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Notes -
I think the causality flows the other way, when you're losing the idea that the whole game is rigged is really attractive. People see their values/aesthetic preferences losing popularity and their group losing status and want to find reasons to declare this illegitimate. The elite conspiracy position then becomes appealing. Fixation on elite-imposed values and manufactured consent as proof the game is rigged and there's no point in playing it is naturally the domain of the fringes who need to rationalize not moderating to gain popularity.
I think it's mistaken to conflate the broad idea of an external locus of control with elite control. There are lots of external forces that you can point to that influence individual or group behavior that aren't completely subject to elite control, market forces, and technological progress for example. You're setting up an internal vs. external locus of control axis, but there's also a separate tendency (cough cough The Paranoid Tendency) to view this external influence as the highly coordinated outcome of decisions made by a small set of human agents rather than as an uncoordinated cross-product of technological, environmental, and economic forces with some human agency acting at pivot points where path dependency is influential.
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