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We live in a clickbait world now. The most valuable product generated by the media is not information, but outrage. It can be manufactured with nothing more than a few tweets from people with less than a hundred followers combined.
The manufacture and distribution of outrage is tightly controlled by a politicized cartel that decides what everyone is allowed, and REQUIRED, to be reflexively angry about.
For example, you're not allowed to be outraged at extremist Democrats, but you are required to be outraged at Trump for calling them out with language far less intemperate than what they routinely hurl at law-abiding Americans.
The outrage cartel acts aggressively to preserve its monopoly control. Nothing spurs it to action faster than independent voices attempting to spread unauthorized outrage against politically incorrect targets.
Provocative ideas are what shift the window of political possibility. The outrage cartel has decreed that window moves only to the Left, and it never stops moving. The outrage cartel has the corporate muscle to silence those who are provocative in the wrong direction.
As with many addictions, a major side effect of getting hooked on cheap manufactured outrage is paranoia. Heavy users of the cartel's product are convinced sinister forces lurk all around them, ready to lunge from the shadows at any moment.
Racism is basically the fentanyl of the outrage cartel, the incredibly dangerous drug it both sells straight and cuts into other products to juice them up. Racism angles can produce a desirable twitch in the mouse clicking finger of even the most jaded outrage junkie.
Conversely, the outrage cartel works hard to prevent anger from developing at politically incorrect targets. This reverses the paranoia side effect and makes the public all but unaware of actual threats, such as MS-13.
Outrage is a fission reaction, a contagion. People are eager to share it with their online friends. They seek validation that the outrage they feel is legitimate. Every junkie seeks reassurances that he's not hopelessly addicted to cheap junk.
Knowing this, the cartel works hard to keep outrage from developing over facts and ideas they do NOT wish to spread. Those ideas could jeopardize the political power of the cartel's patrons and legitimize alternative sources of outrage the cartel does not control.
All that matters is getting people to click links and share them. It doesn't matter if they read the articles or think hard about what they contain. In fact, thinking hard is discouraged because that could lead to skeptical questions that dilute the outrage.
The manufactured outrage post gets a hundred thousand retweets; the quiet correction hours later gets a hundred.
The cartel shrugs and grins when called on it: "Hey, we did our jobs. We sent out a correction. Not our fault if nobody read it." Not our fault you guzzled the booze but didn't drink the glass of lukewarm tap water we slid across the bar after you passed out.
The cartel doesn't always have to lie outright to manufacture outrage, but it's vitally important to suppress any truth that could dilute the product. They don't tell the stories that would drain outrage clicks from the product they want to push hard and turn viral.
Social media is the perfect delivery system for manufactured outrage because the cartel can slip inconvenient truths into Paragraph 26 of a linked story hardly anyone will read carefully. It's like a gang running a legit hospital as a front for selling street drugs.
Just as useful medicine becomes a dangerous street drug in the hands of greedy gangsters, so information is perverted into clickbait by the outrage cartel. Heavy users lose their grip on reality and demand ever stronger doses of the junk that's killing them. /end
