I can't contradict the deduction drawn here but believe one might mention more explicitly that "people" and "they" are prima facie the press, television news, and on-line media, who shape perceptions people have about what they themselves think their fellow citizens are angry about.
Much has been made of late via various moneyed media of the effect fake news networking has had in tainting the integrity of democratic institutions. But the institution of the longer established corporate press continues, by telling people what they think, to be the forerunner in how those people react to what they are being told. Apparently.
The press is both instigator and lagging indicator. Instigator in that they can underwrite movements of people the way advertisers get them to go see a blockbuster movie yet to be a blockbuster. Lagging indicator in that they can concede certain truths they once failed by comparison to cover. If at all.
It's true that people seem not to have given a shit about victims of war in Yemen and the role thereabouts of the previous presidential administration, but it's substantially down to their not having been told they give a shit. This, due to a dearth of reporting on the subject and its discomfiting details. The cognitive dissonance of the liberal cannot be examined without looking squarely at the role the press plays in enabling their comfort in a chosen brand of politics.
It is hard to know how liberals would have reacted to a full-court press against their president and congresses' duplicity on the subject of human rights and war refugees: That's just never going to happen. Plenty of newspapers and networks can point out that they did in fact report on the massive expansion of executive war powers and war waging and the abdication of authority of the Congress over the last eight years. But the paltry mentions they gave it overall serve to indicate that it was not massive in the least, rather just the way things are being done nowadays. Normalization, if you get my drift.
That said, liberals are not brain-dead. They can figure out these contradictions for themselves. As far as I can tell from the way it has been reported, as well as occasional, actual conversations with real life liberals, they tacitly supported the groundwork laid that has led us to the president we have today, the very foundation upon which he has taken his position. I encourage their resistance; I don't expect it to extend to resistance to their co-liberal representatives, whose resistance is even more convenient than their own, and corrupted by additional interests to boot.
Put another way: I have seen no evidence that anyone cared about war refugees until they were pressed to care.
