Mac1958
Diamond Member
Yeah. I'm not generally fond of pointing the finger at one individual person, but there is indeed a point of singularity to all of this, and that's the day Limbaugh's show went national. That, of course, led to any number of copycats (Hannity, Levin, Beck, et al), all of them pounding away, three hours a day. And then it simply exploded with the advent of Fox and then the internet.The antecedents are Rush Limbaugh & Fox News.
They gathered this cult-like group of the discontented, the ne'er-do-wells, the down-sized, outsourced, mortgage-underwater unhappy souls. They created, in other words, a 'market demographic'. Steve Bannon saw it and married it up with Don Trump....and they then assembled a group of grifters and conmen to help them mine it. A money river happened.
And here we are.
I look at Limbaugh as The Father of the Alternate Universe, because he was the first to successfully convince millions not only that the media is 100% corrupt, but that they could "trust" his interpretation of reality at 100%. It's that kind of binary thinking that has the party rank & file so intellectually stunted and paralyzed today, and its leaders (most of whom know better) having to adjust their behaviors accordingly.
I often wonder if Limbaugh had any regrets about what he created.