There at one point was this idea that it urban centers tended to be more liberal because of ready exposure to different cultures and ideas. By extension of that, one would thing that the rise of ready access to the Internet would have helped disburse that to the rest of the population, particularly with things like social media letting people post their thought directly.

In reality though, just the opposite happened. Now people get pushed this constant reinforcing stream of information that feeds into their already established ideas. Then to top it off, ‘journalists’ (which are a dime a dozen these days since everyone with an opinion and a mic likes to claim themselves to be one) continually try to differentiate themselves by writing in more extreme and sensationalistic fashion so they stand out from the mass of other feeds.

Unfortunately, reigning in the deadly wave of stupid unleashed on society may be an impossible task.