The media would have a much harder time collecting ad dollars if they didn't use strawman arguments and misrepresentation to lock in an audience.

Ask a liberal about conservatives or a conservative about liberals and they have abso-fucking-lutely no idea what the ideals of the other side are. None whatsoever. Thanks silo'd media.

What are the current ideals of so-called conservatives? Being a libertarian who can entertain both left and right approaches to problems, I thought I had a decent handle on where they were coming from. But then they seemingly went bat-shit insane during Covid. I try to appeal to what I thought were some of the underlying values (eg belief in institutions, America as a force for good in the world, individual liberty, slow and measured change), and always get written off like I just don't understand or something. But never any explanation for what I'm actually missing. The best I've been able to come up with is that they've set aside actually living those values in favor of thinking that we need some massive societal cataclysm to get back to a place where those values have more of a draw, but that's clearly not itself conservative.