I’m used to saying follow the money, but this time, try following the thought process. Maybe sub in less offensive and bigoted ideas, though, for the sake of your mental health.

You hear an issue brought up on the only news channel that will tell it to you straight. Foreign SF commandos are going undercover in our schools’ dressing rooms to steal slaves for satanic rituals used to summon evil aliens or something, right? Naturally you have a strong reaction. The next time that issue comes up, it is delivered with a more realistic framing by an entirely different party - say, people trying to stop violence against trans populations - but that’s not how you heard the story, and now it sounds like these people are apologizing for the evil aliens compared to what you’ve heard!

Or, you have a small problem. You’re from a small post-industrial town and everyone is dying because the corporations exploited your community, before shipping the jobs to practical slaves overseas and leaving behind the local labor/economy. Now everyone among your friends and family has high cancer rates and is dying in their 40s. Something can’t be right. There has to be another way… but you’ve never heard of it, and you can picture it clearly on your own. This is capitalist realism - the inability to imagine beyond the current configuration. In your mental turmoil you stumble upon a meme or a soundbite: You criticize capitalism, and yet you exist in it - funny! Not funny at all, but how do you even come back against something that dense? Well you don’t really have any ideas because all you’ve ever known capitalism, and it sounds like a great thing, so critics of it must be dumb. Now whenever people critique capitalism, the words pop in your head: “Yet you exist in it!” The gotcha trigger has been programmed in your mind.

This kind of programming is omnipresent in our society - it’s ancient, yet honed in modernity.

Sometimes people buy into the platform 100% and start to be able to read in-between the lines. They learn to dog-whistle all on their own for the sake of the tribalist narrative. They are the vanguard, making these ideas more visible and approachable. These are the ones that go straight from ‘ban trans athletes just because athlete thing,’ and then once trans athletes are banned they move on to making identifying as trans in school illegal without a moment of hesitation, and after that proceed straight to making it a crime just to exist as a trans adult. These people don’t care about the athletics, just like they don’t care about children when they push pro-corporate/anti-privacy legislation. They were driven by fear to normalize the party line, until the party line overpowered the fear. The pressure for this usually comes from friends, family, coworkers, social media, and one-way media choices.

The next level are the pro/semi-pro influencers that receive training (originally lobbyists but now they lobby more than just politicians!) to support astroturf movements. They usually don’t care what they’re asked to say because they get spoiled to do so. The funding and planning of these activities are often done by think tanks, and the think tanks are often a link directly to the oligarch ring leaders. (If you aren’t at least being flown around and wined and dined by ‘handlers’ then you’re just an entry level chump in the big picture.)