Whole post was spot on but I wanted to highlight this.
Was talking to my folks about this a few days ago, trying to explain the QAnon phenomenon and how the fuck we got there. How political polarization combined with social media herding people into like minded groups to create interactions that get progressively more extreme in idea. These bubbles become echo chambers without counter balances. This is exactly where the disconnect is. It's not a difference of ideas or policies. It's become a complete separation of experienced realities.
Like a fork in the road of time travel or something, the alt right fearmongering religious conservative lives in a different universe than the rest of us. Facts are no longer facts, they've become opinions that are shrugged off and replaced with extreme opinions that get believed as facts. Social media echo chambers reinforce these extreme opinions and they become "obviously" true, when they are simply not. But the belief is there. The faith in that being unquestionably true is there. And it's dangerous as fuck.
Facts used to unite us in one world where disagreement and discussion was possible because there was at least mutually agreed upon points of intersection.
edit: In fairness, the mechanism of polarization + social media echo chamber = more extremism with less and less grounding in reality is not exclusive to the right, obviously.
Echo chambers have produced extremists throughout history, they normally have been literal bubbles with lack of outside world interaction. See indoctrination of kids into jihadism, hippy cults turned terrorists in California, whatever. Same basic idea. If all you know is the story from one source, it sure seems true. Those extremists are grown in literal bubbles with zero attachment/access to the outside world.
The current political extremism is by fucking choice by people with access to all the information in the world at their fingertips via their phone and computers.... The irony is that same access that should act as a counterbalance was actually the method of rapid spread and introduction of insane ideas to millions more. woops.
It's just spread like wildfire. The perfect storm of tea party and increased social media utilization among older ages combined to form one hell of a seed that has grown into a major fuck storm.