Air conditioning: The devil's tool

Not only is air conditioning supposedly making us fat, it is now supposedly making us more conservative:

The American left is blaming a new culprit in the country’s turn towards the Republican Party in recent years — air conditioning.

An article on the liberal Web site Alternet.org, titled “America’s Air Conditioned Nightmare,” argues that the southward migration made possible by AC’s ability to beat the southern heat has caused citizens who might normally be influenced by the more liberal north to instead soak up the Sun Belt’s conservative culture.

The piece also blames air conditioning for a “social chill” that’s weakened the political system, making people “less inclined to gather spontaneously” and crippling grassroots political action.

I've seen vapid college juniors come up with better theories to examine than that one. "How MacGuyver hastened the end of the Cold War" is likely to have more supporting evidence than that thesis.