What we’re up against: Observations after a week as a Reluctant Fox Viewer
I spent a week in the hospital with a MAGA loyalist roommate. Rather than spend a week arguing, I decided to conduct an anthropological experiment: what world-view is presented to the Trump viewer? Are there any agreed upon facts? Is there anything for a person who resides in a world of science, empirical fact, and fact-checking to discuss with a MAGA voter?
I came away impressed. Critics have heaped praise on the scope of imagination required by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis to create Middle Earth and Narnia: an entire culture with different civilizations, histories, saga cycles, languages, races of beings, and ways of life. In some ways, the world Fox News has created is just as hermetically sealed and just as impressive.
And the world has its own equivalent of Mordor (the Democratic Party), its own Sauron (well, maybe contenders: is it George Soros, or is it Obama, or is it Bill Clinton?) Pete Butigieg is definitely Gollum, the dweeby little errand boy.
It isn’t just the lack of agreed upon facts. It’s not a matter of the right having a different take on the important issues of the day. There is no agreement on what the important issues are. It’s as if we were getting news bulletins from a different planet. The only story in both news rotations was the tragedy/farce of “the lost submarine.”
For starters, there are a number of statements that just fall in the arch remark, “everybody knows it, nobody needs to demonstrate it” category:
Biden hid in the basement in 2020 and is again this time; he’s senile and doesn’t know where he is most of the time.
Hunter Biden’s laptop provides evidence of the crime of the century.
Democrats hate America and are destroying democracy;
Democrats are flooding the country with illegals through their open border policy;
They’re using LGBTQ and CRT to destroy education and create a generation of docile “Democrat” voters
But there was something new in Trump News World the week of my experiment. That is, “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” “Democrat open borders,” and even Killer Drag Queens for the moment had been driven out of the A-block, 24/7 treatment by two more cosmic stories:
The Senile, Do-Nothing, Doddering Fool Biden
First, on Fox, Joe Biden is not perhaps the most effective legislator who ever sat in the Oval office. He is not presiding over a surprisingly strong economy that, yes, suffers from too much inflation. He hasn’t done an impressive job of rebuilding our alliances. And he and his AG most certainly haven’t been scrupulously hands-off and frustratingly slow in holding Trump accountable.
In Fox World, he has no accomplishments and has screwed up (or applied malign intent) to Afghanistan, Iran, energy, the economy, crime, defense, and education. Deficits are out of control. The “Democrat party” is in almost a meltdown now because “everybody agreed” Biden was supposed to be a one term “bridge to the future” president. But Harris-the-slut-who-slept-her-way-to-the-top turned out to be such a catastrophe that this elaborate plan collapsed and now Biden is running and everyone is freaked out.
Making the problem worse, Biden is completely disoriented and doesn't even know where he is most of the time. Fox is showing Biden’s West Point “stumble” on a loop and loudly lamenting the danger to the country by a president who’s totally out of it. But still evil and sinister as well.
His saying “God save the queen” recently isn’t just one of those odd things Joe Biden says – it’s major news and the cause of a major international loss of faith in US
In fact, Biden is so weak that Bobby Kennedy is giving Biden a serious run for the nomination and Biden’s refusal to debate is a serious assault on democracy. Ambitious up and comers like Gavin Newsom are readying their campaigns and will jump in any day.
The second major story in current vogue is:
The Great Sellout. There are fewer specifics but the mood is the same. Possibly because of the hundreds of millions paid in bribes to the Biden family, but maybe just because, like all Democrats, they hate America, the major policy theme of the Biden administration is a slow motion surrender to China. Showing weakness (the balloon remains a major story), abandoning Taiwan, trade, military deployments, etc. Milley and Blinken are in on it too.
In other developments:
Heroic Congressional committees are bringing the truth to the American people about the corruption and incompetence of Democrat policies and the Biden crime family.
The Durham report was a fearless expose of the deep corruption of the 2016 Clinton campaign and the extent to which the Democrats had already by then weaponized the FBI.
You can take Tim Scott’s word for it: there is no racial problem in the country that couldn’t be solved by hard work and respect. Teach kids to be polite and say yes sir and the racial problem is solved.
Trans- groups are actively working with Democrats to attack Christianity and democracy.
Rampant crime waves are making America’s [Democrat mayor-run] cities virtual post-Apocalyptic hellholes.
The economy is in the midst of a complete meltdown. Trump left the economy in great shape and Biden has destroyed it.
Woke generals have created an enfeebled, unready military that is practicing appeasement.
The Biden family is shaking down countries for hundreds of millions.
The weaponized Justice Department is a threat to every American.
Trump made America energy independent and Biden shut down so many projects we’re back to being highly dependent again.
At this moment (Monday night, June 19, 10 pm), the right wing media is literally melting down because Blinken restated what has been US policy since 1971, through 6 Republican presidents and 3 Democrat: China is China and Taiwan is in some indeterminate status. It isn’t an independent country and never will be. But because the Biden administration said it, it is some combination of incompetent, disloyal, and evil.
The country isn’t just totally polarized. It might be possible to recover from that. We now have populations that live in two empirical universes. There are few agreed upon facts. Not only is Fox the truth but MSNBC, CNN, the Times, the Post, are all total fake news. And, if the numbers show a good economy, well, then, Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are fake too. There is no point discussing, for example, the bribes received by Justices Thomas and Alito, or the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson and the other White House aides who cautioned against the plot, or the epic failure of the Durham investigation. These simply don’t exist.
The circumstances do not exist to develop a real system of bipartisan compromise, such as existed as recently as the 1970s. And after all, if your political adversary is the embodiment of evil, why would you split the difference?
In his classic 1976 study of the onset of the Civil War, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861, David Potter observed:
. . . each [region] reacted to a distorted mental image of the other – the North to an image of a southern world of lascivious and sadistic slave drivers; the South to the image of a northern world of cunning Yankee traders and of abolitionists plotting slave insurrections. This process of substituting stereotypes for realities could be very damaging indeed to the spirit of Union, for it caused both northerners and southerners to lose sight of how much alike they were . . . it also had the effect of changing men’s attitudes toward the disagreements which are always certain to arise in politics: ordinary, resolvable disputes were converted into questions of principle, involving rigid, unnegotiable dogma.
The other thing I was doing while in the hospital was final preps on a book, Fort Sumter’s Long Shadow, about the onset of the civil war. The conditions and attitudes between April 1861 and June 2023 are astonishingly similar. I fear that there are only two paths forward: one leading to insurrection and gun laden warlord rule and the other leading to a sort of Pinochet or Pol Pot reign of terror.