There’s something truly ironic about using (I assume) AI video slop to produce rapidfire 20 minutes videos about how medieval people lived better lives with better stuff than you or me.

Over the past three months, this account has racked up 106K followers while posting 32 videos. It posted one yesterday. It posted another today. Its ads showed up in one of my regular searches and, alas, I clicked.

As regular readers know, my co-author Matt (on hiatus from here!) and I really want to push the story that medieval people were people, as complicated as any people, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s just humans, and we need to start our analysis from that perspective.

Here instead we see this kind of “the middle ages are better than modern times” narrative used to support all kinds of reactionary agendas. This one, in conjunction with the rise of anti-vax, anti-science, anti-medicine as a major strand of right-wing politics, isn’t rally about the middle ages at all. It’s just using bad ideas about the past as a way to undermine things right now.