Because the world’s richest also own all the major media outlets.

Because Donald Trump and his benefactors have no moral qualms with using propaganda to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone who doesn’t have an adequate combination of time and intelligence to sort the bullshit from the truth.

The mere-exposure effect shows how seeing, hearing, or otherwise experiencing the same thing over and over again makes it not only more familiar but more agreeable. Propaganda relies only on volume of exposures to be effective. It doesn’t need to be truthful, or even make sense, to establish itself as fact before cognitive dissonance can make you doubt it. This is how gaslighting works. This is how Stockholm syndrom works. And above all else, this is how political advertising works for the vast majority of people.

The only way to resist this effect is to somehow have an unbiased method of determining whether a source or a community is trustworthy to be a consistent source of factual information, then to discredit any information that doesn’t come from these sources as unreliable and potentially damaging. You can’t overcome the mere-exposure effect, but you can curate what you allow yourself to be exposed to based on your beliefs, so that the mere-exposure effect reinforces these beliefs rather than reshaping them.

Ultimately, nobody will EVER have a purely factual and evidence-shaped worldvoew because there simply isn’t enough time to curate your information streams to a point where you only get exposed to sources of information you feela re trustworthy. So those who spend less time curating the media that they allow themselves to trust are more likely to be manipulated by bad actors who understand this entire process and choose to use it to manipulate others.

You are not immune to propaganda. Nobody is. And they know this. And they use that fact to flip the script. And it works. And we currently don’t agree on a good way to fight back. So they continue to do it.

Probably because you need to be some form of elite to make it in American politics.

Sure, there’s underdogs and outliers… but for the most part if you want to have a substantial effect on American government you have to kiss the ring. Which means becoming part of the in-crowd, or the “elite”. You can promote social justice, and certain economic reforms, generally when you have a blue name instead of a red one… but you still have to obey the golden rule of politics… don’t make waves that the majority of politicians aren’t already riding.

It sucks… and if people get off their ass and actually participate in democracy, it can change… but until then this is the standard.

Because in a fight between neoliberals and conservatives they’re all elitists? What am I supposed to feel sorry for them? Oh no the ruling class is fighting amongst themselves over who’s the most elitist, awe shucks that must be awful.