Maybe I’m just more aware of it now vs. 20-30 years ago, but I feel the division with our country just keeps growing more and more with each passing year/presidency.
And I feel like social media/FB play a big part in this. It seems the extremes on both sides just continue to grow more extreme. And I feel like if social media — and news media — would just go away, we’d see much less division/extremism.
But unfortunately extremism, shock, anger, and contempt for “the other side” is what gets clicks/views.
I don’t know what the solution is. Well, the solution is what I said: get rid of social & (extreme) news media. But there’s no way that will ever happen; extremism breeds extremism.
I keep seeing this. Within my still living parents’ lifetime, people were literally and legally “divided” by Jim Crow laws and segregation. America wasn’t exactly a great egalitarian nation in the 60s.
Not to mention Vietnam and Kent State.
The difference is that once algorithms could be optimized for "engagement", a company simply can't resist amping up the dopamine hits. Because the ultimate goal of those networks is persistent, unrelenting attention. They are for-profit businesses whose primary income is ads (upwards of 98% of Facebook/Meta revenue.)
So the more attention you can drum up, and the longer you can maintain it, the faster the money printer can go brrrr.
Eventually an American will independently reinvent the car bomb, or someone on the left will decide to take a gun to a building containing political representatives.
Personally, I'm surprised that the American right wing (including Trump himself!) didn't seem to stop being pro-gun even when two different people made an attempt at Trump:
https://www.nrahlf.org/articles/2025/2/10/nra-issues-stateme...
If that didn't change their minds, I don't think anything can. Literal Jesus could descend from heaven on the wings of Biblically-accurate angels and tell them "When I said 'thou shalt not kill', I didn't give you any exceptions for self-defence, for stand-your-ground, or for the death penalty." and my expectation at this point is they'd not only ignore it, they'd call him 'woke' for suggesting it.
Does Timothy McVeigh count?