There's an article about preppers in The Atlantic , and it's not about how they are all racist monst

There's an article about preppers in The Atlantic, and it's not about how they are all racist monsters. This is striking to me. This is a real shift. We have had this tendency intensely over the last few years that everyone should avoid anything that's been signified by something toxic. I once had a friend tell me I shouldn't wear New Balance shoes because the alt-right likes them (I kept wearing them). In the current crisis, publications are being forced to reevaluate some lazily arrived at conclusions from the good times because we are in a moment where pragmatism supersedes optics.

Maybe folks should consider that they shouldn't leap to wild conclusions about people based on an interest or quirk that some thinkfluencer has decided was a signfier.

It's amazing how easily some people will fall for the fallacy of the taint. If a movie director is suspected of bad behavior of some kind, for example, no one will go see any of their films any more. Their films are tainted. I had a friend who was an LGBT activist at Notre Dame as an undergrad, and she told me once about a stunt they pulled. They used sidewalk chalk and wrote in front of a bench: "This is a gay bench." They watched as people suddenly would not sit there.

Tainting isn't really real if there isn't liquid involved, generally.