Let’s say you get an email from a total stranger who claims, among other things, that her soul once left her body, the wind talks to her (telling her that she is a ghost), and that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered while being hunted for sport.
You would likely hit delete and check your spam-filter settings.
But you are not a seasoned journalist like the brilliant minds at Fox News.
You see, back in 2020, a deranged Minnesota woman sent an email to Fox that was full of the above gibberish and made-up “facts” that “proved” Biden had stolen the election.
This revelation comes from the Dominion lawsuit, which previously revealed that Fox anchors knowingly lied to their audience to maintain their ratings, which is a concept that I never learned in journalism school.
Also, Fox anchors hate Trump and think their viewers are morons, so I guess we have something in common.
In any case, Dominion has stated that “the alleged source of the voter-fraud claims that sparked the lawsuit is a single email from a previously unknown woman” who admits that “she conjures her theories out of nothing.”
Again, it might strike you as odd that Fox would broadcast incendiary commentary based on one email from an anonymous person who freely admits that her “now nationally prominent ideas about election fraud” are based on “hidden messages she detects in films, song lyrics she hears on the radio, and overheard conversations she hears while in line at the supermarket checkout.”
But again, you are not a Fox journalist.
They listened to this woman, who had zero qualifications and offered “a jumble of ideas that centered on ties between telepaths, the Bank of the Vatican, the NXIVM sex cult, and the 1970 film Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”
And they thought, “Seems credible.”
Of course, it is improbable that many people at Fox believed this lunatic’s email (although it would probably be disturbing to know how many did). More likely, they saw these rantings from a representative of their core audience and used it as a springboard or brainstorming tool for their coverage. After all, there was no actual evidence of voter fraud, so why not make up some bizarre shit and hope it sticks? And why not start with the psychotic assertions of a swing-state nutjob?
Hey, at least she’s not an East Coast elitist, right?
Fox has shown that it is terrified of offending its audience, so it will go to appalling lengths to keep the right-wing outrage percolating. This is the power of the Republican base.
Hey, even the few conservative leaders “who do not embrace the racism, sexism, religiosity, nihilism, and authoritarianism of the hard-core MAGA Republicans appear to believe they cannot win an election without the votes of those people, [and] so the extremists now own the party.”
Conservatives are no longer even offering the dog-whistle ideal of making the country great (again). Instead, they are clamoring for leaders who will eradicate the libs and engage in unbridled retribution.
They openly admit that their lies — so obvious to anyone who is not delusional, partisan, or idiotic — are just to appease the base.
But the base doesn’t care.
They want to believe that we can bomb Mexico, and that will end our drug problem.
They want the GOP to take “a wartime posture — even calling for a “national divorce” — to cover up “their party’s misalignment with large swaths of the United States.”
They want to see heavily edited video that implies January 6 was a pleasant stroll rather than a riot, a ploy so childish and ludicrous that one assumes even the people spouting this nonsense are incredulous.
Brief aside: there should be a word that describes a pathetic effort to convince people of obvious lies that are so absurd that even the perpetrators don’t believe it. There probably is a word in German that covers this idea, and I imagine it’s something like werheschfeltzanthursse.
Regardless, the lies don’t matter, and neither does the public admission of the lies.
Right-wingers are ready to believe anything.
Just ask that woman in Minnesota.
Better yet, don’t ask. The last thing you want is an email correspondence with her.
