politics

I mean there's ton of grifting in the industry but there are two kinds of messaging, the kind that consolidates your existing adherents and the kind that gets the neutral politically uninvolved people to listen. The reason Amerifats hate public transport and slavishly promote deregulation--to the point of even saying universal device charging port requirements are government overreach--is because insanely effective propaganda ghouls workshopped and had a strategy for disseminating to people who initially didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other.

Israel itself was previously so skilled at propaganda targeting Americans who had little knowledge about the mid-east that the average left-wing view on the Levant even about 7 years ago was "there are two equally bad aggressors." During the War on Terror era Israel would make these stories and news dramatizations about pretty white women getting blown up in clubs, and astroturf the online New Atheists with anti-Muslim rhetoric, and people left and right took it as gospel that Israel was our secular and unfairly besieged sympatico country in the Middle East. These were no make-work jobs, even tens of millions in PR fees for this work paid for themselves in spades, because it facilitated decades of unprotested billion-dollar weapons exchanges.

Even though today's Israeli propaganda is dogshit because of the nepo incompetent descendants of the hasbara masters, and misspend of excess funds you mention, and even though it's now mostly effective only on rousing their existing supporters, for decades skilled torrential PR was what made us turn a blind eye to how horrific the IDF and Israeli government were. The grifting opportunities in PR came to the field because the past value it brought to people in power justified millions in cash influxes.

And to your point about the message needing people in a place to hear them, there is an untapped group of people who know the Dems are cowards who don't do enough but don't feel like they can criticize them too harshly, the overperformance of Bernie proved that.