Things are fucked from the top down. It’s by design, It’s a long listen but worth checking out How Conservatism Won by Robert Evans. He lays out in a clear concise way “how a consortium of rich failsons got together to fund a network of right wing think tanks and shift American culture in a fun new direction. (note: it was not actually fun at all).” They’ve been very successful and those think tanks are now pipelines used to funnel ideological purists into powerful positions like our current Supreme Court.

It’s not even a conspiracy, it’s all easily verifiable. These people do not share our American values. They do not value freedoms (speech, press, religion, etc) the same way that many of us do. They want a return to the gilded age with them as the robber barons and landed gentry and everyone else as a permanent, toiling underclass.