Fox News is interchangeable with OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart, and [insert any right-wing white supremacist fascist Nazi broligarch grifting podcaster here].
They’re not quite interchangeable but rather are more of a scale. They start out with propaganda that’s still mostly believable but subtly wrong in various ways on Fox, but the constant hammering that they’re being lied to by <insert any non-Fox news source that’s left of Hitler> eventually drives them to checking out the crazier places like OAN, Newsmax, and Breitbart. Then the whole thing repeats but now the fact that reality doesn’t line up with the things that they’re being told convinces them that everyone is lying to them and there’re conspiracies under every rock and leaf which then drives them to the real kooks over in the podcasts, talk radio, and social media. At which point they genuinely start believing in jewish space lasers and secret pizza parlor basements where people drink the blood of children, and the transformation from mildly misinformed libertarian asshole who watches Fox News into white supremacist neo-nazi who listens to podcasts you’ve never heard of and posts racist conspiracy theories on Facebook is complete.
You know they’re nearing the end when they start complaining about how Fox News is too liberal and has been taken over by Democrats so they don’t watch it anymore. At that point they’re so far down the rabbit hole I’m not sure if anything short of professional psychological help is going to fix them. At this point I’m afraid that about a third of the US is clinically insane and I’ve really got no clue how you fix that.
There’s an interesting and distinct difference in flavors of conspiracies supported by viewers of TV news propaganda and the people who doomscroll social media for news.
The Fox News viewers are all believe roughly the same brand of crazy. The social media users build their reality freestyle out of the craziest conspiracies imaginable.
Fox News is interchangeable with OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart, and [insert any right-wing white supremacist fascist Nazi broligarch grifting podcaster here].
They’re not quite interchangeable but rather are more of a scale. They start out with propaganda that’s still mostly believable but subtly wrong in various ways on Fox, but the constant hammering that they’re being lied to by <insert any non-Fox news source that’s left of Hitler> eventually drives them to checking out the crazier places like OAN, Newsmax, and Breitbart. Then the whole thing repeats but now the fact that reality doesn’t line up with the things that they’re being told convinces them that everyone is lying to them and there’re conspiracies under every rock and leaf which then drives them to the real kooks over in the podcasts, talk radio, and social media. At which point they genuinely start believing in jewish space lasers and secret pizza parlor basements where people drink the blood of children, and the transformation from mildly misinformed libertarian asshole who watches Fox News into white supremacist neo-nazi who listens to podcasts you’ve never heard of and posts racist conspiracy theories on Facebook is complete.
You know they’re nearing the end when they start complaining about how Fox News is too liberal and has been taken over by Democrats so they don’t watch it anymore. At that point they’re so far down the rabbit hole I’m not sure if anything short of professional psychological help is going to fix them. At this point I’m afraid that about a third of the US is clinically insane and I’ve really got no clue how you fix that.
There’s an interesting and distinct difference in flavors of conspiracies supported by viewers of TV news propaganda and the people who doomscroll social media for news.
The Fox News viewers are all believe roughly the same brand of crazy. The social media users build their reality freestyle out of the craziest conspiracies imaginable.