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Comment by CyanBird | Hacker News Reader

Because US people are incredibly racially polarized and almost any topic is prime for it to be used as a leverage point to imbue their racial polarization on

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This was the biggest culture shock I had when I visited. It instantly made me realise when my American mother left ASAP when she was old enough. Exhausting to live like that. What an unbelievable waste of brain cycles.

For perspective I'm curious where you live or lived when you visited. It's also quite a foreign idea for me living in New Zealand.

Ireland

Somehow in an attempt to “fix” racial disparities, America is making race relations worse than they’ve been in decades.

Band aid peeling?

How else do you hope to successfully continue to divide a populace that's so fed up that they're simultaneously ready to elect Donald Trump AND Bernie Sanders AND Ron Paul in the same generation, just to see who has a shot at stopping the carousel?

I always wonder with this point: who is doing the dividing? Do rich people coordinate on some scale like this? Is this done by powerful groups like “The Clinton’s” or well connected financiers? You could make an argument that all these groups could benefit from a distracted populace, but is there any reason to believe they actually actively seek to do so?

It looks more to me like a lot of rich people doing their own thing seeking profits, and the result for the rest of us just ends up crappy as a by product. Traditional media makes a ton of money from outrage, so they forment and spin outrage, not to divide Americans (except as a by product), but because it makes them so much money.

Check out the Tavistok institute history sometime for a small glimpse.

Look no further than Rupert Murdoch. His empire is built on monetizing outrage.

That’s exactly my point. He and others aren’t trying to divide Americans as some coordinated scheme to prevent revolution or something, they just make a lot of money from clickbait and outrage. It’s independent profit seeking division only as a byproduct

The conservatives have Fox News / Newsmax / OAN scaremongering, and profiting out of it, and the liberals have CNN, MSNBC, Teen Vogue and more, inducing moral panic about everything, race baiting and profiting out of it.

They are two sides of the same coin. There is no single entity creating this atmosphere, just a bunch of outlets amplifying the most radical voices, as normal news and balanced debate is boring and not that profitable.

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