What has happened to the US...
What has happened to the US...
They willed into existence the propaganda that had been bathing them since birth.
Look up the pied piper "strategy" that Dems used to intentionally elevate Trump, exposed by wikileaks.
I understand that it was slowly normalized, and people don't realize this. But right now on an absolute scale, you have to be pure assholes. Similar thing happened in Hungary, but our government never went to this low as Fox News does.
Also looking at right wing pundits' Twitter, there are usually two types of tweets: non-whites making some illegal activities, or stupid; and whites are suppressed. It was funny when Charlie Kirk died and his Twitter account until that point for at least a month contained only, and seriously only these kind of tweets, and it was a question whether he was racist, or not... After his death, Musk definitely pushed the normalization, because my right wing account over there started to be really crazy with these kind of tweets.
But even now, Fox News refused to sign on to the new Pentagon press pass requirements, and gave up their access.
Important things are going on. It's not good to mindlessly repeat tropes; we have to actually engage with the world as it is.
Refusing the Pentagon prrss requirements is a nothingburger when for the past 10-15 years it brainrotted a large cohort of the American population.
The first is the primary system. Most people inclined to see Trump as extra-bad were prohibited from voting in the Republican primaries, as they were voting in the Democratic primaries (or even worse, because they weren't registered Republicans in states without "open primaries").
The second is that everyone was basically bored and upset with mainstream status-quo politicians. The Republican party specifically had been growing and grooming the monster that would become Trumpism for decades on reactionary talk radio. They'd get people all riled up about immigration, globalism, racial tension, sellout politicians, etc. But then they'd cool them down enough to show up and vote for more status quo Republicans on a vague remnant feeling of Republicans being "better". If you want some discrete datapoints to see the progression of this monster manifesting in popular politics: Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul [0], the Tea Party.
Trump, the New York con artist Democrat, basically just channeled and took personal ownership of all of that reactionary tripe - "saying the quiet part out loud". So how could Rubio defend against that? Rubio was likely often a target of that reactionary talk radio for failing to take some hardline stance, in favor of the pragmatic American status quo.
And so here we are, an entire tribe of the country with no idea how the country actually functioned or what made us a world leader, frustrated and now overrunning the place as an angry mob hell bent on destroying anything they don't understand, which is everything.
[0] I myself was a Ron Paul supporter, but I have to be honest and admit that the energy behind him - rather than staying true to "right-Libertarianism" fundamentalism - transformed into the simplistic populist answers of the Tea Party.
Rubio isn't decent.