In the 60s the evangelical christians in the US realized there was a path to essentially coopt the Republican party. This roughly coincided with the implementation of the southern strategy. In the 70s Richard Nixon’s presidency collapsed in the wake of the Watergate scandal. From this point on, efforts were made to ensure that no Republican president could ever be taken down due to, essentially, anything.
This is where the origins of Fox News lie. The whole strategic purpose of it isn’t to deliver news (in fact there’s studies showing that Fox news viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news), it’s to offer consistent spin in favour of whatever the Republican mainstream happens to be. Once Trump’s nomination was inevitable , they started supporting him despite their initial opposition.
Fox News is not unique, it’s just the most high profile part of a right-wing media (and “news”) ecosystem designed to ensure that a strong majority of Americans will never see Democrats as anything other than the enemy (despite many Democratic policies being quite popular even among Republicans if not presented with democratic party branding ). There are hundreds of talk radio stations that throughout the 80s and 90s and 2000s spewed nothing but hateful nonsense and poisoned the minds of millions. These people are trained to never expose themselves to media outside of this ecosystem . Anything “woke”, even objective facts, may be dismissed because “media has a left wing bias”.
The recent issues with Russia are just down the fact that it turns out Republicans are a lot cheaper to bribe than most people thought. Putin, a brutal dictator, can be cast as anti-woke, where “woke” ( like "antifa) means whatever they happen to be hating in that moment. Putin hates most of the same groups they’re trained to hate so common Republicans can be talked into supporting Putin’s regime. After all, the alternative is to potentially give the Democrats a win, and that must be avoided at all costs.
I don’t see a way out from this for the US. The media ecosystem doing this has its claws deep into huge swathes of the population and it’s all perfectly legal. There’s no real recourse. In whatever civilization follows us, this will be studied by their historians.
