Today Jonah Goldberg writes about the right-wing eruption over the idea of going door to door to offer COVID-19 vaccinations to everyone:
This triggered a geyser of paranoia and asininity from much of the American right. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said this amounted to “illegal” intrusions into American privacy. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who called it a “gross abuse of power,” said: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, ‘The federal government shall go door to door pushing Americans into vaccine trials.” And these were the sober critics.
....It’s also bewildering. When Donald Trump was president, Operation Warp Speed was an own-the-libs triumph. On Nov. 20, Laura Ingraham of Fox News asked: “The stunning success of President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed caught team apocalypse totally off guard. Don’t you love it?” Now she and many other right-wing media figures are engaged in fearmongering over the alleged dangers of vaccines we wouldn’t have were it not for Trump.
I don't want to pick on Goldberg, who's been consistently disgusted with the excesses of the modern Trumpian right, but even he remains unwilling to point a finger at the real cause of this behavior: Fox News. He flicks at it slightly when he mentions Laura Ingraham's U-turn, but that's all.
The Republican Party has always had a dozen or three looney bins on their extreme end, people who are willing to say just about anything as long as it's stupid enough. But they're not the problem. The problem is that Fox News has taken their schtick and nationalized it. As recently as 20 years ago, Massie and Roy and their ilk wouldn't even have gotten a page A23 blurb in the national media. Today, Fox News blasts out this kind of idiocy to the entire country several times a day and it soon becomes all but a part of the GOP platform.
It's one thing to be anti-Trump. But if we really want sanity back in our politics, conservatives need to become anti-Fox News. That's a lot harder since it's not clear if Republicans can win elections reliably without them, but it's the only answer. As long as Fox remains the primary source of news on the right, our country will continue to slide downhill.
And this is what’s at the bottom of the hill.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/asia/afghanistan-taliban-commandos-killed-intl-hnk/index.html
First they own the libs, then…
Fox News's main revenue stream is cable subscription fees. That's why advertiser boycotts don't have much effect on the firehose of crap they spew everyday. If more cable subscribers demanded that Fox be blocked from their subscription packages -- and more cable companies offered Fox-free options -- that might get their attention.
Unbundle the cable package.
If Ds were like Rs, they'd mount a campaign against the evils of cable companies and pass laws to give the public a la carte pricing for cable channels. It would be vastly popular.
Agreed. I'm not sure if cable companies would be in favor of that or not. A lot of cable content *providers* would definitely hate it, though, because they rely on being lumped into these packages to reach their audience. How many households would choose TLC or the History Channel if it weren't included in a bundle?
I'm not saying 'aliens', but... Aliens.
...conservatives need to become anti-Fox News. That's a lot harder since it's not clear if Republicans can win elections reliably without them, but it's the only answer.
That will only happen when conservatives believe that Fox is making them lose elections. Clearly, 2018-2020 is not nearly enough evidence. The GOP needs to lose several more cycles before they have any hope for a course correction.
They're also going to have to lose much bigger. Even though they lost control of two branches in 2020, they still have enough levers (the filibuster and a lock on the SCOTUS) to hobble along until they regain the Presidency or a legislative chamber. So far they're still a long way from having to pay a price for their behavior.
Right now every savvy observer considers the Republicans a lock to retake the house & senate in 2022. Republicans are committed to a campaign of racist agitation & any form of hysteria they can whip up - crime, immigrants, transphobia. This has never really failed them, so they are not going to change.
Democrats, in response, are going with their usual whistling past the graveyard coupled with the defensive crouch.
Perhaps I'm not savvy. I figure that Trump is going to turn the 2022 election into a referendum on Trumpism, which lost in 2020 and will lose bigger in 2022. The Democrats can't do some of the things they really want, like election reform, as long as the filibuster stands in the way, but budget reconciliation lets them do politically popular pocketbook things, like the child tax credit. They need to do one enormous reconciliation package late this year or early next year so that its provisions are clearly visible in bank accounts by the fall of 2022.
If they do that, and the Republicans continue blasting away at their own feet, they should gain seats in both House and Senate, so that things like election reform can be done in 2023.
Gee, when you've lost Jonah Goldberg, wacko author of Liberal Fascism ... (Though, perhaps knowing on which side his bread is buttered, he promotes the patently ridiculous claptrap that we wouldn't have the vaccines if not for Drumpf as if (1) no other president wouldn't have made developing a vaccine an urgent hair-on-fire priority except with more competence, less corruption and far right politics, and (perhaps) without a juvenile project name, (2) Pfizer took no US funds for development of their vaccine, and (3) every other advanced nation has developed or secured access to effective vaccines on roughly the same time schedule.
Can't get too upset with him.
He & Mama Lucienne are still mourning Linda Tripp. (Another Climpton Kill List victim.)
I wrote about this a bit on my twitter, but local conservatives ganged up on our local school board meeting this week to demand that the school not teach CRT. ("Um, we're not teaching CRT," answered to the school board. They never were.) I'm sure this is happening all across the country.
We saw the seeds of Fox begin to sprout with the Tea Party activism and armed conservatives stalking Obamacare town halls. But it was really Trump and the pandemic which fertilized these yahoos so they are spreading everywhere. It's the new normal that you have a very belligerent crowd of Fox News viewers who will loudly complain about whatever Fox points them at.
Some of it is going to be stupid stuff (CRT, Mr. Potato Head, Dr. Seuss) where they'll mostly be mollified/ignored. But it's going to cause schools and local governments and businesses to start second guessing their stances on genuinely important local issues just because they don't want to deal with these people.
We're a long way from normal.
If that happened where I used to work, my old boss would just haul out the Manhattan White Pages-sized history curriculum handbooks and invite the screamers to point out the offending passages.
Conservatives do not want sanity back in politics. If sanity or truth or even decency come back into politics, they will not only lose, their national party will collapse.
FOX doesn't support the Republican Party, FOX is the Republican Party.
But they are!! They've switched to One American News (OnAN) and NewsMax. Not exactly the direction we'd like, though.
Kevin's preoccupation with Fox as the source of all evil completely overlooks the much greater reach of social media and talkback radio. Hannity's radio audience, for example, is typically four to five times bigger than his Fox TV show's. As for social media, "The top 10 most watched episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast on YouTube account for over 219 million views."
Just keep passing this on:
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
I look at cable TV now and it's like Blockbuster c.2007. I think it's just inertia that keeps it going in the face of streaming.
Foxys are paid to lie . Simples .