> It is promulgated in order to manufacture consent for doing the thing that "both sides" are supposedly already doing

Manufacturing consent is horseshit because it gets the direction of causation wrong. Nobody is master planning any of this. Storytellers sell stories. And then politicians sense the vacuum of attention.

Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. DOGE then cut, mostly randomly. And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.