Political Memes

This is a fundamental problem with any kind of civil conflict. You're inevitably going to have inteliigensia at the highest levels of each side of the dispute. You're going to have mountains of propaganda to justify the need for the conflict and the existential nature of the threat of the opposition. You're going to dehumanize your opposition in order to de-legitimize any kind of dispute. And you're going to tap a rich vein of low-income, low-education civilians to fill out the rank and file of your military.

Plenty of liberals lined up to march into the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan and jungles of Vietnam. Plenty of conservatives are still part of the Soy, Woke, and Gay modern military, NSA, FBI, and CIA. Even if you're looking dead center, you're only going to see the view that your lens of observation affords. Its not like Bezos owned WaPo or Bill Gates's MSNBC is above filling your eyes with Murdoch-tier bullshit. Just look at how the clusterfuck in Gaza has been covered.

What we have, at the end of the day, are all the same tools of dividing and conquering our own nation that we have historically inflicted on our colonial territories. Fascism is just imperialism returning to the core. And when your wild-eyed gun totting next-door neighbor breaks in to your house, convinced that you've got an adrenachrome factory in a non-existent basement, it'll be under the same conditions that turned Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis against one another or Serbs and Bosnians or Koreans and other Koreans or Texans and Mexicans time and time again before.

the thing is, only one of those sides is deluded into thinking they're actually patriots.

Sure, they'll say they are, but their actions will make it obvious which one it is in actuality. Did you attempt to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power? Do you ban books? You're not on the "intelligent and patriotic" side.