Some people have briefly touched on this point in the thread but no one has really stated the obvious:
Nobody in America is being KEPT ignorant. We choose to be as knowledgeable as we want. It just so happens that things have been working really well for about a century and fuckloads of people are choosing to stay ignorant for most of their lives because they are no longer struggling like the vast majority of humans have during the last 20 thousand years of civilization.
Well, they stay ignorant a little while. At least until they finally wake up, look around, realize theres a problem, then vote for some asshole who tells them all the things they wanna hear. He goes on to fuck things up but so long as he keeps lying about it and they never feel like informing themselves they will keep voting for the same assholes over and over, and blaming others for problems they dont understand and aren't smart enough to fix. We do NOT have the same problem as third world countries. We got a completely different problem. And ours is less likely to be fixed unless maybe we have a couple generations of America being a shithole, then eventually someone with balls (not necessarily brains) takes charge and brings down the current system, then rebuilds the government, probably with a violent revolution. The worst part is thats a pretty typical cycle in almost every society that ever existed, but you wouldn't know all that unless you studied history and are NOT FUCKING IGNORANT!
End Rant.