Confessions Of A FOX News Orphan

Ed from Gin and Tacos is reliably excellent on every topic, but here in The Baffler he really cuts close to home for me on the subject of FOX News Orphans, i.e., the grown-up children of formerly smart and successful parents who have gone full-#MAGA over the past two decades:

"Spend a full hour reading right-wing Facebook. It is like a funhouse mirror; you’ll feel the what-was-in-those-cookies sense of having entered a fantasy world of grievance and rage—a Lewis Carroll version of The Turner Diaries, a John Birch Society children’s book for sundowning grandpas. It is a barrage of propaganda crafted around the biases of old white people to exploit their deepest racial fears and authoritarian-follower personality traits. Much of it makes Fox News look tame and responsible by comparison. Toy commercials could only dream of reaching kids as effectively as the right-wing noise machine hooks our elders.

Now imagine looking at that for hours per day, every day.

What would be left of your brain after several years of that? Like the president they so blindly love, the brains they once had become a puddle of Cracker Barrel sausage gravy strewn with flotsam and jetsam of the Greatest Hits of the reactionary playbook. These are randomly sampled, irrespective of time, logic, or coherence. Immigrant caravans! Soros! New Black Panthers! Vince Foster! Card Check! Seth Rich! Uranium One! MS-13! Crisis Actors! Anchor babies! Whitewater! Her emails! Cap and Trade! Thugs! Birth Certificate! Every obsession is equally relevant. And the right time to be very, very mad about all of it is right now."

I guess I should tread lightly here but it's interesting that my dad, who happens to have a Ph.D. in biology and had a very successful career in science, is basically one of these Zombie Republicans now.  It hasn't been easy to maintain a relationship with him, honestly, and Ed is right to point out the utter weirdness of these people.  During phone calls, snail-mail letters, and my annual visits, I try to stick to neutral topics like the weather and sports, but within three minutes of discussing Seahawks football he'll be asking me about Maxine Waters or Seth Rich.  He can't stay on any topic for longer than a cup of coffee without invoking the latest right-wing outrage de jour.

So maybe he's just poking fun at his liberal son?  All fun and games?

Well, no.  For years I've noticed that while standing in a supermarket check-out line he would sometimes bring up these kinds of FOX keywords with absolute strangers, or with (god forbid) the checkout clerk.  Because they must brood and fret and stew about whatever it is Limbaugh was on about earlier today just like he does, right?

(During the Obama years my sister and I were convinced that he'd shoot his mouth off about "this black Muslim president" and get beat up or worse, contacted by the police over a potential death threat, intentional or not.)

I'm convinced that simple pleasures like a sunny day or a glass of wine are permanently diminished for him, what with the constant siren call of "lock her up" or "Kenyan Muslim" resonating throughout his head always, everywhere.

Here's the kicker though -- as awful as Facebook is, my dad brought this upon himself with a steady diet of pre-internet media starting during the Clinton 90s, and exploding after 9/11.  He doesn't even own a computer, but Limbaugh and Hannity and The Weekly Standard were enough to poison him forever.  Analog paranoia and hate is more than sufficient to ruin a formerly free-thinking person.  And no doubt, Facebook has come along at the opportune time to amplify this lunacy to exponential heights of bitter madness.

It's brainwashing of the highest level.  Between hours of FOX on cable and radio, daily, I doubt Jim Jones could have done a better job of basically turning a high-functioning mind against itself and, frankly, fucking up what was once a perfectly imperfect but sorely missed father-son relationship.