People who vote against their interest and for depravity do so, in most cases, on the basis of believing lies, of buying lies intentionally peddled to them.
Even many of the people who voted for Trump now realize they were swindled by a liar.
The foremost means of Trump selling his lies - not to mention the rest of the Republican-fascists - is through the American, commercial, corporate media. It is the lie seller, the lie teller, the lie peddler.
Among the decades of lies the American media have sold to the public is the demonization of Hillary Clinton. The ones told during the last campaign, including the ones about her e-mails are just the most recent in a quarter of a century of such lies.
The reason the media can lie about liberal politicians with impunity are a line of Supreme Court rulings beginning in the Sullivan decision of 1964 which made lies told about public figures next to impossible for, especially, politicians to sue for. The liberal justices, mostly, who supported the early line of rulings, most of them brought by media companies, publishers, etc. with a financial interest in the media argued and supported by liberal lawyers and such groups as the ACLU are responsible for freeing the media to lie with impunity. With the support of liberals who were duped into believing that was some kind of enhancement of democracy.
Keep in mind, that year, 1964, the timing of those court decisions purportedly enhancing freedom and the regress of American politics is not a mere coincidence of timing. Those rulings had real effects in real politics. Give or take a few back trackings due to things like Watergate, it is the general direction those rulings turned us in that got us where we are today.
The lies which such liberals enabled, those lies that the corporate media, the most effective engine of vote influencing in our country, unshockingly, unsurprisingly and predictably, and, overwhelmingly, attacked liberal politicians, individuals, groups and ideas. They attacked minority groups, they attacked women, extending and expanding on the previous practice of the media in the period from before those "liberal" rulings were made.
Those rulings were joined by other acts, such as those early in the Reagan administration which deregulated the media, getting rid of things like the Fairness Doctrine - originally put in place by, of all people, Herbert Hoover, so that broadcast, mass media could not be overwhelmingly one-sided in its presentation, disposed of by Ronald Reagan's thugs so it could be one sided - equal-time provisions, public service requirements, broadcast licensing to encourage diverse ownership, etc. WITH THE SUPPORT OF MANY ALLEGEDLY LIBERAL LEGAL GROUPS and the libertarian-liberals who had mostly didn't much really care about economic justice, and whose interests in civil rights for minorities who were discriminated against counts as a hobby, at best, a weak inclination, if that. Certainly not as compared to thing like having access to the porn many of those rulings in cases the media financed and brought, and in the liberties granted to the media so many of them make money out of.
While it is harder than watching an episode of Family Guy or The Dark Tower or whatever, it's not rocket science. The results of those rulings were entirely predictable from the start, the influence they would have on voting and, so, on our politics is as obvious as the rulings made against the campaign finance reforms which belatedly began to arise among liberals trying to get the horses back in the barn which the liberals such as those in the ACLU and the "liberal" New York Times had stampeded out of the corral.
These days, one of the biggest uses of the "free speech" lines is by neo-Nazis and white supremacists and people like Ann Coulter in line with their propaganda stunts. A use of it also made by corporate conservatives, giving up the unprofitable opposition to porn for the far more power-enhancing use of it as demonstrated by such figures as Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist, and the other far-right Supreme Court members who have given us such abominations as Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo. That, alone, should tell real liberals how they were had by the Joel Goras, Nat Nentoffs, and much of the ACLU whose stands have combined to produce a Trump instead of a president like Lyndon Johnson, who, as I recently pointed out, signed Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act into law within a week, a week the like of which we have not had since then, largely thanks to the "free press" rulings that allowed them to lie Nixon into office in 1968, as they had not been able to do in 1960.
Those overturned campaign finance laws were largely in response to the combined power of the corporate media to lie on behalf of Republicans and conservative with the unfettered access to the financing of the rich. Oh, yes, and the ACLU has largely opposed any campaign finance laws as an inhibition of free speech, as well. Such is the way that such "First Amendement" advocacy works to give us a Trump and have given us, among other things, the return of white supremacist - nativists and, for the first time, actual Nazis to the White House.
I will take the Black and other liberal church ladies over the Ivy League libertarian liberals and media left for political astuteness, any given year.
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