Yes and no. Sure, Trump is driving the hate machine, or at least riding shotgun. In one case that's a literal garbage truck to underscore his point about immigrants.Canpakes wrote:Correct. A great example is Trump.
The other part of that hate machine is provided by an industry created to specifically peddle hate. This seems to have been a specialty of right-wing radio, as example (for which there exists few, if any, counter-examples from the left).
It isn’t about ‘hating Democrats’ so much as hate in general, for anything that can be used as a scapegoat.
But the best example that comes to mind is Rush Limbaugh. Just a regular kid who got into radio in high school, dropped out of college to pursue radio as a DJ who kind of sucked and got fired a lot. One day he let loose on his ignorant opinions and from there, he's living the proof of the American Dream, that literally anyone can make it.
Kind of in the right place at the right time to get his voice into the information vacuum first. He resonated with a lot of angry and or gullible white Christians, apparently. No conspiracy needed.Wiki wrote:Limbaugh began to express his political opinions in 1985 when he mocked the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, which he considered along with the general anti-war movement to be "inherently anti-US, yet was reported as substantive and morally correct by a willing and sympathetic media".[31] The FCC's repeal of the fairness doctrine—which had required that stations provide free air time for responses to any controversial opinions that were broadcast—on August 5, 1987, meant stations could broadcast editorial commentary without having to present opposing views. Daniel Henninger wrote, in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Ronald Reagan tore down this wall [the fairness doctrine] in 1987 ... and Rush Limbaugh was the first man to proclaim himself liberated from the East Germany of liberal media domination."
