I spent yesterday evening at a bar with Fox News on. The sound was off, but you could get the gist from the chryons scrolling at the bottom of the screen.
The basic news program was interesting in how they ordered the story. The slaughter of 50+ Palestinians was covered very late in the broadcast, after they had already covered the opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem. I wasn't listening, but clearly there was an attempt to separate the embassy opening and the mass shooting of people in Gaza.
What was really amazing was watching Tucker Carlson's show. Again, I couldn't hear, but I don't think it mattered. Even without the sound, it felt like a panicky defense of Trump. "I'm not the puppet, you're the puppet." There were extensive rebuttals to arguments that haven't been explicitly made. Repeatedly, the show hammered the point that Mueller has not proved collusion, which...yeah, he hasn't. Anyone with a shred of journalistic integrity would note that Mueller's investigation has been remarkably leak free. We have no idea what Mueller knows. We do know that whenever someone else leaks something about the investigation and a new person is revealed to be involved, we also discover that Mueller's team has already talked to them. In other words, Mueller's investigation is 50 steps ahead of journalists.
Carlson's show then veered off into how colleges and the media are full of liberals and how even one "liberal" running for mayor of San Francisco doesn't like the idea of sanctuary cities. Yes, college professors are more liberal. In some ways, this is because of the nature of modern liberalism and modern conservatism. Modern conservatism is hierarchical, provincial, ethno-nationalist and even authoritarian in nature. Academia rewards pretty much the exact opposite (not Administration necessarily, but academics). On Fox, the presence of liberals in academia is proof that "knowledge" has a liberal bias, but one could make a case that the absence of conservative academics is a condemnation of conservatism. Why do conservative arguments fall flat in intellectual communities?
Instead, what Carlson's show fed me was a tidal wave of grievance and petulance. About liberal professors and Robert Mueller and Mexicans...it was pure distilled cranky, racist uncle.
A lot of ink has been spilled about "where did Trump voters come from." That's easy. They came from Fox News. They are willfully misinformed and angry as hell. And they are breaking this country.
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