The Indoctrinated…

Some of my acquaintances have a completely different conception of reality than me right now, even though we are very similar culturally, socioeconomically and in age.  Conversations with them are disconcerting, foreign and unbelievable.  It’s so bad that I ask myself are we even on the same planet?  It’s like they’ve been indoctrinated into a mind-altering cult far removed from reality.  I’ve been trying to figure this out, seriously, since November 2017 when I started this blog.

The first thing I have discovered about my acquaintances who have a very different and alien to me worldview is that they are avid consumers of AM radio right-wing shows and/or the Fox NEWS shows.  The following are excerpts or paraphrases from Is Fox News Finally Past the Point of No Return? by Steve Almond on wbur.org and they have helped me understand others a little better

First of all, Fox News is NOT a news organization.  It produces political entertainment that appeals to those attracted to a “paranoid style” of programming.  It’s only motivation is PROFIT, certainly not facts or truth.  (Mediabiaschart.com states that Fox News rates as 85% false).  Fox News is “…stoking fear and loathing for cash…  and people are buying in to the “poisonous propaganda.”

Fox News teaches that “…someone is out to get you, aging white person!  The government, the climate scientists or the Muslims or the immigrants or the feminists or the thugs (read: people of color) or the Godless abortionists or the IRS or Killary.  They are coming for your guns, for your way of life.”

“Fox deals in propaganda, stories that are intended to simplify moral action by flattening the world in to an utterly predictable binary.”

Conservatives = Good / Liberals = Bad

Whites = Victims / People of color = Perpetrators

The Wealthy = Job creation / The Poor = Moochers

“Viewers have been trained to reject facts that rank as too disturbing (climate change, income inequality, systemic racism) and instead to embrace phony scandals (death panels, Benghazi, Sharia law, etc,) in which they are forever cast as heroic victims of imagined enemies.”

While, “Actual journalism, in seeking to document the complex realities of life in the 21st century, tends to complicate moral action.”

“Fox – along with the for-profit demagogues who dominate the AM dial – laid the entire foundation for Trump’s ascent.  For two decades, these outlets have been INDOCTRINATING aging whites in a manner that would be the envy of totalitarian regime.”

“Most Americans have long since tired of Trump’s masculine insecurity, his pathetic politics of division and despair.  But so long as Fox News is around, the rise of another cruel bully is all but inevitable.”  And sadly, Impeached President Trump “…retains an approval rating of 40 percent – despite his blatant incompetence and corruption- because of his Fox News firewall.”

This Fox fueled worldview is tearing this once great United States of America apart by gutting government agencies of its expertise and the protections it offers ordinary Americans,  and putting all the country’s resources into the hands of the greedy top one percent who care nothing for the rest of us.

All the Fox News consumers I know, truly believe that they are being told the absolute truth.  They are seemingly unreachable.  They elected the most incompetent, immoral and corrupt President ever and believe that he’s doing a phenomenal job.  I don’t know how to reach them.  They discard my fact checking as liberal propaganda and call me a libtard.  As Trump destroys our government and our country we are quickly losing our standing in the world.  I hope we can recover before it is too late.