I saw a great quote the other day - "EVERY SINGLE METRIC other than polls is in Trump's favor. Enthusiasm, crowds, signs, registrations, etc. These are hard numbers that can't be manipulated. Polls are the one source that can be heavily manipulated."
I considered myself independent but "right-of-center", and would routinely vote for either party based on a variety of factors.
My redpill moment came in 2014, when I was reading a CNN website article about a shooting at a movie theater in Florida. It was about an argument between an elderly man and a man who was there with his wife. The article began like a newspaper-type story would be expected to start, with a "just the facts ma'am" approach, where it told that there was a shooting on such-and-such date/location and here's how it unfolded. So far so good...normal journalism 101 stuff. The young married couple was seated in the row in front of the old man, the young guy pulled out his phone and started using it. The old man told him to put it away.
And then I noticed something. The entire prose of the article changed. It almost took on a poetry-workshop approach, writing statements like "voices were raised, food was thrown, and threats were made. And in the end, Mr. XYZ drew a gun and fired it into Mr. ABC's chest." The article then went on to mention gun laws, open/concealed carry rules in Florida, and so on.
My immediate thought-process was "WTF, some of the details that CNN just glossed over are really important! What was being thrown, what was being said? Did XYZ have a legitimate case for feeling threatened?" But my number 1 thought was....Why did CNN go out of their way to obscure the relevant facts of this story? And that sat with me and my blue-pilled viewpoint for quite some time.
A few days later I read another article about the arraignment of the elderly man, this time in the WSJ. Among the facts provided in the article was a mention that the elderly guy shot the younger man in the chest, and that the bullet first passed through the hand of the young guy's wife....who was holding her husband back, perhaps restraining him from beating the elderly man. It also stated that the young guy was the one throwing items at the old man, and not the reverse. The facts that were borne out of this case are much different than the narrative that CNN was trying to paint, to an almost absurd degree.
Look I always knew the media had a liberal bias, but I vaguely thought that they were required to report within the boundaries of assorted journalism "rules". Reading that story that transitioned from "here's the starting facts" to "vague-as-vague-can-be", and realizing it was intentional and not sloppy, served as my red-pill that there's a lot more going on than what we're being told on the surface.
Yeah buddy I'm with you on all of this, but the twin events of Chris Wallace's grandstanding at the debate and their calling AZ absurdly early were the reason for like 80% to 90% of us to get off the Fox train.
A somewhat distant third was then Fox partaking in the coordinated event by all of the news channels in "calling the election" just two minutes before Rudy's first press conference regarding fraud.