“We felt like we were going to lose our entire life. Everything we worked night and day for.” What horrible scourge was attacking this person’s town? A pandemic? A natural disaster? Locusts? No, windmills. Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein goes full blade runner as he takes you to the once aptly named Montcalm County for a front row view of a small town battle over wind energy. Prepare to have your mind blown. How A Facebook Fight Over Wind Power Predicts the Future of Local Politics in America. “Like higher-profile local battles over mask mandates and critical race theory, disagreements over wind policy have become intensely antagonistic and frequently hysterical. But unlike those issues, opposition to turbines isn’t neatly polarized along red–blue lines: It often pits conservatives against conservatives and liberals against liberals. Nor does it revolve around a once-in-a-generation event, like a global pandemic. Instead, it’s elemental — quite literally, in the air. In this sense, it may offer the purest example yet of the power of social media to warp local politics in 2021, to make a single emotional issue stand in for and subsume all others. For the future of civic life in the United States, Montcalm County is a dark forecast of the way the winds are shifting.” It’s always best to remain upwind of modern American political discourse.