The first step of a debate is to have a set of understood and shared facts, the reality of whatever is currently going on. On some issues, yes, this is still possible. On the vast majority, and unfortunately the ones most pressing, it is not.

If you talk to the average Republican voter about, for example, climate change, you'll hear about China is faking the whole thing to make American industry less competitive, or about how, since we got some snow last night, that must mean it's a hoax. If you talk to them about job growth, they'll tell you we need to resurrect the COAL INDUSTRY, which was in rapid decline already and has only accelerated as coal continues to be less and less appealing as an energy source, because, you know, it's coal, and it's not very good. Jobs have been slipping in that industry since the 1940's, and automation has only worsened it. Yet Trump campaigns about revitalizing it, and the rest of the Republican party enables that, no matter how unrealistic it is.

It's just non stop conspiracy theories, disinformation, denial of fact, on and on. Watch Fox News some time. It's unbelievable how utterly insane the coverage is. I'm not talking a "different point of view" I'm talking about they are literally destroying any sense of truth to push their agenda, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone paying attention because that's basically what Roger Ailes started the company to fucking do: Appeal to conservative viewpoints that felt left behind as progressive stances became more and more mainstreamed.

This is not a conspiracy theory: Fox News' origins, along with smaller outfits like InfoWars, various talk radio stations, all the way to more recent ones like Brietbart, have been running this grift for decades; enabling the intellectual rot that has destroyed the GOP from it's core, and annihilated everything they ever stood for, all of it murdered on the altar of making money.

I say all of this as someone who is ashamed to acknowledge being a conservative, who has slowly watched the party he grew up believing in become a sad parody of it's former self, able to stand for NOTHING, NOT A THING other than squeezing out the last few dimes before the planet bursts into flames. What the GOP is today is a disgusting husk, a cancer-laden zombie kept moving by Koch brothers money and the sheer refusal of huge parts of the country lacking in proper education to admit they were fucking conned.

> Watch Fox News some time. It's unbelievable how utterly insane the coverage is.

MSNBC is every bit as unhinged as Fox News. It wasn't always that way, but it's become worse and worse over time. Rachel Maddow's ranting and raving about the Russians, panel discussions about Tulsi Gabbard being a Russian asset - it's bad. I feel sorry for anyone who gets their news from either channel.

Except that MSNBC doesn't dominate the left like Fox does the right. There are many networks that liberals watch: MSNBC, CNN, the BBC, etc. etc. and that's not even going into the fact that liberals are generally smarter consumers of news as a whole, reading multiple papers, watching multiple news networks, not to mention independent sources too. Conservatives rarely if ever leave the bubble.

Most liberal-leaning media in the US went absolutely insane over Russiagate. You wouldn't do much better by watching CNN. Every day, the walls were closing in, the big breakthrough was right around the corner. I don't doubt that liberals are typically more "sophisticated" than conservatives in the US, but that doesn't translate into political sense. The greatest condemnation of their sophistication is that so few of them predicted Trump's election, and that so many still have no idea why he won. That's why the Russiagate narrative is so popular among American liberals. It gives them an easy way to explain a phenomenon that they fundamentally do not understand.