The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump
is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians.
In the eighties and nineties, TV producers and newspaper editors established the ironclad rule of never showing audiences pictures of urban poverty, unless it was being chased by cops. In the 2010s the press began to cartoonize the “white working class” in a distantly similar way.
This began before Trump. As Bernie Sanders
told Rolling Stone after the 2016 election, when the small-town American saw himself or herself on TV, it was always “a caricature. Some idiot. Or maybe some criminal, some white working-class guy who has just stabbed three people.” These caricatures drove a lot of voters toward Trump, especially when he began telling enormous crowds that the lying media was full of liars who lied about everything.
After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was – without exception now – a crazed, racist monster. As detailed here multiple times, ruminations on Republican voter behaviors became not merely uninteresting to pundits after November 2016, but actively taboo. By 2020, the official answer to
What’s the Matter with Kansas? was
Kansas is a White Supremacist Project and Can Go **** Itself.
