Buckle up. We are in a long & treacherous fight to save democracy.
We need to grow our majority. We need to win a few more election cycles. We need to speak up and speak out. We need to stay together.
The revelations, if I can use such a biblical term, from the Dominion law suit against FOX prove what every listener to this show knows: FOX is a propaganda network that finds profit in partisan Republican lies.
You might ask, how did it get this way. Because it sure seems like some powerful and unfortunate pairing of forces, political and economic, combined to warp a news organization into such a pitiable and dangerous organization.
But you would be wrong.
FOX news did not become this way over time. It was founded for this purpose by Roger Ailes, who first pushed the idea as an aide in the Nixon White House. And it was never about news. Ailes understood that unpopular Republican policies, policies that would stall the country’s forward movement on civil rights, women’s rights, environmental protection, could not be implemented without a decades’ long propaganda effort aimed at damaging the idea of liberal democracy.
Over at the Justice Department, at the very same time, the political operative Kevin Phillips was pushing for a new politics that would, he promised, lead to a permanent Republican majority. He said the party that assembles the biggest collection of ethnic and racial animosities will always win. So began the southern strategy that would, in time, transform the South from Democratic to Republican, and, with cover from FOX, would make it fashionable in GOP circles once again to be a racist and a bigot.
Nixon was a suspicious, corrupt, and dishonest showman. He made the Marine band play “hail to the chief” every time he entered a crowded room. The Watergate scandal was not simply a third-rate burglary, it was Presidentially- led effort to subvert the rule of law, whether by abusing the IRS auditing powers or by firing the Attorney General to stop investigations into government corruption.
This is FOX’s founding DNA: A shallow, paranoid, and showy patriotism, a strategy to both sow and reap ethnic animosities, a deeply corrupt view of the purposes of government, and a long-range goal to undermine democracy.
It is a powerful if loathsome combination. And it's corruption poisons our souls. Our fellow citizens are no different than the mass of humanity that learned about the world from other highly partisan propagandists- NAZI radio, or Soviet TV. The poison is such that they would rather deny what they see with their own eyes than confront the lies that have now shaped their consciousness.
Tucker Carlson- a truly vile liar and racist- can say privately that he hates Trump at very moment he goes on air to peddle the Big Lie. Most humans have a moral compass that would make that kind of thing impossible. But not Tucker. The corruption of his soul is complete.
And where does this toxic combination lead us?
We are now able to see it take shape. And what we see is, if we just step back and look, unrecognizable. Child labor. Book bans. The abandonment of public education. Authoritarian power grabs where gerrymandered legislatures simply annul local authorities and governors fire elected prosecutors for not falling in line. Right wing governments pressuring corporations to get on message. Power for its own sake. Power that strips Americans of rights we fought hard to win. Power that is designed to intimidate by first attacking the most vulnerable.
This is not us. This is not the American way. But we have allowed it to grow because tolerance, optimism, and good will are. This attack, dating back to the 1970s, has succeeded beyond its founders wildest dreams because they took advantage of our good nature.
And now we on the precipice. MAGA mills seeded by FOX lies multiply across the social media landscape. And legal scholars who have examined the Dominion case expect FOX to lose, but will a corrupt and partisan Supreme Court let them off the hook because both FOX and the Court are creatures of the same political movement?
It is so easy to look at current events and see them only in the present. But that is not good enough. We must understand FOX has DNA that goes back to Nixon White House, that it shares with the inventors of the Southern strategy, that it inherited from antebellum big cotton.
Make no mistake, this is ever and always about finding a path for a powerful minority to impose its will on the rest of us. That’s why Leonard Leo, the architect of the capture of the Supreme Court, is now involved in Teneo and other creepy and half hidden efforts to build a powerful right wing funding culture and efforts to reshape America in ways the majority rejects. I’m not kidding about creepy: these groups help find spouses as well as political jobs for young men who will become shock troops in the authoritarian revolution whose victory they now can taste.
This is our fight. And I welcome it. Time will tell whether Americans in our era have courage and determination like the Americans have who fought in 20th century’s great wars to save democracy. I am neither afraid nor despondent.
I have seen how America has risen to this challenge. Women will not be forced backward. Michiganders have already taken their government back. In Wisconsin, democrats are on the verge of being able to go on offense after years of getting pushed aside by the country’s most gerrymandered regime. Everywhere, people are finding ways to stand up, to participate, to join forces, to speak out, to vote. We have finally begun to break the autocrat’s momentum.
We need to grow our majority. We need to win a few more cycles. We need to speak up and speak out. We need to stay together. If we reflect on our values, if we avoid getting distracted by each outrage but remain focused on who we are, then I have no doubt of the outcome. We will overcome this insurrection and be reborn as the world’s first and most enduring multi-racial and truly inclusive democracy.