A few days ago the Internet and the media outlets were humming with clips from "The Daily Show" which depicted Trump supporters proselytizing their latest conspiracy theories. The ignorance was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. One supporter was asked why President Obama wasn't in his office on 9/11. His response was that he'd like to get to the bottom of that; clearly not knowing that a Republican named Bush was President in 2001.
It gets worse. Another supporter was asked how she concluded that Trump was the better candidate. She said that she didn't have "any articles" and hadn't read any but that she just "knew" that Trump was her man and she wasn't going to change her mind. Finally, when things couldn't drop any lower, they did, with another Trump supporter saying that Hillary had AIDS, which she got from Bill, who got it from Magic Johnson. All right.
So, who are these people? I have been endeavoring to find out what the "low information people" listen to and so far I've come up with a few indications of why they are, in fact, no information people. I recently read a blog on Daily Kos from a diarist who identified as a liberal living in West Texas and she stated that her step-mother only listens to Bill O'Reilly, while a neighboring chicken rancher friend listens only to Rush Limbaugh. Okey, doke.
The diarist went on to say that these two people in her inner circle never read the Washington Post, New York Times, what have you, preferring instead the Fox News website, (the standard bearer of how to write an incoherent blog.) Now this is actually a glass half full/half empty proposition, as I see it, because maybe they don't listen/read what I would opine is credible mainstream media but at least they're not slavering over the most recent share from American Renaissance or 1488 -- KKK and Nazi propaganda, respectively.
Long story short, the "conservative" media simply don't disseminate the same information as the mainstream media. The conservatives don't know that Hillary visited Flint, Michigan when the water was contaminated, for instance. They only know about the email non-issue because it has been telegraphed to them over and over and over again like the beating of jungle drums. The diarist I mentioned above said that the conservatives she knew did not go into the liberal press, whereas the liberals, myself among them, routinely trawl the conservative sites. Moreover, the diarist freely admitted that a lot of her neighbors operated out of fear -- fear of somebody breaking into the house, fear of something happening to the children. I have read about people of this fearful mindset stockpiling guns, ammo, food, and flying the Confederate flag, not just on Robert E. Lee's birthday. Another diarist that I like said that Alex Jones would take any three things that he feared, figure out a way to connect them, and then blame it all on "them" and that's how he put together his conspiracy theories. In the absence of any forthcoming information from Alex Jones himself, that description will suffice for the duration.
Trump feeds upon this swamp fever, black helicopter mentality, and that's who listens to his idiotic sound bites and believes that he is a man with policies that will protect them -- I guess that's what they believe. I'm extrapolating. Other Republicans, Romney and Nixon leap to mind, lied as flagrantly as Trump, but they lacked his one idiot savant characteristic, which is to tap into the irrational fear that exists in the darkest recesses of the cultural psyche, extract it, and then mainline it back into those recesses again, like a drug. So, "his supporters" follow this maniac, and I guess will do so until November 8th. It's not over until Trump serves the Kool-Aid.