As the political death march of the GOP enters its final stretch and a disintegrating nation bears witness to its downfall, the cable news network of corporate accomplices finally faces its own Götterdämmerung
[Published here as the autumn of 2020 approached, I think it was a fair take on FNC’s prime time display of whistling past the graveyard.]
By Mark Cromer
You can see the fear in their eyes each night now.
And you can hear it in their voices, even as they attempt to conceal their congealing dread with cheap on-air shticks and routines such as Laura Ingraham’s slurring her giddy declarations and throwing in ‘That’s wild! Wild!’ through her fixed smile and fake laugh played up as an impression of Johnny Carson-meets-Dean Martin five martinis into it. You can hear it in Sean Hannity’s breathless machine gun mouth as he rakes his audience with a mix of canned jargon rattled off at political adversaries followed by mantra-like adulation chanted for President Trump in what often appears to actually be an attempt at televised mass hypnosis.
The Great Buck Howard would not be impressed.
And it’s Hannity’s nightly high velocity spray—kicked off with a warning to ‘buckle up’ but closed out with a faux-paternal reassurance of ‘let not your heart be troubled’ from John:14—that perhaps best betrays the brave face that Fox News is attempting to put on as the electoral death rattle wracks the Republican Party’s withering body politic across a convulsing America. Simply put, Hannity apparently believes if he just talks faster and louder and spews ever longer and more lurid streams of Carny-esque adjectives that he can make the nightmare that is descending simply disappear.
But it’s far too late for that and the Democrats so-called ‘progressive’ Peoples Temple cult members that have been incubating and hatching like pod people undisturbed for four decades have emerged to do more than just roost contentedly on the Fox & Friends farm.
These are heady days indeed for the cultural revolutionaries within the mass media infrastructure that the progressive cultists have seized during their long march and as America burns the firelight captures the glowing faces on MSNBC, CNN, PBS and the legacy broadcast networks as well as down channel offerings such as ESPN and assorted smaller cable networks that have virtually all raised their fists and little red books either in support or nervous compliance.
Yet even as the American construct collapses into what most likely will resemble something along the lines of Lebanon in the mid-to-late 1970s or Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it is Fox News that is becoming simultaneously ever more fascinating and, quite frankly, darkly funny to watch as it finally dawns on their on-air staff ever more so each day what their relentless shilling and whorish submission to the Republicans’ corporatist leadership will now pay them and their own children and grandchildren.
To be sure, there are still some contented faces to be found around the Fox News studios, perhaps none more so than Neil Cavuto’s cherubic mug that has been a programing staple by the network since its inception in the fall of 1996. As a Wall Street cutout that reliably hits his marks for the markets on every broadcast of his shows (he has at least two), the violent chaos now sweeping the nation’s cities and the assimilation of the government into a soulless corporation is surely a sustained jasmine-scented breeze that billows the satin sails of Cavuto’s abject contempt for the lingering remnants of America as a nation-state and working Americans as a once culturally cohesive people. So these must invigorating days indeed for ‘Ne-Ne C.,’ as he’s reportedly known around the studio.
But for the weekday prime time opinion show line-up of Tucker Carlson, Hannity and Ingraham, the dog days of August 2020 offered little more than a perpetual state of high anxiety and panic attacks as the GOP teeters on the edge of political oblivion and with it the end of the world that has succored their success for so long.
This long, hot August was capped off by a Republican National Convention that played out in a parade of personalities that populate the Fox News universe, including former employee Kimberly Guilfoyle, who delivered what appeared to be her own version of Dwight Schrute’s podium pounding acceptance speech as Salesman of the Year for Northeastern Pennsylvania, only far more bizarrely surreal than funny. The GOP convention could have used an assist from The Office’s Michael Scott, taking the stage to shout into the mic: “Good Morning, Vietnam!”
Fox News viewers might be forgiven if they thought the convention looked like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, as almost immediately after Trump had regaled his assembled garden party audience and the 23 million more Americans who were tuned in with a declaration that under his watch citizens will always walk freely and safely on the nation’s streets, attendees leaving the White House were set upon by mobs of urban berserkers and street terrorists and even Senator Rand Paul and his wife admitted they felt they were going to be killed.
The discomfort in the Fox News studios must have been palpable as they reeled from the televised spectacle of a sitting U.S. Senator and his wife cowering behind two police officers apparently armed with little more than bicycles to fend off the savages that circled them just outside the President’s mansion. How to best explain this to their viewers? Well, Fox News reverted to its own brand of ‘Never Trump’—in that it’s never Trump’s responsibility. It’s never Trump who must be held accountable. Since the District of Columbia doesn’t have a governor to blame, they went right for the mayor of the city. While Trump has the authority to put as many troops on the streets of the nation’s capital to do whatever it takes to restore and preserve order—it’s the mayor’s fault. To be sure, Mayor Muriel Bowser is indeed a proud facilitator of the violent chaos, but the buck inevitably ends up on Trump’s desk.
And so it goes for the powerful network that Rog Ailes and Rupe Murdoch built to reach white middle America—lets be clear that’s the primary programming demographic for Fox News and it’s as legitimate a programming focus as BET’s is for black America or Univision’s is for Latinos.
But Fox News has also spent a quarter century serving as the communications department of the Republican Party, coming on-air just as the GOP-led estate sale of the American enterprise was really kicking into high-gear. The Republican leadership understood that the Democrats long-term plans called for the demolition of the United States, but they were committed to ensuring everything and anything of financial value was cataloged, parceled and sold before the so-called progressives were allowed to set the torch to the gutted structure.
Yet now as that dark day finally arrives, the A-Team hunkered down at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in the Fox News HQ that’s so wonderfully planted smack-dab in the middle of Warren Wilhelm ‘Bill’ (ha!) de Blasio’s real life Night of The Living Dead set in what used to be called New York City, well they seem caught flat-footed at best.
Even Carlson, who at least seemingly has come the closest to calling out the high treason the Republican Party’s leadership has been insidiously engaged in since well before a young Tucker was padding across the grounds of Trinity College in Connecticut for what it is, seems stunned by the successive cultural body blows that have landed across America since the dawn of 2020 and he can often be found opening his show in recent months with candid declarations of disbelief that the country is disintegrating with such rapidity. Carlson is indeed alone among the marquee players at the cable network to accuse the GOP leadership in at least a semi-meaningful way—to the extent he has done it at all is notable for Fox News—and yet each and every time he does he quickly retreats into standard-issue bromides targeting the Democratic Party’s progressive cult leaders and their vast array of support mechanisms they have spent the better part of the past half-century building undisturbed by the corporate looters running the GOP’s self-dealing operation.
It’s a shame that when mainline GOP honchos and hucksters come on his show for a chat Carlson never manages to muster the animated contempt or raw testosterone he throttled up for public consumption during his aggressive questioning of disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti. Considering that Avenatti was and remains virtually insignificant—make that utterly irrelevant—in the scheme of America’s fate, it’s odd that Carlson would dedicate the airtime and energy to his frequent and impassioned denunciations of him, complete with the Trumpesque nickname he bestowed on Avenatti for belittling purposes alone: ‘Creepy Porn Lawyer.’
That Avenatti was entertained by some in the media as a plausible Democratic candidate for president and fêted by yet others as some altruistic social justice lawyer out to defeat the Great Orange Ogre only speaks to their journalistic malpractice in the first instance and brazen disingenuous motives in the second; but it does not explain why Carlson relentlessly expressed his distaste for Avenatti and yet somehow couldn’t stop talking about him. What does explain it is a simple, four letter word that Carlson could also not stop using: ‘porn.’ Avenatti provided cover for Carlson to tease the term ‘porn’ throughout his show, i.e. ‘Porn Star Stormy Daniels’ ‘Porn Lawyer’ and ‘Porn, Porn and More Porn’ all ‘coming up right after the break’ throughout his show in a tried and true tactic that news stations around the nation developed back in the 1980s for sweeps week. The term ‘porn’ is to television viewers what chum is to sharks: a cattle call.
Thus while Carlson can perhaps be forgiven for shamelessly employing the cheap ratings-grabbing tactic that Avenatti’s bizarre performance on the crumbling American stage provided, the truly damning indictment of his opinion show ethos can be found in what he doesn’t do or say when someone like Dana Perino appears on his show. One must remember that Carlson declares himself virtually every night at the closing of his show, lest anyone forget for even a single news cycle, that he and he alone is: “The sworn enemy of lying, pomposity, smugness and group think.”
If you have to tell people every single night via a cheap and cheesy slogan what it is you ostensibly stand for, then perhaps its veracity should be stress-tested. And what better a quality control measure than to review Dana Perino’s frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson Tonight, where Carlson indulges nothing more than friendly banter that often sounds like he is crushing on Perino and doesn’t want to blow his chances. He reliably delivers her open-ended questions as if the two were stretched out on a picnic blanket and he was feeding her grapes about insider political jockeying in which Perino answers in her trademark meandering semi-stammer while Carlson nods in smiling agreement.
And Carlson doesn’t seem the slightest bit perturbed by Perino’s breezy musings on politics and the state of American life, unfazed that these airy utterances are flowing forth from the former official mouth of the Bush Administration—one of the most viscerally corrupt regimes in the history of the republic. The very same Bush Administration that launched a failed and endless war in Afghanistan and a catastrophic war based on lies in Iraq while simultaneously overseeing an open-border policy that brought no less than 30 million more migrants from foreign shores into the United States as the national treasury was running dry and the robber barons of Wall Street were running amok even as they ran the nation into the ground in a drunken orgy of sheer greed.
Yes, that Dana Perino of that Bush Administration.
Yet it’s all smiles and giggles with Carlson a’ blush over his lil’ honey bunny on the screen in front of him, dutifully nodding and remarking with sweet nothings like: “You are so right. No one can say it better.”
But if he really was the ‘sworn enemy’ of the subterfuge, deceit and endemic corruption that has progressively maimed and now fatally wounded America, Carlson would happily invite her on the show and open with a question like: “Dana, thanks so much for coming on tonight as it’s always a treat to have you. Let’s just get started with something I have been wondering ever since your days back in the White House—do you ever feel like a vampire? Or maybe even a cannibal? I mean what with the endless ocean of our soldiers’ blood and guts W. & Co. plunged the nation into for ‘nation-building’ in Afghanistan and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, wink-wink, uh, I just have to wonder that if as the former public face of the Bush Administration and its parent company Cheney Corp., well, when you see a vet hobbling along missing all of one leg and half of the other, or maybe just standing there in a Oxy haze with half of his face blown off, do you suddenly feel thirsty, Dana? Hungry perhaps? How about horny? When you see a vet that was nearly blown in half by an IED outside of Fallujah but somehow survived, does your barometer chart a perceptible rise in humidity south of your equator?”
If Carlson felt so giddy at the prospect of relentlessly trolling someone so utterly irrelevant to America as Michael Avenatti as the ‘Creepy Porn Lawyer,’ one might think he could at least bestir himself on a single occasion to dub the Bush Administration’s Press Secretary what, judging by Carlson’s very own metrics, she most surely is: a ‘Blood-guzzling War Whore.’
But since she is his colleague at Fox News and has more shows than he does and because Perino is in relentless rotation across most of the network’s other shows he demurs in favor of feeding her those plump grapes while Perino giggles her way through America’s collapse.
Yet it isn’t just Carlson’s crush Perino that brings out the simpering host in him.
Carlson also just recently indulged the same grotesquely deferential game with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, a frequently combative tough-talker from North Carolina that served in Congress and chaired the GOP’s Freedom Caucus before getting the nod from Trump earlier this year. Meadows appeared on Carlson’s show in an A-block segment to pound the Democrats on the issue of public safety—an issue that has seized Fox News as much as it has most other bipedal, cognizant Americans with even a modicum of situational awareness.
The level of coordinated mob violence exploding in cities across the nation in recent months as police forces have been held back or ordered to retreat has reached such a level that even Fox News has been unable to ignore the fact that Trump and the GOP have done nothing to stop it. Unable to deny the obvious, they seek to deflect the disgusting abrogation of sworn duty and echo Trump’s transparent excuses.
So as Americans are being beaten and killed on the streets by fast-moving and well-organized terror squads amid waves of unprecedented looting and arson, Trump has played classic Trump: tweeting ‘Law and Order!’ and burping out bravado now and again that he could “stop it so fast, so easily” if the governors in the carnage-wracked states were only to appeal to him to intervene. This is what passes for presidential leadership in the republic’s hour of maximum danger, in lieu of immediately putting 150,000 heavily armed combat troops on the ground in Portland, Seattle and wherever else is necessary with orders to restore order and authorizing overwhelming deadly force if the troops are attacked. Governors and mayors who aid, abet and encourage continuation or escalation of the street terror should be swiftly taken into custody for insurrection and with the same deadly force protocols in place should they decide to play Salvador Allende.
Yet when Meadows, who as Trump’s Chief of Staff is arguably the second most powerful person in the White House by controlling access to the President and effectively setting the agenda, appeared on Carlson’s show all Carlson could really muster was to meekly ask Meadows what he made of all the violent chaos and then, following a full-speed filibuster deflection by Meadows, Carlson meowed something about why hadn’t the Justice Department stepped in yet?
He didn’t ask Meadows the obvious: “If it was Ivanka who was getting her face slammed repeatedly into the pavement by black-garbed terror squads roaming the street at will, or if it was Don Jr. that was pelted with fireworks and set ablaze like a human scarecrow, or say if it was Jared who was chased and knocked to the ground and stomped repeatedly in his head, would the President still be waiting for an invitation to intervene from the governors and mayors? And as a follow-up, Mr. Meadows, can you describe for our audience what would happen to a mob that attempted to surround the Presidential Limousine and drag the President from it? What would that footage look like? Break it down for us.”
But Carlson was clearly playing T-ball with the Chief of Staff and Meadows appeared almost fondly amused by Carlson’s neutered mutterings.
So while Tucker Carlson occasionally has a go at taking passionless potshots at the Republicans who have been political co-conspirators in the Murder of America, he inevitably returns to the familiar chant of: “It’s the Democrats!” and thus does what clearly is expected of him by the suits who sign his paychecks. Carlson makes the case that Americans must cast their ballots for the Republican Party this fall—otherwise the country is dead. It’s a tinny echo of the Trump campaign’s entire platform: vote for me or you’ll all be living in Portland and forced to learn Mandarin. (Or as Trump would phrase it: “You’ll all be forced to speak China words from DragonLand!”)
Yet for whatever shortcomings Carlson demonstrates on his ostensibly nationalistic show, he’s certainly no Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham. No, Hannity and Ingraham have devolved into a swinish class of their own when it comes to running cover for the looters that wear suits and the robbers armed with briefcases, blowing chaff into the screen nightly in an effort to cloud and confuse the American people’s political radar.
Since January 21, 2017, Hannity has engaged in the most stunning feat of political analingus ever programmed for public viewing, nightly burying his tongue so deep into Trump’s tuchus that he is unable to extract it and object as The Donald repeatedly veers 180-degrees away from what he pledged to voters in 2015 and 2016 and delivers precisely the opposite of the campaign vows that ushered him into the White House. With the tone of an indignant cattle auction caller, Hannity spews forth nightly the fantastical claims that have become the Trump brand in the White House: the wall is built and the border is secured, the endless wars have finally been ended and the troops are coming home, the vast American manufacturing base that was dismantled and sold off to foreign shores has been returned to America along with their union-scale wages and benefits, evil Obamacare is being replaced with a bigger, better and more ‘beautiful’ healthcare plan, and on and on and on. That virtually none of it is actually true means nothing to Hannity, of course, who like Trump seems to be attempting some rudimentary form of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
The hard fact is that following nearly four years of Donald Trump in the White House, including two full years when the GOP had total control of Congress, the southern frontier remains in actual reality wide open and penetrable by anyone just mildly committed to crossing it sans permission even as the United States continues to legally admit more than a million immigrants annually. The hard fact is the Republican Party’s leadership—with Trump’s blessing—has worked feverishly to expand visa allotments for skilled labor applicants in high-tech fields, ensuring Americans with STEM backgrounds are forced to ‘compete’ in the ‘free market’ of saturated labor pools and struggle through life on the suppressed and stagnant wages they are designed to achieve. Just as grotesque is the hard fact that America’s eternal combat abroad rages on as always. America’s soldiers remain strewn across battlefields and unknown war zones around the globe defending countries that constitute no national security interest for the United States and often defending corrupt governments in faraway lands that actually hate America and its people.
None of that has changed in any meaningful way under Trump.
Six months since the Coronavirus pandemic exposed the gutted medical manufacturing base in the United States and revealed that the vast bulk of key medicines millions of Americans rely upon are made overseas and still a massive crash-course, Marshall Plan-scale initiative to return and restore the nation’s vital medical production base has not materialized. In spite of Trump’s fictional blather to the contrary, more than 70-percent of all medical manufacturing facilities producing active pharmaceutical ingredients used by the United States remain on foreign shores.
The collective consciousness at Fox News understands this very well, and yet it programs an inverse reality where Bush’s perverse ‘Mission Accomplished’ declaration has been updated to Trump’s fantasy roleplaying: ‘Promises Made. Promises Kept.’
It’s worth noting that as Trump’s chief resident handmaiden at Fox News, Hannity has also apparently taken on the duties of show screener for the network at Trump’s behest, the most immediate result of which was the cashiering of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin as frequent guests across the network’s shows. A pretend author like his old competitor at the network Bill O’Reilly, Hannity was likely gleeful as he cut Coulter and Malkin—two real best-selling authors who actually research and write their own books—have been declared heretics for factually calling out that Emperor Trump not only has no clothes but appears to be obsessed with routinely streaking on camera.
Coulter’s pounding of Trump’s shameless betrayal (an important distinction from failure of policy initiatives that were attempted but not achieved) by frequently tweeting “Wall Updates” that reported on how many miles of new wall had been completed (Hint: “Zero”) or replying to Trump’s tweet storms over whatever outrage of the moment he was spiraling over: “Gee, I wish Trump were President” so infuriated Trump that he ‘unfollowed’ Coulter and reportedly called Hannity and ordered him to see that Coulter was blackballed from Fox News.
So with Coulter and Malkin, two of the most intellectually deft and tantalizing effective writers and speakers when it comes to defending American citizens and the American ideal, blacklisted at Fox News, just who is the network regularly running as its on-air brain trust?
As MAD magazine would have phrased it: The usual gang of idiots.
And it is perhaps a dark comedy when one considers that the lineup of Fox News contributors and frequent guests is something of a Who’s Who of Republicans who have happily led the party to its grave and the nation to the brink, including such GOP soothsayers as Karl Rove, Bill Bennett, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Ari Fleischer to name but a few and all of them men who played key roles in ensuring that America would find itself where it is today.
While these Wall Street bagmen long ago participated in the GOP’s bloodless surrender of every institutional pillar to the progressive cultists who converted them into ideological breeding hives where ‘social justice’ larvae are laid, hatched, groomed before being secreted into corporations or dispatched into the streets or kept on campus and swallowed once more by the ever-expanding franchises of the academic wormholes, Fox News summons them forth on a near daily basis to hold forth on the best way out of this unfolding disaster.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently told a nodding Laura Ingraham that it was time for Americans to “take back academia.” And he said it with a straight face. Universities and colleges across most of America were systematically abandoned to the radical Left forty years ago (this writer was on campus at the time) and the public K-12 education system was essentially handed over in the succeeding years, effectively disappearing as actual functioning schools by the dawn of the millennium at the latest.
But there’s Newt Gingrich playing make-believe on Fox News and declaring its finally time to take back the academy. But that’s the game at Fox News. Gingrich knew he could utter such rubbish without the slightest worry that Ingraham would ask him a simple question like: “Take it back with what, Newt? Your party surrendered academia nearly two generations ago, that train left the station when Reagan was still in his first term. So what are you talking about?”
No, Gingrich knew that Ingraham would nod and smile and concur and thank him for all his wit and wisdom.
On July 2, Gingrich appeared on Martha McCallum’s news hour to discuss Trump’s reelection bid and more specifically the buzz in GOP circles that Marc Tieson, Peggy Noonan and Karl Rove had created with their published warnings to Trump that very week that he needed to ‘moderate’ his campaign rhetoric. Gingrich, of course, did not disappoint the Wall Street monitors as he called for Trump to run on further tax cuts and to preach GDP growth; never mind the millions of foreign nationals imported directly or indirectly (legally or otherwise) on America’s smoldering shores despite the vast seas of unemployed citizens. And never mind the Forever Wars that Trump vowed to end if elected in 2016 that continue to rage, for Gingrich concluded that few if any in Trump’s base seemed to have noticed or cared that American GI’s around the globe continue to get their arms and legs blown off for no discernible purpose or coherent objective. Ending mass immigration, bringing the troops home and locking up street thugs and criminals was not a winning pitch, Gingrich insisted. Instead, he urged Trump to expand a campaign based on the Holy Grail of tax cuts and that would provide the recipe to sweep large numbers of the black electorate into the Republicans’ ranks and carry the GOP to victory in November.
That’s how far mentally gone Newt Gingrich was by July 2020. And Fox News keeps him talking front and center. And they say Biden has a deteriorating mental state.
It was the classic corporatist pitch that has steered the Republican’s electioneering efforts for 40 years so perhaps it is appropriate they keep chanting it in a bronchial death rattle as the GOP finally gives up the ghost.
Consider for a moment Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw, that eye-patch sporting Texan who was propelled into the national limelight following faux moral outrage of over a harmless goof by SNL’s Pete Davidson. Crenshaw has become a standard-bearer for the Republicans and frequently appears on Fox News to prognosticate for the party. And just like Mark Meadows, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich and every other GOP player, Crenshaw holds forth unchallenged on Fox News, even when his publicly-stated views amount to spitting in the face of the American people.
Speaking to the Leadership Institute on May 13, 2020, Crenshaw made the case for continued mass immigration (even as 40 million Americans were heading into the unemployment lines) as it comported with the needs of business:
“We need to balance [security] with business, they are not lying to us, they can’t hire Americans. They just can’t. These construction companies, these farmers, they have tried. There have been studies where, I think in Alabama, this happened, where if you get rid of all the immigrants no one will work there,” Crenshaw said. “And that’s an American cultural problem I wish we could fix. I wish our teenagers would go to work. But they don’t, so I have to be sympathetic to some of these business owners who are creating jobs, creating wealth in America and creating growth, building things, they can’t do it without anyone working there. And for some reason, people who speak English just won’t work there.”
Crenshaw’s riff, delivered casually and in an almost slightly bemused manner, perfectly encapsulates the Republican Party’s leadership’s long-held position on the American worker—or as Crenshaw frames them: “People who speak English”—who have found themselves undercut, outsourced and cutout from skilled and unskilled industries by the likes of Crenshaw working at the behest of his corporate benefactors. When Crenshaw was born in 1984, English-speaking workers were framing, roofing, plastering, dry-walling and laying cement at construction sites all over the nation for union or comparable wages. By the time Crenshaw graduated from Tuft’s University in 2006, the labor force replacement policies carried out by two Bushes and a Clinton had largely eradicated the English-speaking American from those job sites and sent developer profits skyrocketing.
But on Fox News, Crenshaw is never challenged about his views but rather presented as Nick Fury come to life, a Navy Seal Team 3 commando who nearly defeated the Taliban all by his lonesome.
Fox News’ programming heritage is littered with wild-eyed, open-border zealots who attempt to cloak their corporate agenda in the guise of a patriotic love of freedom. The former Wall Street commodities trader Eric Bolling cut an imposing presence on the network and rarely missed an opportunity to conceal his true intent behind loud denunciations of illegal immigration. But during one broadcast shortly before the network canned him in the fall of 2017, Bolling let loose with an almost ecstatic endorsement of relentless mass immigration into the United States. Bolling declared into the cameras that while illegal immigration should be halted, America should increase its net legal immigration into the country from more than a million a year to “three or four or five million immigrants a year!”
And there it is, again. Again.
A Fox News personality gleefully declaring the United States should pour literally 50 million more foreign economic refugees into the country within but a decade at the latest, all while knowing the result would annihilate any remnant of the American Dream for Americans and finalize for eternity the country’s forced conversion into a Third World crockpot—which is and always has been the end goal of Wall Street’s investor class.
Bolling’s euphoric plea for the floodgates to burst under a tide of humanity from all corners of the globe was keeping with Fox News editorial doctrine to reflect the policy initiatives of the Republican Party. As such, that he was fired at all is probably the most damning evidence supporting the allegations against him.
One was reminded of that on January 22, 2020, when The New York Times published an oddly damning indictment of just how degenerate and detached the GOP’s leadership has become—oddly because the former newspaper-turned-agitprop platform framed the story’s moral as something of a homage to the Republicans who were also fighting to pour more foreign refugees into Amarillo, Texas. Real estate broker Daniel L. Rogers, the 57-year-old Chairman of the Potter County GOP, blanched then bristled at the American citizens who described their communities, neighborhoods and quality of life being rendered unrecognizable by the flow of refugees.
As The Times reported: “Inevitably, culture clashes between longtime white and Hispanic residents (read Americans) and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia are almost a daily occurrence. City Hall staff members have fielded angry phone calls from residents [reporting] that refugees were barbecuing dogs in their front yards. Newcomers unfamiliar with local laws have hunted ranchers cattle for food.”
Dogs slaughtered by migrant refugees and roasted in the front yard and the Republican Party’s response is the more the merrier.
“Bring us 10 million of those a year, if they want to be productive members and make America great and be American, not a hyphenated American,” Rogers told The Times. “Nobody cares what color somebody is or where they came from. Nobody cares.”
Well, not exactly nobody.
Sonia Rios, a 45-year-old Amarillo resident said she and her wife were fleeing the city as a result of the crime wave they had witnessed as a result of the influx of refugees, including vandalism and break-ins and what she described as refugees running wild in the streets. “We’re done,” Rios said.
But from the Republican leadership in Potter County, Texas, to the GOP servants at the Fox News studios in Manhattan, the battle cry continues: “Brings us 10 million of those a year!”
Rogers and his Republican leadership brethren may well indeed get those millions of economic refugees from all corners of the globe setting up their camp of the saints in Amarillo and around the nation, and perhaps sooner than they might imagine as the collapse of the Republic accelerates. And that in turn may produce some interesting spectacles that Rogers and the Republicans didn’t exactly bargain for even after all these decades of desertion and betrayal, like say the day they are the ones being spit-roasted over the open coals of a front yard migrant refugee barbecue blowout block party.
And that’s not sheer hyperbole, either.
In the mid-1980s this writer had friends who were in Haiti when second-generation dictator Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier fled the impoverished island nation and in the whirlwind of retribution that followed they witnessed members—or suspected members—of Duvalier’s dreaded Tonton Macoute security apparatus being hunted down, overwhelmed and literally roasted in the street by mobs. So perhaps Rogers and the Republicans should have been a little more discerning in their long-running global flier party, but it’s a little late for that now.
Which returns us to the penultimate predicament that Fox News now finds itself in as the steaming shit sandwich of consequences is finally placed on the table in front of it. The network, like the nation, is most surely screwed no matter who wins in November.
Trump certainly could pull off another legitimate win—there are possibly even more voters now who will cast their ballot for him without admitting it than there were in 2016. And despite the media narrative regarding the black vote, in actual reality the sole determining factor of whether Donald Trump remains in office rests exclusively once more with the white vote. It will once more simply come down to whether he can not just turn out the working class white vote but enlarge it in the key Midwest battlegrounds and in states like North Carolina while holding on to suburban whites in the Sunbelt and picking more of them up in states like Colorado and New Hampshire.
But it won’t matter even if he does win reelection. The fundamentals for the GOP are all pointing in the same direction, whether it arrives in 2020 or 2024 isn’t of much consequence. And the fate of the nation will follow it quickly.
Trump and the Republicans have done nothing—nothing—over the past four years as the cultural Maoists have unleashed their withering campaign at silencing dissenting views across virtually all social media and other tech platforms. Brazen and mass censorship carried out in the bright light of day has been celebrated by the progressive cult members as ‘deplatforming hate’ (and as Kafka could tell ya, arguing that it’s actually an authoritarian purge only proves to the progressive cultists that you are a ‘hatemonger,’ ‘racist,’ ‘[fill in the blank]-aphobe,’ etc.), while Trump and the Republican caucus have essentially sat back and watched this circular logic devour dissent online, on campus, at the workplace and in the public square. And it won’t stop there.
And they don’t care.
In order for Trump to actually do something of consequence, Jack Dorsey would have to deactivate Trump’s Twitter account. And make no mistake about it, that day is indeed coming, but Dorsey is too savvy a trimmer to act prematurely when Trump and the GOP still retain some significant powers. So he’ll bide his time and strike when the fortunes of the fall become clearer.
It’s a dereliction of duty and a betrayal that predates the digital debacle by decades, as conservative or culturally protectionist viewpoints were systematically eliminated over a long campaign of control at newspapers, magazines and across traditional television broadcast networks. The only viable platform for conservative and traditional cultural protectionist viewpoints that survived the purge was talk radio and it became a national redoubt of sorts for primarily white populist perspectives and also wildly successful. As such, practically the entire format of am talk radio en banc was immediately dubbed ‘hate radio’ (again, to the progressive cult members, opposition of any sort in any format is by their stated definition a matter of ‘hate’ and must be labeled and attacked as such) and targeted for destruction, with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity prioritized trophies in the big game hunt to shut them down.
The cultural Maoists that makeup the progressive People’s Temple political death cult that’s on the march from sea to shining sea in America today have assembled a powerful attack strategy that focuses on the advertising base of formats and platforms they’ve identified as political heretics or potentially effective opponents.
Fox News has not been spared, the attacks against it will only escalate in the coming months and years, assuming it takes that long, and it will not survive in any way that resembles what it claims to be today.
And the network’s ratings will not save it, any more than Mike Lindell and My Pillow will.
A Trump return to the White House and even if the GOP holds the Senate will change nothing of the fundamental dynamics facing Fox News and all other media outlets that have shilled for the GOP for decades as the Republican Party sat idly by over the past four years as hundreds of prominent naysayers were blatantly banned, shadow banned, downgraded and disappeared in a very public manner by Big Tech.
So imagine what it all looks like for Fox News if the Ghost Ship of Joe Biden wins in November.
Trump’s inaction will be supplanted by the Jacobian horde behind Biden and their final drive to seize total control will kick into slaughter house mode. Any delusions that Fox News will be allowed to exist as it has for the past generation will be quickly put to the sword through a variety of means and measures directed at the network, its staff and its advertisers.
But if Biden wins in November, watch the Republican ratlines for some very familiar faces as previously seen on TV scurry like hell for safety that they are unlikely to ever find again.
And maybe that’s justice, of the cosmic variety, after all.
