General Discussion

FOX and its regular viewers are perhaps the most insidious and destructive force we face as a nation. The rest of the right-wingnut media, conspiracy insanity, white nationalist growth in social media, worship of fascist murderers, and on and on, all flow from almost three decades of FOX.

I have seen smart, reasonable, sane people lose their minds when they start watching FOX.

Twenty years ago, my partner's mother moved to Florida. This is a woman with an amazing background. She went to law school and passed the NJ bar when that was an incredibly rare thing for a woman. In younger days she was on a roller derby team. She and her husband were active in there local Democratic Club (when there were such things).

Around 2005, something strange started happening. She would say the most off the wall things. Like that unions had destroyed the economy. Like that social safety nets killed ambition and had created a snowballing cycle of poverty

I was floored. My partner (Senator here on DU til his death in 2011) figured it out instantly. He said, you watch FOX down there, don't you? The answer was yes, everyone did.

We had many, many conversations about it. Implored her to stop watching that shit. I don't think she ever did. It was a sort of binding force in their community. She just stopped parroting the crap when we were around to avoid the lengthy, heated, conversations that followed.

Since that time, FOX and its viewer have only gotten more and more extreme to the point that a book like Unhumans, the far far, far, right dystopian nightmare of how fascism can save the world from the progressive Unhumans --a book that glorifies Franco and Pinochet - is blurbed by a Vice Presidential candidate, a former president's son, and others prominent voices you'll find on a mainstream network watched by millions.

These people aren't stupid. They are victims of a highly ubiquitous, sophisticated, and effective propaganda campaign that began with soulless right-wingnuts like Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

I don't have an answer. But I do know that name calling and stereotyping "them" as all idiots just exacerbates the problem. Feeling hated by the people they call "them" only binds them together more and powers their hatred for us.