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Wednesday, February 20, 2019

The True Believers of FOX News


Lies told often enough become alternative facts.....


Recently, I attended a dinner party at old friends’ house, and I expected a relaxed evening.  The food was spectacular, a very finely nuanced codfish, served on a bed of exquisite lentils.  That dish was preceded by a mango-yellow tomato soup, with really fine wines and a desert of homemade pie, fresh blueberries rolling off the top of a delectable key lime filling.  Our hosts were flawlessly polite and gracious.  Most of the meal was spent on polite conversation, where are you from, do you have kids, and other pleasantries.

Another couple attended, whom we did not know, and whom, I believe our hosts had just met. A neurologist on the staff of the University of Miami school of Medicine.  Born in Mexico, he had been in the United States, I believe, for twenty years.  He was an intelligent, soft-spoken fellow and but had some infuriating opinions, including a denunciation of Hillary Clinton’s emails and that President Obama was the worst president of the United States ever to inhabit the White House.  He reluctantly admitted that Obama had been born in the United States, but had Muslim sympathies and was anti-Semitic.
He also professed his deep admiration for Benjamin Netanyahu and the excellence of Donald Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem as a symbol of American strength, “the only things the Arabs understand.”

Other perorations included the inherent bias of the New York Times, The Washington Post, anti-Semitism of Thomas Friedman, and the bias of the American media, against Donald Trump.  Although he said he did not object to a two-state solution, he defended the settlements and that Israel had no partner for peace negotiations, citing the result in Gaza when Israel pulled out and stating that the same thing would happen to the West Bank, should Israel cede sovereignty to the Palestinian authority.

He presented himself as an authority in these matters by stating that he had been to Israel many times and therefore was in a better position than American Jews to analyze the situation than those of us who had only visited a few times. Also, that since he came from Mexico, he understood America and its constitution better than ordinary Americans.  He made no mention of the corruption of Mexican politics having any potential influence on his ideas. 

I hate condescending people who confer greater expertise on themselves simply because they have visited a place a few more times than others or they simply had a different life experience. 

He did recognize that 70% of Israelis wanted peace and were willing to give up the settlements for a peace treaty with the Palestinian authority but said that Israel would still have to occupy the territories to provide security for Israel.  I did not disagree with him.

I argued with him, however, that most secular American Jews now believe that religious zealotry among those who are in the settlements are an impediment to a peace treaty, that the borders are basically already decided, and that with minor land swaps there could possibly be a settlement.

At that point the conversation returned to his advancing the argument that Trump was a great president, and that the economy was booming.  Moreover, he claimed that Obamacare had destroyed the private practice of medicine in the United States, that President Obama was the worst president ever, and had lied about people keeping their own doctor.  I was enraged that he created a false moral equivalence between the constant lies and criminality of Trump and Obama.


When I pointed out to him that 30 million people now were covered and that before they were not and that insurance companies could dismiss clients for preexisting conditions and now, they could not, it fell upon deaf ears.

I asked this gentleman where he got his news.  He said he watched the FOX news channel, which he claimed was an unbiased arbiter of the facts, unlike the Times, the Washington Post, or the other biased news media such as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN.   That all these organs had it in for the president and were purveyors of fake news.

He told me I should watch FOX between 6-7 pm for an unbiased news menu, ostensibly to prove that all of FOX was therefore “fair and balanced.”    I said,” let me get this straight,
You want me to watch FOX for one hour and thereby come to the conclusion that the rest of the day is not propaganda?”

This gentleman, who had set himself up as a latter-day Mexican Alexis de Tocqueville was judging the American constitution based upon his marginal understanding of it.  He thought the electoral college was set up as a fair governance of space, rather than a sorry compromise to get the constitution adopted in 1787 that enabled slave states to perpetuate their injustice throughout our turbulent history.

He sounded like a rerun of FOX and friends and had no understanding of the forces that should be dominating our national discussion:   Climate change, technological displacement, and nuclear war.  The distractions of the FOX news propaganda machine are not limited to the uneducated.

This led me to inevitably conclude:

FOX is an Orwellian propaganda channel that has been profoundly destructive of our national polity and that education is often no defense to persistent lies and propaganda, as Orwell had told us long ago.


FOX sits by itself as an organ of Trump and its hijacked Republican base, who despite their minority, have managed until now to dominate the legislative and executive branches of government, exploded the deficit, shut down the government, encouraged racists, divided the country, fed lies to the public, shredded the dignity of the Presidency, alienated our allies, conducted a needless trade war, provided subsidies to large corporations, disrespected the rule of law, obstructed justice, sullied all those around Trump, conducted a revolving door for respected diplomats and public servants, trashed our national intelligence services, including the CIA and the FBI, presided over the shrinking of the middle class, and is enraptured by a president who is a blaggard, a crook,  a buffoon, a  knave and a scoundrel.

I went home with a major headache despite the graciousness and charm of the hosts of the dinner party.  I guess people really cannot talk any more.











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