>people are waking up en masse
I'll let anyone who doesn't know in on a little secret; working class people are HUGE into conspiracy theories. There isn't quite the thought policing going on when most of your job is physical, so all the construction workers or tradesmen or short order cooks you see are much more aware of what's really going on than people give them credit. Often much more so than many office drones who must toe the 'woke' party line or else they get cancelled. There's still a large section of this country that is just plain dumb or uninformed, but it's nowhere near as big as it used to be.