Gee golly, why would the GOP want poor people in rural areas to not have internet? Isn’t that their largest constituency? Almost like those people having access to information other than through “local” news channels owned by Sinclair, Fox News, and their local church scares them or something.
How much do they really pay attention to those things, though?
Thing is, people don’t pay attention to it, that’s how it works. If they really dig in to it, they notice the contradictions. It just plays in the background and they pick up the bits that speak to them in some way, they internalize those bits and ignore the rest, then they might repeat those bits, adding to the background noise.
You just learn to ignore basically all of it and don’t challenge it because everyone been fed rhetoric to support the bits that speak to them, and you don’t have any other place to draw a coherent counter narrative from.
Now with the internet, there’s spaces that give other narratives and rhetoric, ones that don’t feel weird, alienating, pompous, and aren’t constantly speaking down to you.
I used to live in a fairly Republican area of the country and you’re 100% correct. It’s not something people watch, it’s just that fox is always in the background. bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, the country club, it’s the default TV channel wherever you go. If you ask to change the channel people look at you like you’ve gone insane.
It’s starting to fail as a system of manufacturing consensus. largely because of the internet, people who get access to the internet run head first in to stuff that contradicts fundamental assumptions that have been drilled in to them. Go to these areas and you’ll see a lot more dissent than you used to.
It’s really hurt a lot of people’s willingness to trust any “authoritative source”. It’s these sources fault for creating these absurd echo chambers and not questioning what would happen when they inevitably failed.
Notice too that there’s always plenty of money for war as well as massive tax breaks for the scum who are allowed to legally bribe politicians.
There’s even more money to commit genocide.
Can’t bring myself to be surprised anymore.
