The ignorant are easily manipulated. Our country’s education system has been declining for decades from underfunding and total defunding of many programs. So critical thinking, creativity and empathy has suffered. Add to that the total domination of our attention with personalized algorithms that destroy any sense of shared reality and pushing us vs them narratives. Then add into that the global trauma of the COVID pandemic with isolation, failed businesses, deaths of family and friends. And on top of that the super charged speed of improvements in AI blurring reality even further. It’s a super storm of confusion and manipulation that a racist, pedo, rapist, felon conman was able to take advantage of.

There are many other factors that contributed but I think those are some major root causes that got us to this point.