this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2025
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You forgot the massive part played by manufactured consent. Attacking education and massively buying mass media, makes it that elections become what they are now. An illusion of choice. Freedom of information is a central pillar of democracy, you can't make educated choices if you're not educated.
Which goes back to point one: Civilians enjoy being manufactured consent. They enjoy attacking education, controlling media, and maintaining the corrupt dual systems of elections. The illusion of choice, is a choice, many still decide to uphold. Anti-intellectualism is core aspect of authoritarianism, and a pillar of seizing the thoughts of the population. You can't make informed choices without indoctrination centers in guise of education.
They can't enjoy it because they don't know it's happening, that's literally why it's called manufactured consent. It's not real consent.
Yet, conservatives are fine firing teachers, ruining their budgets, burning books, denying diversity, digressively victimizing, etc. and consent to illiteracy, being conned, and conning others.
Fanaticism is a choice, and they choose it, every time.
Maybe calling it willful manufacturing their demise might be closer, but consent they willfully partake.
That's a consequence and a symptom, not the cause. The people manufacturing the consent and the one being manipulated into it are different groups of people. One is choosing and consenting, the other ones are more victims than anything else. It doesn't excuse the heinous shit some of them do or believe, but it explains it.
The cause is choosing to be manufactured consent. Choosing that manufacturing is the consequence we keep revisiting. If the ones being manipulated stopped to think “maybe we keep choosing wrong” they wouldn't be in position where manufacturing consent would exist, they would instead choose to simply collaborate with despots that happen to be corrupt old white men.