Fascists are notoriously adept at duping credulous citizens, flooding their malleable minds with tsunamis of bullshit. As Donald Trump infamously declared midway through his dystopian tenure, “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Disinformation peddlers like Tucker Carlson – those who feast on fascist-wrought havoc, gnawing on the seedlings of democracy like the slugs that ravage gardens – are just as detestable. Carlson’s revisionist attempts last week to soft-sell the Jan. 6 insurrection, despite the fact that the violence was vividly evident to anyone with functioning eyes and ears, was a veritable salute to Roger Ailes, the late Fox News chairman, who spoke of how much he loved to “create some bullshit.”
But what’s actually most tragic is that tens of millions of Americans feast on these lies day after day, and absolutely nothing whatsoever – not even a sworn confession from Fox liar-in-chief Rupert Murdoch; not even the texts and emails, unearthed in a massive lawsuit, which prove that Fox’s on-air liars knew all along that they were lying – will persuade the willfully deluded that it’s time to wake the hell up.
In the words of one guy on Twitter, sporting the requisite MAGA cap, “It (the 2020 election) was flat-out stolen, and we know it. We don’t have to be able to prove it.”
“We don’t have to be able to prove it”…Those of us who dwell in the realm of facts find it deeply despairing to live among fellow Americans who can’t process reality, who can’t admit to themselves that their heroes on Fox News have long been infantilizing them with lies and playing them for fools. (Worse than that, actually. One Fox executive, in his emails, ridiculed Fox viewers as “dumb” and “cousin-fucking types.”)
Speaking of our deep despair, John Pavlovitz, a former youth pastor and advocate for Christian progressivism, has described it well on his website: “I see people regurgitating fictional Fox News talking points and hear them parroting back conspiratorial nonsense…and it grieves me to know how far gone so many around me seem to be. I no longer recognize the place I’ve always called home…It’s simply demoralizing sharing a country with people who think Donald Trump is someone worth emulating: to be surrounded by that kind of moral inversion every single day…It’s a source of profound and sustained grieving.”
I’ve written several columns about the Dominion Voting System’s $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News (Fox hosts said on the air, without a scintilla of evidence, that Dominion’s machines were rigged against Trump), and I dared think that perhaps the unmasking of Fox’s serial liars might shake the faith of Fox’s audience. But no. According to Nielsen Media Research, Fox’s ratings have held steady in recent weeks despite the string of revelations sparked by the lawsuit. And the emails I have received from Fox News fans attest to their blind loyalty. They still say that Biden’s win was fake and that Jan. 6 was mainly a peaceful event (echoing Carlson).
How have we devolved to the point where so many people believe that the sky is green and the earth is flat?
We’ve long known, courtesy of numerous studies, that Fox devotees are less well-informed than those who get most of their news from other outlets; that in essence Fox breeds gullible couch potatoes. But clearly there was a market for Fox tomfoolery in the first place. A huge cohort of Americans wanted to marinate in alternative facts, to hunker in the bunker despite all evidence that it would scramble their brains.
My quickie theory, for what it’s worth, is that this phenomenon can be traced back to the dawn of the culture wars, in the 1960s, when a new version of America – more racially and ethnically – began to emerge. The cacophony of new voices – women, minorities, gay people, young people hating the Vietnam war – threatened those who were wedded to the traditional white male version of America. And as the decades passed, they nursed their anger. The debut of Fox in 1996 gave them an outlet. Younger like-minded people joined the grievance bandwagon; the election (twice!) of a black president further fueled their self-victimhood.
And at this point there’s no way they’d ever leave the tribe. Dominion’s lawsuit has exposed Fox’s fraudulence, but so what. A string of Republican senators have denounced Carlson’s bullshit broadcasts about Jan. 6, but so what. Mike Pence said at a dinner last night, referring to Jan. 6, that “what happened that day was a disgrace, and it mocks decency to portray it in any other way,” but so what. That guy was noose-worthy, end of story.
And you should see my emails (actually, no you don’t). In response to my columns about the Dominion lawsuit’s revelations, I got this from a guy named Phillip: There was “blatant, obvious, widespread election and vote fraud in 2020.” He says that I “employed a Hitlerian, Nazi-esque tactic” when I wrote that Fox’s hosts lied on the air. He told me: “You need to reassess your viewpoint about 2020 and at least refrain from insulting people who are educated and informed.” (If Philip were educated and informed, he’d be aware that 60 judges, including multiple Trump appointees, rejected the baseless allegations of vote fraud in 2020.)
A guy named Ronnie emailed me to insist that, no matter what has been revealed by the Dominion lawsuit, the Fox hosts were still right to say that the ’20 election was stolen. His proof was that Trump won “nearly 2500 counties,” whereas “that idiot Biden won only 477 counties.” (Actually, Biden won 551 counties, but what’s important – though apparently unknown to Ronnie – is that the Biden counties had 67 million more people than the Trump counties.) Ronnie concluded: “The biggest fraud committed is the BIG LIE that the elite crooked media has perpetrated that Biden was elected.”
I also heard from a guy named William, who says that Dominion is crying fake tears because “it has not lost one contract” (wrong), and its lawsuit “is purely political to damage a news outlet that the hate-America, anti-First Amendment hacks in corporate media can feast on…We can all agree there was no overthrowing of an election.” (We can only agree that the multifaceted overthrow plot did not succeed.)
John Pavolvitz, the aforementioned progressive Christian commentator, says that “for those of us who feel cheated out of a kinder, more diverse, more decent America,” the only one solution to our polarized stasis is “daily, bold, defiant pushback…It will come as we loudly and unapologetically speak truth where truth is not welcome. It will come as we connect with one another on social media and in faith communities and in our neighborhoods, and as we work together to demand accountability from our elected officials and our neighbors. It will come as we use the shared resources of our experience and our talents and our numbers to ensure that our children inherit a world worth being here for. It will come as we transform our grief into goodness…and do something in this day that moves the needle toward beauty and justice.”
That would be nice, yes. But ultimately, I fear that Joseph Heller, the late author of Catch-22, got it right when he remarked: “The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth. Don’t you know history?”