This is what we’re up against, folks. Friday marked the launch of the “America First Tour” headlined by Donald Trump’s most zealous fans, Matt Gaetz (who is currently the subject of a federal investigation for sex trafficking and corruption) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (who is a devoutly committed disciple of QAnon). The affair was held at a retirement community in Florida known for being a bastion of ultra-conservativism.
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan attended the event and interviewed some of the Deplorables gathered to cheer on the Dyspeptic Duo. In one particularly disturbing segment, O’Sullivan entered into this dialog with a couple of Trump’s true “Big Lie” believers:
Q: You guys genuinely believe the election was stolen?
A: Uh huh.
Q: If you believe that that’s true, isn’t that horrible?
A: Yes. I know it is. Is it horrible that we would even be in the situation to even think that?
Q: But it’s false.
A: No it is not. Why would they have all those ballots hidden under tables? Why did that man drive that truck all the way across state lines with ballots?
Q: The ballots under tables thing with Giuliani in Georgia, that’s all been proven to be false.
A: It has not. I watched it on TV.
Friday night in The Villages with @OutFrontCNN pic.twitter.com/sXk7Dc1F0q
— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) May 7, 2021
Well, that settles it then. She saw it on TV. And as the whole civilized world knows, everything on TV is one hundred percent true. Why just a few days ago I saw Tucker Carlson reveal that Barack Obama is going to force you to get your kids vaccinated. Tucker wouldn’t lie, would he?
It’s a safe bet that the couple in that clip keep their television tuned to Fox News (or Newsmax, or OAN) twenty-four hours a day. And they believe every lie that they broadcast. In this case, they are referring to a thoroughly debunked story about allegedly phony ballots that were hidden under a desk at a Georgia counting facility. The charge was that these ballots were later retrieved and counted after all the observers were sent home and they were all votes for Joe Biden.
That story was feverishly spread by most of the right-wing media. Trump, of course, also included it in his delusional tales of a “stolen” election. However, the story has indeed been proven to be unequivocally false. The video they claim to have “watched on TV” shows the normal process of ballot counting with independent observers present and no irregularities whatsoever.
The problem here is that there is no way to convince the couple in the video that they have bought into a lie and are being taken for fools. They will continue to believe what they think they saw on TV, even if shown the evidence that it’s false. And they aren’t alone. They are just the latest representatives of the cult that has grown like a fungus around the lies disseminated by Fox News and their ilk.
If we hope to halt the totalitarian aspirations of Trump and his Republican Autocratic Party (like the execrable Lindsey Graham who just declared that the GOP cannot “move forward” without Trump), we have to stop it at its source. And that means monitoring and challenging the propaganda dispensed by the Trumpists and their Ministry of Disinformation (aka Fox News) at every opportunity.
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How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.