There is a troubling trend that I have recently been noticing among politics and news in the past months. More and more, people on both sides of the political spectrum are building echo chambers and refusing to give credence to anything that contradicts their worldview. No amount of evidence or reasoning will be able to pry them from their holes, as they resist with cries of "fake news," "librul tears," and "deplorables." Because yes, both sides are doing this, but only one side is in power right now. And that makes this situation incredibly dangerous.
Before I go on, allow me to digress into "fake news," a term I see popping up more and more. The term fake news had a correct, accurate, and useful meaning for about two weeks, then it rapidly morphed into what means today. What fake news did and should mean is entirely fabricated, clickbait articles manufactured by illegitimate news sources to generate traffic on social media to their sites. What it now and should not mean is "I get to ignore this piece of news from a main-stream source because it contradicts my views."
The vast majority of still legitimate news sources will have a bias, but that is a far cry from reporting objectively false information. This method of simply ignoring everything you don't want to consider exacerbates the problem outlined above. Again, both sides have fallen and are falling into this trap, but fake news agencies themselves have noted that certain types of conservatives are more likely to "fall for" these articles, and therefore write and target them at those demographics.
Using this process of delegitimizing the media and listening to only sources that support their views, supporters of everyone from Obama to Clinton to Sanders but especially Trump are able to maintain support for their candidates no matter what actually happened/is happening in the real world. And it is this that is so incredibly dangerous, because this is how tyranny begins. When you have a popular base in a democracy that will support you essentially no matter what you do, it stops being a democracy and begins becoming a dictatorship.
I can absolutely understand why many people voted for Trump. He said a lot of good things that often needed to be said. In the end, for me, that was outweighed by everything else about him. For many others in different situations, the opposite is true, and that makes perfect sense. What I cannot understand and what repulses and scares me is not Trump supporters, but Trump followers. I do not understand those people who tune out everything criticizing their "god-emperor," who blindly attack all opponents of their candidate, who do and probably will continue to follow and exalt Trump no matter what he does and no matter what is revealed about him. It is these people that are a threat to society, the nation, and democracy itself.
If Trump were not actively ignoring or even reneging on so many of his campaign promises, this would not have to be said. As it is, it must be. Anyone, Trump supporter or not, who finds themselves unable to consider that they might be wrong, that their views might not be correct, that someone else may in fact have a better or the correct way to do things, is fundamentally un-American and undemocratic.
