It\u2019s difficult to get away from the current crisis, and threat.<\/p>\n
The Atlantic, Megan Garber: Do You Speak Fox?<\/a>. Subtitle: How Donald Trump\u2019s favorite news source became a language<\/p>\n \nPolitical theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox\u2014particularly its widely watched opinion shows\u2014has had on American politics and culture. They\u2019ve talked about the network as an \u201cinformation silo\u201d and \u201ca filter bubble\u201d and an \u201cecho chamber,\u201d as an \u201calternate reality\u201d constructed of \u201calternative facts,\u201d as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. The comparisons are all correct. But they don\u2019t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob<\/i>, PC police<\/i>, Russiagate<\/i>, deep state<\/i>, MSM<\/i>, MS-13<\/i>, socialist agenda<\/i>, Dems<\/i>, libs<\/i>, Benghazi<\/i>, hordes<\/i>, hoax<\/i>, dirty<\/i>, violent<\/i>, invasion<\/i>, open borders<\/i>, anarchy<\/i>, liberty<\/i>, Donald Trump<\/i>. Fox has two pronouns, you<\/i> and they<\/i>, and one tone: indignation. (You<\/i> are under attack; they<\/i> are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing. Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends<\/i> or The Five<\/i> or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \/\/<\/p>\n Salon, Amanda Marcotte: How anti-choice propaganda trained Republicans to accept Trump’s coronavirus denialism<\/a>. Subtitle: Trump’s new medical adviser peddles a familiar model of deceit: Wrap lies and right-wing ideology in a lab coat.<\/p>\n \nDonald Trump didn’t like what the experts were telling him about the coronavirus pandemic, so he found a guy with “Dr.” in front of his name who will tell the president the bedtime stories he wants to hear. Dr. Scott Atlas isn’t an expert in infectious disease or epidemiology, as are coronavirus task force advisers Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom he has pretty much usurped. Atlas is a radiologist and, more importantly, a senior fellow at the far-right bad-idea incubator known as the Hoover Institution (previously home to the infamous prediction that the U.S. death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic would be around 5,000<\/a>).<\/p>\n According to the New York Times <\/a>and the Washington Post<\/a>, Atlas \u2014 who apparently caught Trump’s eye the way so many of his advisers do, by peddling BS on Fox News \u2014 is ready and willing to say all sorts of medically unsound things that just happen to align with everything Trump wants to believe about the coronavirus. So Atlas has risen rapidly as a power player and is reportedly even getting venerable institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to echo his unscientific beliefs.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \/\/<\/p>\n Drilling in to the key issue:<\/p>\n The Atlantic, Peter Wehner: Why Trump Supporters Can\u2019t Admit Who He Really Is<\/a>. Subtitle: Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.<\/p>\n \nThis is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trump\u2019s supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could<\/em> shoot someone on Fifth Avenue<\/a> and not lose his voters.<\/p>\n \u2026<\/p>\n Still, in the minds of Trump\u2019s supporters lingers the belief that a Biden presidency would usher in a reign of terror. Many of them simply have<\/i> to believe that. Justifying their fealty to a man who is so obviously a moral wreck requires them to turn Joe Biden and the Democratic Party into an existential threat. The narrative is set; the actual identity of the nominee is almost incidental.<\/p>\n A powerful tribal identity bonds the president to his supporters. As Amy Chua, the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations<\/i>, has argued, the tribal instinct is not just to belong, but also to exclude and to attack. \u201cWhen groups feel threatened,\u201d Chua writes, \u201cthey retreat into tribalism. They close ranks and become more insular, more defensive, more punitive, more us-versus-them.\u201d<\/p>\n That works both ways. Fear strengthens tribalistic instincts, and tribalistic instincts amplify fear. Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat. In the presence of such an enemy, members of tribal groups look outward rather than inward, at others and never at themselves or their own kind.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n All about fear, or rather, paranoia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s difficult to get away from the current crisis, and threat. The Atlantic, Megan Garber: Do You Speak Fox?. Subtitle: How Donald Trump\u2019s favorite news source became a language Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe … Continue reading