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Notes -
A long time ago, in the mid-'90s I worked in a shop fabricating windows. My co-workers were ex-amish, hardcore christians, lifelong contractors and builders. Rush Limbaugh was the preferred shop radio channel. While I don't agree with much of Limbaugh's policies, I did find his show charming and interesting, as political demagoguery goes.
It was an article of faith among these men that the "liberal media" systematically discriminated against people like them, their politics and misrepresented their views. And mostly, they were right, at least in a vague way. This mistrust goes back a long way, but it definitely got ramped up massively under Trump.
And before anyone points out the obvious, yes, of course Fox and Limbaugh or Hannity or Tucker are all doing the same thing from the other side. But anyone can see the power differential between Fox and........everything else at the major media level. More interestingly, there's a whole parallel media infrastructure being built out on the right over the last ten years to match what the left had been doing all along. Creating an entire media ecosystem that can do what mainstream media does, circle-jerk reference their way to "legitimacy". A lot of money got dumped into this, setting up foundations and jobs and funding for twitter/instagram warriors, various news websites of smoothly increasing sketchiness. The right is building a war machine for the culture war, because the regular culture got turned into one against them. They're fifty years behind and they know it. They don't have access to the most educated and talented thinkers, they know that. They do have the sillier shit that the left is dreaming up with their near-monopoly on the mainstream of culture. It magnifies some of the more marginal areas of left-wing politics beyond their actual importance. This can be both because the left is obsessed with their intra-mural fights, and because the right is obsessed with pointing at the resulting wackiness as indicative of the general nature of the left as a whole.
Now, as manifested in this very forum very much downstream of some minor twitter drama with the NYT about an obscure blogger who was subsequently bullied a bit and then sequestered on substack with a nice little gig writing technical stuff just so long as he avoids his spicier takes on politics and culture. A transitory thing in the great scheme of things, but thousands of us had to move our digital home several times because of it.
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