And it occurred to me how this whole thing is like an emotional sledgehammer you get used to being bludgeoned with continually. All nuance is gone. And as I’ve said before, this is a push: you are not reacting naturally and organically to something or someone in your actual physical environment, but rather to something engineered, non-organic, and designed to be emotionally and visually addictive.
Why would not an addiction to strong stimulation, to overwrought emotions. to wild swings this way and that, not manifest politically? Why would it not make it easy to people who have learned to inhabit this world to consistently take the most extreme positions, even on issues they know nothing about? Why would it not reward ignorance with the stability of certainty, and replace warranted caution with reckless anger and rage?
Clearly, this happens. The same morbid little trolls who do everything in their power to hurt people on the internet are in the next shooting and maiming people and creatures on their video consoles. It is one simple continuum.
But more subtly, they might be watching horror movies, or watching thing blow up, and heroes deliver simplistic and absolutist moral tales about violation and revenge. Always revenge, any more. Most Americans are addicted to this notion of revenge, and that it would play out against Trump supporters should surprise no one. We have been trained to need villains, and if for whatever reason you can’t accept they are outside our borders, then they must be here, and the rest flows logically.