Many of the US-centric comments here seem to ignore historical context. Distorted and falsified political news has been with the country since John Adams, at least:inception
John Adams & Why Fake News is Nothing New
Keeping within the lifetime of many of us, how about The "Red Scare" of Senator McCarthy aided assiduously by Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn (the same Roy Cohn who later holding the fledging Donald Trump to home his political sensibilities. Just in case anybody does not know, these stalwart people spread absolute lies and innuendo enough to destroy many lives and spread fear in the US populace. The Cohn rule "when justifiably accused deny, deny, deny and accuse the accuser of everything you're guilty of yourself". He was disbarred eventually but not without major damage, while helping the political career of Richard Nixon.
The only difference between the McCarthy era and the Trump era is that most of the McCarthy era people were quite intelligent and mostly secular also.
Today the US Presidency is dominated by Evangelical Christian seekers for The Rapture. Trump, as a King Cyrus-like non-believer is accepted as the harbinger of the end of times. A recent perfectly typical example is that of Mike Pompeo in Egypt "I come before you as an Evangelical Christian..." Check the messaging, do not accept my word for this, please. That President trump neither knows nor cares about this situation is quite guaranteed to be even more destructive, precisely because his own political party is so afraid, just as they were in the early 1950's.
For the interest of Tesla, science, the Rule of Law and so much else the only hope is rejection of these ideologies. That will happen, hopefully before it becomes too late. Remember that Brazil, Hungary and others are being captured right now by the same menace. The advance of Christian, Islamic, Hindu and other religious extremists right now has massive risks. All this is very unlikely to end quietly.
Note: you might consider me biased since I grew up in the McCarthy era when my father, an evangelical protestant minister, preached of the evils of 'godless communists"... Hatred of 'the others' produces truly horrible inhumanity, and it did then too.
No major argument from me. The big difference between political manipulation and fake news of the past and today is the way it's been industrialized in the US. The US went to war with Spain in 1898 in large part because William Randolph Hurst's papers were touting how evil the Spanish were being in their colonies. The McCarthy Red Scare is another time someone manipulated people's fears to push a political agenda. In McCarthy's case, he was not popular in his home district and he needed to boost his poll numbers.
We also have moved into another era of right wing nationalism on a level not seen since the 1930s and 40s. The last time there was this much nationalism, it contributed quite a bit to World War II. We are also seeing some quite liberal movements active in the world, though it's of a very different nature from communism which in practice was little different from right wing nationalism (though the core motivations were different).
Today's extremes are more generational than the 30s and 40s type of split. The generations born after 1980 tend to be very liberal in most parts of the world while a form of fascist nationalism is gripping the older generations. Unfortunately GenX is driving a lot of this. Some of the biggest jerks in politics around the world are GenX.
I'm early GenX and I remember seeing it happen. My sister is 10 years older and is from right in the middle of the Baby Boom. When she was in college the Vietnam War was winding down, but there was still a protest attitude among her peers. (She came from a conservative family and didn't agree with the attitudes of her generation, but she experienced it.)
When I got to college, it was the middle of the Reagan administration and the attitude on campuses was very different. The Young Republicans were the biggest politically oriented group on campus. I remember the campus paper had editorials all the time about essentially law and order. There were a relative handful of punk rockers on campus and someone took a picture of one of them, made up a poster that said "Warning: Don't Punk" and put it up around campus. There were people who were justifiably upset about the bullying, but at least half the editorials also defended the person who did it.
I used to shake my head and think "this is the most liberal these people are ever going to be".
Both my sister and I went to schools in the Cal State system, though mine was in a more rural area (San Luis Obispo) and had a big school of agriculture (Devin Nunes is an Ag graduate from my alma mater), so it was somewhat more conservative than my sister's campus (Cal State LA) was in the 60s, but my boss who went to Cal Poly SLO in the 60s observed that the school had become more conservative since she was a student.
When I was in school teachers occasionally observed that there was something different from my class from previous classes. One high school teacher mentioned in a lecture one day that my year was the poorest performing 3rd year in the school's history, but the year behind us were even worse.
I went to three schools before college and in each of them my class had significantly more discipline problems than the year before us.
GenX has reached the point where they are the generation mostly in charge now. Though being a small generation compared to that before and after, it will probably be a shorter time in the sun than average. Politically it's a conservative generation wedged between a somewhat more liberal Baby Boom and a much more liberal Millennial generation. They feel their time in power is short so they are trying to lock in their conservatism as deeply as possible to make it more difficult for the Millennials to undo it.
Older people tend to be more conservative anyway. Winston Churchill has a quote something along the lines of "show me someone who is young and not a liberal and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me someone who is old and not a conservative and I'll show you someone with no brain!" The right's propaganda machine in the US has turned manipulation from something of an art performed by talented BS artists of the past like McCarty and Hearst and turned it into a science, saturating the punters with well crafted propaganda from multiple angles to convince them that the alternate reality they want to create is real. To people who never leave the conservative information bubble, it seems like every source is talking about the same topics in the same way, so the BS mutually reinforces one another. It's brilliantly Machiavellian.
So the propaganda machine sucks in older people who are leaning conservative anyway and are less aware of how interconnected the media has become. There is a documentary called "the Brainwashing of My Father". The film maker's father had been a liberal all his life, but ended up watching Fox and got totally wrapped up in the conspiracy theories. The rest of the family were pulling their hair out. Finally her mother hid the remote and forced him to watch other programs and he returned to his old self.
The nationalism goes beyond the US's shores though and the Russians have been capitalizing on it to manipulate elections around the world, though extreme nationalists have won in countries where there is no evidence the Russians have done anything, like the Philippines. The Russians have been quite active in Europe where they have been trying to sabotage the EU and NATO. They nudged the Brexit vote by fueling nationalist feelings among some. They have interfered in other European elections to mixed success.
In some European countries the #1 and #2 parties are extreme nationalist parties and extreme liberal, which shows how deep the divide is in many places in the world. The Russians are exploiting these and making them worse, but the fundamentals about why they are there in the first place have to do with the changing demographics of the world, migration patterns, and economic patterns. Developing countries are making a lot of the goods sold in developed countries and it's put native born people in those countries out of work. They are angry at not having the economic opportunities their fathers and grandfathers had.
Some are turning towards nationalism in response, others towards more liberal philosophies. The growing divide could become a flashpoint for violent conflict though.
