I wish I could fully understand that divide myself. My best attempt at understanding it, is that rural people know no one by any urban standard. My mom in my hometown talks about people like I should know them still, but I’ve met and befriended thousands of people since leaving. She maybe has met a handful of new people in the 25 years since I moved away. So that’s the baseline. They have no one to challenge any biases or prejudices they were raised with. Then you tack on media that targets them specifically. It targets some maybe normal fears about the bigger world. Things that movies overdo and then media tries to adopt as reality and suddenly Escape From New York becomes a documentary. Now, they’re bought in to the idea that they’re receiving the truth. And then they buy in that this media stream is not only the truth but the only source of truthfulness. And then they’re captured. They were taught a deference to religion as children, so that has been twisted that Christianity is all good and anything is dangerous and bad. A sense of national pride has been twisted into the same. Before all of this brainwashing, we could have disagreed that religion was or wasn’t good for people. Not anymore. We could agree that other countries might not be one I’d want to visit but their citizens were mostly good and they were probably being screwed by their government like we were. That’s no longer the case. They’re evil and want us dead so we should want them deader first.

Media has taken the nuggets of normalized life, turned it into toxic propaganda and the result is an incredible degree of control. That couldn’t have happened if rural areas had actual communities and connections were made up of opposing voices. They were so homogenized, they all fell at once and turned into a human centipede of propaganda.