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Village Idiots [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-11-11
I’m old. When I was a kid growing up in a small, rural town in southern Illinois, there was a strange fellow that wandered about, picking up trash, rummaging through garbage bins behind the few stores we had, pulling a filled cart, and mumbling to himself. I don’t know what he did with the stuff he found. My parents said he either sold it, traded it, or made something useful from it, something that he could use. He was harmless and never hurt anyone. I had no idea where he came from or where he went, slept, or lived. He was just a fixture in the town. He was mostly ignored. He was known as the ‘village idiot’.
As I became older and traveled about, I noticed nearly every small town had similar characters, and since there are small towns all over America, they would make for a significant total. And as I watched a little closer and paid more attention, I began to see telltale signs that opportunists recognized the same thing, and that this group of uneducated American eccentrics could be monetized. Then I watched how they accomplished this, right under my nose:
To be successful, they had to understand the group, what they liked, what they watched, their habits, and how they lived. One of the first things they discovered—unlike from my boyhood experience—was that this group had money to spend, not a lot, but enough to pay attention to when added up over the entire group. Next, they learned they were poorly educated, vulnerable, and seemingly ready to believe anything they saw on TV, Facebook, or read on Twitter. The opportunists were convinced they hit gold: A consumer group with money in their pockets and that would believe nearly anything
The next step was to decide on a marketing strategy, where to place their ads, the best ‘bang for the buck’, so to speak. This was easy, and it didn’t take long to make this decision. The group was already inveterate watchers of the FOX channel. Even after FOX lost its lawsuit for lying and misrepresenting facts, and had to settle with a nearly billion-dollar penalty, the group continued to tune in. They seemed oblivious of the lawsuit, or the penalty that FOX settled to pay. And FOX seemed happy to keep them in the dark, especially since the audience made no effort to seek clarification or details, settling around the warm, cozy, protective hearth that FOX provided them.
And so, the ‘village idiots’ of forgotten times have become a powerful force in modern times, but no longer innocent or anodyne. They have sent one of their own to the White House, several others to the Senate, and more than enough to the House to bring the country to its knees!
This will not end well.
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