The infiltration of the Republican party by foreign agents.

What historians will point to in my opinion are two key point in modern American history that unleashed the decent into madness.

1. Raegan, his financial policies laid the groundwork for the modern ultra wealthy tech bros.
2. 9/11, 9/11 turned patriotism into a national psychotic duty.

After 9/11 you could slap a US flag on basically anything, shout patriotism and make a shit load of money while being thanked for it.

Then it just rolled on.

A multitude of issues have contributed to this, the creation of fox News, allowing our entire manufacturing sector to leave the country, and then ignoring the poorest and most vulnerable people's issues, misinformation, social media, state actor disinformation campaigns, and probably a bunch of stuff I haven't mentioned. Pick your favorite.

what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?

Losing the Cold War. America wasn't beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)

Livejournal was one of the earliest "modern" social media sites (for those who didn't experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr--longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics "on the Russian" side it was getting DDoS'd.

I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn't it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.

And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it's valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.

Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as "trending" or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.

Having "trending" algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.

If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that's easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won't completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don't dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.

The pandemic, the inherent flaws of an antiquated two party system, malicious individuals controlling all major social media platforms, an overworked and undersupported population, low education standards. Idk I'm German and have never been over but from what I can tell it's very complex. And while many of my fellow Europeans like to give Americans shit online right now the truth is most of us are one or two unfortunate elections away from a similar scenario. Whatever it is that's driving people apart isn't exclusively an American problem.

And no Medicaid/Medicare to pay for it. So, even if they get the care, they'll be crushed by massive debt afterward.

I’m pretty sure bird flu currently cannot be spread person-to-person and that’s why it’s only a notable concern rather than a pandemic 2.0 level threat