This weird breakdowns on Twitter or ESS of voters not pledging fealty to Biden or Clinton, or breaking down at the possibility of people making legitimate demands, concessions, and pleas for relief and help met with disgust.
It's clear that both liberals and conservatives are quite reactionary but why do the former even attempt to pretend to be good people if they're just defending their privilege and identity?
Media may not directly shape culture, but it can definitely crystallize and give form to the shapes that are already there, half realized. For example: South Park didn't make people transphobic out of nowhere, but it definitely gave a form to it and helped turn a shapeless, chauvinist-biased ignorance into open, fully formed hatred and contempt. Similarly, the West Wing didn't create Liberals from whole cloth, but it did crystallize their preexisting biases into one easily exploitable shape.