you shouldn't have to recycle and even if that's the result of like whatever pushing that propaganda, they should only have right to know that the sixty percent of people believe this. As though it's just a natural belief that exists out there, and there's nothing that's contributing to its rise or its prevalence.

EV: It just it goes to show that these kinds of patterns are nothing new, and it's like a bit of muscle memory when you can instill fear in people that you can make it all about other things. You can expand the scope of it and make it like the seat belt thing — about this kind of like claustrophobia that we all have, and this fear of being unable to get out of a situation. And that's what we've done with masks and vaccines. Vaccines are... you don't understand the science fully, so you can't know what's going into your body and this could change you because we have fears about health care in this country. And with masks, you make it existential about freedom and control and control over your children, masking them, and so you expand the fear and then it makes it a lot more personal and pernicious.