by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The thing about how fucked up FOX News is — we really only have ourselves to blame. There’s a market for batshit Right wing propaganda and so it exists. If they weren’t making money, they wouldn’t exist. We live in a free society with free speech and a market-based economy: it’s not really FOX News’ fault.
In fact, my case is strengthened by the growing popularity of OANN and NewsMax. A huge swath of the viewing audience wants lies. Negative polarization is so intense now in the United States that if you’re not lying to a certain group of people then they will find someone who will lie to them.
That’s why media outlet that purports to be “objective” about the news — like WGN’s NewsNation — leave me very weary. How can you legitimately tell news straight down the middle when a huge group of people willfully want to believe the sky is green. If you don’t hold that lie up as equal to the sky being blue, then they think you’re just another liberal media outlet.
Anyway, the point is conservatives are growing every-more willfully detached from reality and they wrap themselves in lies to the point that their is no longer any shared reality.
And that, my gentle reader, is how we’re going to end up with an autocracy. Or a civil war. Take your pick. The United States is so politically unstable at the moment that this is a situation that can’t continue indefinitely. At some point, we’re either going to become consumed by the lie or we’re going to end it.
