I know this sounds simplistic, and it is, but: I think it all starts and ends with the media.

The media are where millions upon millions of people get their "news" and their indoctrination and their permission structures. I know smart, educated, successful people who cite...MSNBC and CNN as support for their (patently false, demonstrably untrue and idiotic) world views. The same people who, when confronted with the Socratic method, change the subject or leave the conversation rather than deal with questions, the answers to which would clearly expose their ignorance and their stupidity and their hypocrisy. (I have a fantastic example of this from around 2015, involving my sister and 5 of her women friends, all six of them being Hillary supporters, and the 7 of us in a brief Facebook conversation. But it's TL;DR material, so I'll spare you. But it's proof-positive of my point.)

If the media were honest and unbiased and just reported news straight and disinterestedly, and EVEN with the century-long deplorable state of public education in America, IF the media were as I described, the Democrat Party would be at most a fringe player in national politics, and the utterly stupid, idiotic ideas advanced by the Left lately would die on the vine, if they even bloomed at all.

The media are the cancer among us. The alphabet legacy corporate media and all their players need to be burned to the ground, the earth salted where they stood, and rebuilt from scratch. The media need to be Luigi'd if the Republic is to survive and thrive.