> Anything outside of mainstream rhetoric is immediately labeled conspiratorial. Which is strange to me. Most people on both sides seem to recognize the media is rigged by big money, but they don't seem equipped or encouraged to form their own opinions that incorporate this knowledge.

I propose that if you think of a human mind as a neural network that is trained by the information it ingests, much of the mysteries of human behavior makes almost complete sense.

"people on both sides seem to recognize the media is rigged by big money" is a bit of a hanging chad, but I suspect that is explained by something like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-dependent_memory