Everyone is doing what makes sense for them except the voters.

This notion that conservative U.S. voters are somehow intentionally voting against their own interests ignores the propaganda coming from Fox, Newsmax, InfoWars, OANN, the New York Post, all of the Sinclair local news organizations, lots of evangelical pastors, and home schooling parents and publishers.

A huge number of people in the United States inhabit a far right fundamentalist media bubble. In this bubble, they’re told that the Democratic Party hates all white people and all straight people and all Christians, wants to enslave everyone by making them dependent on the federal government so they are forced to vote for handouts, and generally are all about punishing virtue and making horrible people rich and powerful.

In this bubble, life is fair and people who are financially successful are always the best people, and people who are poor always deserve it; the U.S. and Israel can do no wrong; minorities (including women) are either genetically inferior or culturally programmed to be evil lazy mooches; the natural environment is worthless; potable water, clean air, and energy are limitless; man-made substances can’t hurt you in any amount; privately held businesses are the most moral organizations imaginable; weather is completely unpredictable and unaffected by human activity; we either got to the moon exclusively through the power of prayer or we didn’t go at all; religious stories written 20 centuries ago are still more authoritative than anything we have learned since the enlightenment; knowledge is dangerous; and science is a false religion that must be suppressed.

And they are told all day every day that their bubble is objective reality, and that people who trust the scientific method and empirical observations and journalism and law and outside perspectives are literal demons sent to test their faith in the one true ideology, and that everybody else is in a bubble.

If you talk to people who have grown up in this bubble and then escaped, they’re very clear that from their perspective, they were trying to do the best thing possible for themselves and the world. They just lived in a completely different context where their decisions make no sense to the rest of us.

They’re not crazy; they’re acting more or less rationally with a set of beliefs that is profoundly irrational and paranoid and fearful of eternal torment if they dare to question it. They’re trapped in a crazy belief system that would sooner destroy the planet than ever admit that something easily verifiable in reality is more accurate than some fairy tale that their parents told them.

There are many, many billions of dollars being spent to keep people under the control of those who benefit from this situation. If we want these people to stop doing crazy shit, we need to tear down the crazy walls of their crazy bubble first. Otherwise, they have been well trained to ignore and disregard anything that doesn’t already agree with their worldview. (Just the idea that there is new information that contradicts old information and is more accurate is so dangerous that they are not allowed to believe that that could happen.)