In a previous article, I wrote about the bullshit of “both sider-ism“. After writing it, I mused a bit about things I didn’t include in the piece.
One large thing was the concept that people seem to care more for perceived overly dramatic politics than civility and strength within familial bonds. Those priorities are fucked up.
It’s like the wave of “political” tribalism is more formidable than the family tribe to the point that it outweighs all rationality and loving discourse.
It’s bullshit.
This article in the Intercept is a notable read. And while most Fox News eradicate their addictions to conspiracy theory and bright-blinking, flashy yellow journalism, I feel that we all need to keep trying.
A snip from the article but you have to read the whole thing:
IN THE EARLY 1990s, some of the smartest people resisting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic worked out of a chaotic office in the center of Belgrade. The office was filled with a haze of cigarette smoke, ringing phones answered with shouts, off-kilter desks scarred by abuse, and half-empty bottles of liquor. This was the nerve center of Vreme, an opposition magazine presided over by the wise-cracking Milos Vasic.
A cross between Seymour Hersh and Ida Tarbell, Vasic saw beneath the surface of things. He realized that his small magazine made little difference to Milosevic, who had instigated and fueled the brutal wars in neighboring Bosnia and Croatia. There was just one media platform that mattered: state-controlled Radio Television Serbia, which was a relentless promoter of the Serbian strongman and his eliminationist agenda.
Vasic had a sharp analysis of how Serbs, in their susceptibility to indoctrination, were not unique. “All it took was a few years of fierce, reckless, chauvinist, intolerant, expansionist, war-mongering propaganda to create enough hate to start the fighting among people who had lived together peacefully for 45 years,” Vasic said. “You must imagine a United States with every little TV station everywhere taking exactly the same editorial line — a line dictated by David Duke. You, too, would have war in five years.”
Instead of a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, we have Rupert Murdoch as the founder of Fox News, which for years — starting long before Donald Trump’s presidency — injected racist, anti-Semitic and anti-liberal tropes into the American mainstream (remember the war on Christmas?). Fox isn’t watched by everyone, but for those who do watch, Fox is everything. As my colleague Jon Schwarz wrote the other day, it’s possible to imagine the political violence of the past weeks occurring even if Hillary Clinton had been elected president — we can take Trump out of the equation, and we still might have crazed Americans trying to kill other Americans because of their religion, skin color, or party affiliation. But it’s impossible to imagine these attacks occurring without years of Fox News spreading the ideology of white nationalism. The network promotesconspiracy theories that begin in the bowels of the internet, and it feeds into those bowels an army of converts willing to go further than Fox & Friends dares.