Historians have long argued the USA was, from its inception, destined for explosive showdowns over the size and role of government. Maybe not on the scale of the Civil War, but certainly clamorous schisms, bound to depart from gentlemanly decorum in the collision of political philosophies. What they didn’t necessarily anticipate were the foundational support beams splintering over objective truths, like mathematics, like scientific data, like certified vote counts. Even the southern slave states acknowledged that arch-villain Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860.
But over the last quarter century, the U.S. has accommodated unprecedented seismic fissures between objective reality and full-throated national psychosis. And nothing has slung more toxic sludge into the breach than Fox News. Yet, the Fox accelerant is less about politics and more about a billionaire’s deep appreciation of addictive human behaviors, and the potential for generating insane profits by waging a rim-to-rim blitz of fear and loathing.
The operation’s genius is its capacity for identifying non-issues or obscure particles – from graduate-level critical race theory courses to the works of Dr. Seuss – and inflating them into zeppelin-sized flying machines that scare the shit out of viewers whose very identities are threatened by the future (where the prospects are always tenuous). Town halls and school board meetings are swamped by the shrieking afflicted, dragging vaccine policies into spittle-lubed showdowns between good and evil. Even the mob’s reality-show hero, upon watching his followers ransack the Capitol on J6, was astonished by the furious pageantry. As Michael Wolff reported in Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, #45 related to the crowd through the analogy he knew best, blurting: “It’s like ‘Let’s Make a Deal.’”
No pressure point, no asterisk, no traditional threads of normalcy or accord, are too granular or trivial to escape the politicization of Fox’s marketing strategists. So imagine what their outrage machinery could manufacture if and when it gets a serious grip on the one high-profile issue Dems and Republicans agreed on last year – the need for a UFO research office in the Pentagon. We saw what might’ve been a sneak preview just last month with Fox prime-time superstar, Tucker Carlson.
Until the NY Times 12/17 coup properly recast the UFO challenge, its subculture was too declasse to even rate as a wedge issue. Roswell alien-costume parades, the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, garish vendors’ booths at UFO conventions, self-appointed emissaries and prophets – the mainstream media was too distracted by the sideshows to invest serious resources into the complexity of the mystery. And that included Fox News. But not Tucker Carlson.
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