Remember back in 2015 when the media began referring to Donald Trump’s (presumptively) brief moment in the spotlight as the Summer of Trump? We all seemed to think things would get back to normal after his cavalcade of absurd, brazen lies was fully exposed and people began to see him as the billowing bag of day-old deli meats he is and has always been.
Nearly eight years later, he’s still chugging along, and the core of his cult is as dedicated as ever.
How did this happen? One leading theory holds that we’ve been trapped since Y2K in a Compaq computer simulation and Trump’s foray into politics began when the admin’s 3-year-old kid started shoving Kraft cheese slices in the disk drive every day before lunch. (No, really—that’s entirely possible.) But as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently pointed out, the truth is far simpler: Those once-fallow Trumpian fields were made fertile through Rush Limbaugh’s and Fox News’ decades of dedicated manure-spreading.
Inspired by the Fox-Dominion settlement, Hayes’ commentary came before Tucker Carlson’s abrupt pantsing on Monday, but long after Trump laid his McRib sauce-slathered raccoon hands on our venerable republic, continually crossing the “rubes I con” in the process. And, to be blunt, Hayes nails it.
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First he diagnoses the problem—which isn’t a problem so much as a solution of sorts: Fox got itself into a jam by blasting 2020 election hopium into the insular information bubble it has meticulously curated for its audience, and the result was a $787 million hit to its bottom line—with more hits likely to come.
“Tens of millions of our fellow citizens live in such a constrained informational environment, and are so distrusting of any alternative sources of information, they operate in what is basically an entirely separate informational sphere,” noted Hayes.
He went on to point out that Democrats tend to consume and trust a wide array of media sources—including The Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, and The Wall Street Journal—whereas “the spectrum of what Republicans consume is way, way smaller.” For instance, Fox News is considered a “most trusted” source by 57% of Republicans in the Economist/YouGov survey Hayes cites, but the drop-off from there is precipitous, with far fewer Republicans than Democrats trusting legacy sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times. And, as Hayes points out, this distrust in the very media sources that didn’t just agree to pay a voting machine company $787 million to settle credible defamation claims against it goes back a long way. Conservatives, he points out, are in thrall to a “very, very small universe of ideologically, partisan-aligned sources of information.”
Watch:
Crucial point::
CHRIS HAYES: “And here’s the thing. That didn’t happen by accident. That is the product of a successful effort by Fox News and others—a lot of other conservatives—who waged a decades-long war, going back to the 1960s, on the mainstream media and any other trusted American institution. The late Rush Limbaugh enshrined the battle lines in what has become a famous, or infamous, monologue on what he called the ‘Four Corners of Deceit.’”
RUSH LIMBAUGH (2009 VOICEOVER): “So we know have the Four Corners of Deceit, and the two universes in which we live. The Universe of Lies, the Universe of Reality, and the Four Corners of Deceit: government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit.”
By the way, Rush Limbaugh is still dead. And while it’s not okay to celebrate that, it remains perfectly okay not to give a flying—or even an entirely earthbound—fuck.
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Of course, while Hayes wasn’t specifically talking about Fox’s recently defenestrated frozen fish stick fuck, Tucker Carlson, everything he says here applies in spades to Tuckyo Rose, who has long tried to convince Americans to protect themselves as little as possible against a deadly virus while simultaneously rooting for Vladimir Putin and his vile regime.
But, again, it didn’t happen overnight. As Hayes notes, Limbaugh and Fox deliberately created an information bubble in which “they, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, the Fox Newses of the world, are the sole source of reality” and where “you can’t trust anyone but them. … You can’t trust the government, government officials or government statistics. You can’t trust scholars. You can’t trust scientists, or the mainstream media, reporters.”
And guess who spied this willfully crafted truth vacuum and decided to jump headlong into it? That’s right: Donald Trump. Despite pushing back on Trump early in the summer of 2015, Rupert Murdoch’s network eventually read the ketchup stains on the wall and decided they needed to go all-in for the ocher abomination.
HAYES: “Of course, that didn’t work. The base decided that they trusted Trump more than they trusted Fox. And, again, this is what’s key here: Fox themselves had produced a situation in which they were helpless to do anything. They’d created an audience that was completely unwilling to believe anyone else who would say, yes, he’s a sexist and a crook and he’s dangerous. And we saw the same thing play out again after the 2020 election. Fox wanted to, in the main, institutionally, rely on their trust relationship with their audience and tell their viewers the basic truth that Joe Biden won the election. It wasn’t rigged. And that what Donald Trump did was, as Rupert Murdoch actually wrote in an email, quote, ‘pretty much a crime.’ I agree, Rupert.
“So Fox tried that for a couple weeks after the election, but the viewers started to turn away, because they no longer trusted Fox. They trusted Donald Trump, who was telling them the election was stolen. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott understood this. She laid it out plainly in another email made public, again, thanks to the Dominion lawsuit. Quote, ‘We have damaged their trust and belief in us.’ Yes, it was basically a trust showdown—one that Fox couldn’t win, unless they adopted Trump’s line, which they did.”
At that point, says Hayes, Fox was helpless. They couldn’t stand with the truth, because they’d conditioned their audience not to believe it. And the conservative media had already spent decades tearing down the institutional guardrails that might have contained the despotic fever dreams of a guy like Trump. And willfully creating an ignorant horde that relied on information stovepiped to it from an army of liars and truth-shaders ultimately brought our democracy to the brink.
HAYES: “Here’s the thing. They couldn’t go to their base and tell them, ‘Hey, look. Don’t just listen to us. Look at every other independent assessment of the election. Look at the official numbers provided by the government. Look at the courts, another part of the government. Look at the reporting in the media, in The New York Times, in The Washington Post, in The LA Times, in NPR, and on and on and on.’ They couldn’t do any of that because they’re the ones who told their audience not to believe any of those people, because those people were, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, the Four Corners of Deceit. So Fox was left on its own, desperate to win back its audience, and so it decided to peddle Donald Trump’s lies.”
And now, notes Hayes, Fox doesn’t just find itself with a wallet that’s $787 million lighter—it also finds itself trapped in a world where it’s no longer beholden to the truth, but to lies. Because Trump has swallowed them whole. What can the network do now, for instance, if Trump lies about their new darling Ron DeSantis?
HAYES: “Where can Ron DeSantis turn to appeal to? A Washington Post fact-check? Not going to work. There’s no referee. Fox News and the conservative movement destroyed the conditions for that. So now it’s just a head-to-head battle of who you like more. Who you believe, who you trust more. They trust Donald Trump. And until Rupert Murdoch and Suzanne Scott and the rest of the Republican Party and the political operatives … unless they figure out how to dismantle the situation they themselves built, Fox News and the rest of the right will always lose to Donald Trump, or anyone else who can out-demagogue him.”
Of course, this should have all been obvious a long time ago. Insisting everyone but Dear Leader is wrong and evil and can never be trusted is Cult-Building 101, and that’s exactly the sort of environment Limbaugh, et al., started cultivating long ago. Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson have merely stood atop the smoldering ruins Limbaugh made. And look what’s happened to Tucker—and what continues to happen to Trump.
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Fox, meanwhile, faces ongoing embarrassment and further threats to its bottom line. Maybe, in the end, honesty really is the best policy. Especially if you insist you’re a news organization.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.