Life among Fox News zombies gets less funny, more scary

Fox News propaganda only works on you if you already hate.
By Kay Ebeling
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It's hard to discuss current events with neighbors when so many of them have been brainwashed, yes, a kind of mind control is happening right now in USA among people who consume Fox News, and almost every radio station you can get in rural areas, plus "secret" websites such as QAnon as sources of their news. They end up believing a completely different set of "facts" than those of us who have stuck with the conventional New York Times, CNN, NBC, and even MSNBC which is opinionated, but opinions based on real events.

I watched this disinformation takeover of USA happen from the start, in fact, I loved Rush Limbaugh when he first came out on radio stations in late 1980s. I was a single mom who dropped off my daughter at daycare then had a half hour walk to the bus stop to Eureka for my job. I wore a portable radio with a headphone and listened to Rush the entire way to work every day and he made me laugh. It was dark comedy and rude and insulted people I love but it also insulted people I disliked.

Then Rush's show changed. It started with the ditto heads, which bothered me but I still listened. Then it became obvious someone or something got to Rush.  After his first years, I think he turned much meaner. He still had a way of hooking you in as a listener, even for a person like me who has been a radical centrist my whole life, but as Rush got meaner, I stopped listening.

He got meaner and more extreme right wing, and I kind of forgot about Rush Limbaugh until about 2013, when I wrote in a letter to the editor that Rush Limbaugh had helped ruin the radio industry for broadcasters who were not extreme right wing. Over next few days one after another were published angry replies to my letter using my name with degrading adjectives, from readers of that paper, the Antelope Valley Press. I had just moved to the area and did not realize I was in a place full of people who thought Rush Limbaugh was the most significant and meaningful and important broadcaster in history, or words to that effect, that I had never heard before.

That was also around the time I first saw Fox News, because again, my neighbors in Lancaster were Fox zombies already in 2013, totally buying into the blatant anti-American message I see when I watch that network. 

Don’t they wonder how this network appeared on their television sets telling them an alternative truth that sets them up for nothing but arguments with people who pay attention to what is really going on?  No, they don’t see any of that contradiction that is obvious to me about Fox News and all the tentacles that have developed from it.
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Right wing messaging worked on people who were already inclined to hate. It made it okay for them to hate, gave them compadres in their hatred,
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The propaganda the right puts out today does not reach me, and I used to read William F. Buckley and E. J. Dionne and others on the "right" with great interest, being a centrist. I can see who the right wing message does reach by the way it makes me feel when I watch.

Fox News propaganda only works if you already hate.

You have to already be inclined toward hatred for the propaganda on Fox News etcetera to work.  There is like a receptor in the brain of certain people, so when they hear and see that right wing message, they embrace it, they want to stay inside it, they don’t want to turn it off, they don’t want to hear anything else but the Rush Limbaugh progeny.

Fox News and right wing messaging worked on people who were already inclined to hate. It made it okay for them to hate, gave them compadres in their hatred, and you cannot deny the effects of that anti-American hate messaging going on for decades, basically telling one group of Americans to hate another group, has had.

Rwanda.
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Rwanda.
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As I wrote the above paragraph, Rwanda popped up in my head again, because in 1994-95 a radio station convinced one tribe in Rwanda to pick up machetes and whatever weapons they could find and kill their neighbors because they were from a different tribe. Someone perfected the brainwashing technique in Rwanda, then Fox News appeared on this new thing cable TV in 1995 in USA.

It was not an coincidence that USA got flooded with guns, some of them military assault caliber, and Russia has funded NRA for many years, even putting one of its spies, Maria Butina, publicly in place at gun shows. I think Putin and the Prince made sure guns were in hands of these same groomed Fox News viewers during this same period of time that USA got flooded with a hate-your-neighbor message.

I'm really scared. Because what I perceive around me is a population of Americans who have not heard anything but the right wing propaganda/alternative facts since childhood, so they are now groomed. All it will take is some clever and carefully crafted messaging on the right wing networks to convince a lot of them to pick up weapons and kill people who are… different, democrats, wearing masks, however they will identify the enemy.

I'm not a Democrat I just registered as one because there is no other choice. I used to work for NASA and Jimmy Carter and the U.S. Naval Reserves. Still I bet the Bugaloos would single me out as an enemy because I'm a white educated woman and I'm old taking up resources and space.
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I'm scared.
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I'm scared.

To me it's not that many degrees of separation from this weird place we are in now. where one after another an American institution falls apart while Trump stomps on it and his friends liquidate and profit from it, to a totally totalitarian state. Because the end of a road like the one we are going down now is a place worse than anything George Orwell envisioned in his book 1984.  Now in 2020 we've got electronic communications and weird ways to control people, and let's not forget smart phones and ways "they" can monitor where you go and who you interact with just because of that "smart" device in your pocket.

It's like Americans are walking right into a trap, and the Pied Piper has been blowing his tune for more than thirty years to get us here. We are so deeply entrenched, because their weaponry takes advantage of our very first amendment freedoms, that we don’t even have a way to fight back.