Am passing on my buddy Dave’s letter to the NYT, replying to an article about the Repub ‘outrage/hate machine’, that keeps the sheep riled and paranoid, which is ‘The Plan(R).’ BTW, Dave’s letter is #1, among all reader input, today.

Dave | Lafayette, CO

Professor Krugman has pretty much covered all the bases in this latest column. But I submit the following observation (which Paul perhaps simply ran out of room to include) as follows:

I firmly believe that the toxic rage which has been rampant on the Right for the last 30 years is largely due to the "outrage propaganda" which has always been a staple of far-right media - in particular talk radio (Limbaugh, Ingraham, Coulter, Levin, et al.) and Fox News.

These "shock jocks" on the Right must constantly amp up their outrage levels to sustain their audience ratings. They "jumped the shark" about twenty years ago - but still continue year after year to escalate their manufactured outrage to keep their faithful listeners whipped into a perpetual frenzy.

It's just like drug addiction. The audience builds up a tolerance and needs incrementally more powerful doses of their daily outrage quotient to stay motivated to tune in for more. Hence we've now reached total saturation levels of blind rage on the Right, where the mere mention of straws being offered (but not provided automatically) is warped into a mortal threat to Truth, Justice and The American Way.

And yes, that's why Trump "came out swinging" in 2015 with his blatant, over-the-top appeals to hard core racism and bigotry. He simply adopted the blowtorch demagoguery and bigotry of hate radio and Fox to entice voters to follow him like the Pied Piper.

Orwell prophesied the daily "three-minute hate". Now it's on 24/7.