Maybe. I feel like I watched live on 4chan as Trump was presented as a joke and then true believers started posting as well. Maybe 4chan was documenting the phenomenon but it always felt like it willed it into existence like it did q-anon.
It's not "maybe". As someone who born in Hungary, and have been experiencing our lovely full blown fascist propaganda longer than it became mainstream in the US, Fox News is definitely worse than our main propaganda channel. I was "lucky" to watch it in February, when I was there, and it's pure hate. I cannot imagine that anybody who don't switch channels quite quickly is not an asshole at this point. You cannot bear that shit if you are not a dickhead.
I understand that it was slowly normalized, and people don't realize this. But right now on an absolute scale, you have to be pure assholes. Similar thing happened in Hungary, but our government never went to this low as Fox News does.
Also looking at right wing pundits' Twitter, there are usually two types of tweets: non-whites making some illegal activities, or stupid; and whites are suppressed. It was funny when Charlie Kirk died and his Twitter account until that point for at least a month contained only, and seriously only these kind of tweets, and it was a question whether he was racist, or not... After his death, Musk definitely pushed the normalization, because my right wing account over there started to be really crazy with these kind of tweets.
