When the United State deregulated media to essentially eliminate the public service component of media, we created a race to the bottom that we're now realizing in the public space.

The generation of people in their 30s and 40s running the country spent summers listening to Rush Limbaugh over lunch with grandpa, grew up to consume news and comment from message boards and later social media, entered adulthood in the middle of an endless cycle of warfare, and came into their own in this era of propaganda and information warfare. Mainline protestantism has been displaced by Pastor Bob and prosperity gospel. We're replacing the craven boomers with nihlists.

The underlying trope of most propagandistic media is always to discredit the most powerful entity in the room - the government. Why? The money people behind faux-grassroots media are almost always reactionaries who often build their empires on the government teat and don't appreciate the irony. Particularly true of extractive capitalists in the petroleum and materials industries. The US Government giveth, and is the only entity that can taketh. So "rule of law" for me, and "freedumb" for thee.