The font of fascism continues to gush forth, propelled by the lies that sway soft minds.
As we trudge ever nearer to the one-year anniversary of the violent MAGA insurrection that sought to sweep democracy into the dust bin, we’re processing new revelations virtually every day thanks to the House’s Jan. 6 Committee – most notably Republican member Liz Cheney, who late Monday released subpoened texts that shine a bright light on the abetters of fascism at Fox News.
Here’s the gist, if you haven’t heard already: Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade knew damn well, on the afternoon of Jan. 6, that Trump was goading the rioters with his silence. The Fox hosts knew damn well that Trump had a duty to step up and do everything possible to stop the bloodshed. But even after Trump did nothing, they still went on the air that night and let him off the hook, concocting lies for their credulous couch potatoes.
Ingraham texted Trump consigliere Mark Meadows: “Hey Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
Hannity texted Meadows: “Can he make a statement? Ask people to leave the Capitol.”
Kilmeade texted Meadows: “Please get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished.”
Alas, until it was too late, there was no persuading Dear Leader. So the Fox hosts naturally responded by covering the ass of Dear Leader. They knew (as evidenced by the texts) that he’d been derelict in his duty as president, but then, with all deliberate speed, they stopped knowing it. After the violence abated and the bodies were carted away, Ingraham went live with a string of lies. She said that the insurrection was fueled by lefties from antifa. Then she said that, actually, it wasn’t an insurrection at all because “it looked like maybe like three dozen people.”
Hannity did his usual show that night, never mentioning that mere hours earlier they’d pleaded with Trump to call off his goons; rather, he suggested that the insurrectionists were left-wing militants in disguise. That lie jibes with what hosts have propagandized for the past year, that Jan. 6 was no big deal, that what happened was probably Nancy Pelosi’s fault, or whatever. Heck, the top hosts railed months ago against the formation of an independent Jan. 6 inquiry – and now that we’ve read their unearthed texts, we know one reason why.
Liz Cheney’s release of those texts was big news late Monday – everywhere except on Fox, of course. Hannity and Ingraham surfaced in prime time, but somehow forgot to mention that they’d been publicly outed by their own words, pleading for Trump to do his job. Silence reigned again on Tuesday morning, when there was nary a mention of the texts on Kilmeade’s Fox & Friends. But hey, that’s understandable; as ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt tweeted, “Even Johnny Cochran wouldn’t be able to get Hannity, Ingraham and Kilmeade out of their jam. Those (texts) are incontrovertible proof, the type that is seldom seen, caught in the act proof, like video of a drunken burglar falling through the roof of a store he was robbing.”
But Fox just soldiers on. To lie by omission or commission, to lie day after week after month about the worst assault on our institutions since the Civil War, is a sin against sanity. It’s a prime symptom of Fox’s cynical contempt for its own audience. This is how fascism can blossom, by seeding and harvesting mass ignorance. This was indeed the credo of Benito Mussolini, who once said, “The crowd doesn’t have to know, all they have to do is believe and submit to being shaped.”
Looks like Chris Wallace got out just in time.