A great deal of this has to do with mainstream, established media. There is still a strong unspoken assumption that mainstream media speaks for all of us. This is how we can all be pissed off about a specific thing and yet honestly think nobody cares, just because mainstream media doesn't report it as a problem.

When the media reports something across the board as a problem and continues to do so without letting up, change is quick to follow.

But when it reports something as not a problem, or fails to report it much at all, that seems to be a cue that no correction is necessary.

For example, compare and contrast reporting on presidential mental acuity during the Biden administration vs Trump's administration: this is a perfect example of how the media treats the same problem very differently depending on who's got the problem, even when the problem itself is magnitudes more obvious, serious, and damaging in one case than in the other.

This media selectivity has always been there to some extent, but this weird media equivocation toward Republican misbehavior really seemed to go off the deep end in the summer of 2015; I remember hearing some Republican who got caught doing something and expecting the same old tired apology, but instead he said the equivalent of, "Deal with it, I don't care." And it's been that way ever since, as though they all got the memo that the fix was in.

Even now, no one I know personally has stopped talking about the Epstein files or caring about them, except the media. Same thing.

Feel free to disagree, but I don't even have to guess that if Zohran Mamdani, as a very hypothetical example, said religious freedom only belongs to Muslims, white billionaire heads would explode and no mainstream news outlet would let go of it until the end of days. But this well-connected right-wing white pseudo-christian woman can drop that load on live tv and mainstream media doesn't even blink.