To answer dino and wylie...
I am somewhat of a semanticist, so I usually try to make clear when I am referring to objective fact (the temp is 93) versus subjective truth (it is really hot.) I used the word truth intentionally in my original post.
I mentioned months ago that I spend half my day reading French. The non-fiction stuff comes from European magazines/newspapers that are not intended for an American audience, French journals like Alternatives économiques (Paris) or French-language translations from Der Spiegel (German,) Internazionale (Italian,) etc. Most of what I read is center-left to left because France is center-left to left and I'm doing this primarily to keep my language skills sharp, not to study European politics. It doesn't make me more informed than any of you but it probably gives me a different perspective.
Several weeks ago, I read an article out of Bucharest, describing the situation in Hungary, translated from Romanian into French. The article was describing migrant camps and the unacceptable living conditions the migrants were subjected to and how groups want to close down these concentration camps and...you get the picture.
It wasn't similar journalism to what we see here in the US, it was the same. Sometimes, the terminology is the same...living wages, income inequality, Russian meddling. Even the timing is curious. The story may appear first in the US, maybe first in Europe, but always in parallel. Europe has a "build a wall" issue with Brexit since Northern Ireland would need a physical barrier from the Republic of Ireland when the UK leaves.
All of this gets magnified and broadcast using social media. It gets solidified through European colleges and universities pumping out academic publications that read more like an OP/ED rather than scientific research. It's as if information on both sides of the Atlantic flows from a single source and all they have to do is tweak the article to fit the local circumstance...Hispanic migrants rather than African migrants, the dollar as currency rather than the Euro, Missouri abortion laws rather than Austrian.
There is a battle going on for our souls. It is not just California or Kansas but for all of Western Civilization. The political divide in Europe is dividing them, polarizing them and destroying their sense of unity in the same way it does to us. The next war won't be fought by nation states aligning themselves into an alliance, it will be neighbor against neighbor, community against community...and a blood purge to rival Verdun and the Somme.
So, when I see a post that describes traditional and social media being a centrally-controlled propoganda tool to sway public sentiment, academia using its prestige to convince the layman, traditional groupings (German, French) under attack in favor of multicultural ones (Europeanism,) it rings true to me...because I can read the same stroy coming out of Amsterdam that I can see on NBC coming out of Chicago.