Media distraction and lies
It is puzzling and frustrating to see so many people take what the major and social media does, and think it is true and informative.
More frustrating is that when someone comes along and points this deception out, those consumers get angry with the messenger.
I was a journalist who majored in communications, and for many years I studied the way that media aims to draw people in with things like purposely misleading headlines. That was at the beginning of the Internet age. It was before social media. But these tactics were already there, of course. Social media online simply made it all worse. It is like a torrent, a flood of trivia and so-called information flowing over us all now. We hold this stuff in our hands and put it in our pockets and carry it all around. We KNOW what it does to us, on some level. We act really smart and clever and like we know what's up. But then we keep consuming. It's like eating sewage, which we know stinks and is toxic, and we're holding our noses, but we keep eating it!
"Well, we need to be informed. We need to know what's going on." There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is the sources of that information and events and history. Most of us depend on a few sources, and the same sources.
If you depend on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, or any of the like, I already know you're largely deceived. That doesn't mean you're stupid, necessarily. it doesn't mean you aren't sincere about wanting to know things. But at best what you are learning is so limited.