’Luke O’Neil put a call out for his readers’ stories of their loved ones’ capture by Fox News, being overtake by its paranoid, racist conspiracy mindset: he got back a heartbreaking collection of tales of “funny, compassionate” older relatives turning into someone who was “increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid” – some people even found their older relatives dead in front of a TV playing Fox.
The stories mostly involve people who saw themselves as “conservative” but who kept any kind of racial animus or other socially unacceptable views to themselves, but whose conservative worldviews were deepened and weaponized, in part by sprawling and aggressive direct-mail ad campaigns for quack remedies, prepper supplies, gold bullion, and so on.
Many of the people transformed by Fox seemed to begin their transformation in 2008, with the election of America’s first Black president, and at the dawn of the financial crisis, when the slow upward redistribution of America’s wealth to the 1% took a precipitous leap.…’
Via Boing Boing
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