Memory was fuzzy, I was thinking it there was a much greater time between the ask and the deliver. It no doubt was the sort/long vs real/fake issue that I was conflating,
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. It is possible that I was so fixated on being such a good Right Winger that I failed to fully examine what was being presented. I have over the last several years started to look more at things and not just take them at face value, something that there is not time to do for past events.
That is the type of affect that sustained propaganda has on human minds. The feeling of isolation that people often say social media brings is I think another aspect. I'm not sure if it actually does or not (or if it comes from somewhere else, I think social media actually just highlights how isolated people actually are, by showing them how many other people there are to connect with - and seeing that people they know might know a lot of other people so they realize they're actually a much smaller part of their life than they knew before, they go from blissful ignorance to "oh, I'm not the center of the universe after all").
Cults full on do explicitly this type of stuff (isolate, and then constantly push propaganda) because it breaks human minds (seriously, it works on just about everyone, given a long enough time). Its also why we're realizing that police interrogations (and interrogations in general) following a very similar manner are actually not good support when the person caves and confesses. Only there, they're doing it out of duress, while in the former they often push positive stuff (or give people an enemy or evil to unite against).
I know its easy to hear "you're brainwashed" and dismiss it as general rhetoric (because you hear that in the opposite direction), but that's literally what has happened to a lot of people. And yes it happens both ways, but it absolutely is far more prominent on the right. I think why a lot of them feel that America is betraying them is because by and large we have not let a lot of their "us vs them" propaganda go unchecked, when in the past it would.