When I started this blog, I didn’t realize it would impel me to spend several hours each week watching Fox News. I find it distasteful, it is so unbelievable, such an alternate reality – but I find it worth commenting on. Before doing so, let me say a few additional words about a prime Fox bête noire:
Critical Race Theory
I had a letter to the editor of the Washington Post published (July 10) in which I argued that we should reformulate the debate about CRT. Instead of focusing on CRT, the question should be whether our public schools teach about racism? And, of course, they should, even most conservatives could not deny that. Just like schools need to teach about sexism, ableism, inequality, poverty, climate change, and other controversial topics. The questions then become how? what? and who decides?
These are not easy questions to answer, but, to my mind, politicians need to butt out. Current legislation on race and CRT proscribes any curricular activities that give rise to “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” This is absurd. Good education often does and should cause discomfort. As Timothy Snyder, Yale University historian points out in a New York Times article (June 29) titled “The War on History is a War on Democracy:” “history is not therapy.”
Back to Fox
So this past weekend I watched Fox news commentators Tucker Carlson (July 9), Sean Hannity (July 9), Lauran Ingraham (July 9), and Maria Bartilomo (July 11). One ever-present feature is how often the right’s argument is projection. Last week, I commented on how their claims of indoctrination by the left are a guise for their banning examination of topics like slavery and Jim Crow. Hannity similarly claimed the left wants to eliminate American history when this is really the terrain of the right. Carlson talked of the threat of mass riots by the left when the reality is the insurrection of Jan 6 and the continued threat of the right. Hannity says the Democrats are “Party First, Country Second,” when this so fits the Republicans. He also says that the Democrats only believe in elections when they win. Need I say more?
Hannity’s show was devoted to Mark Levin and his book American Marxism about whom I commented some last week. But this fearmongering, trash-the-left deserves some additional commentary. The book will be released July 13. Hannity calls it the “most important book in a generation.” For Levin and Hannity, everything on the left is Marxism – the New Green Deal, dealing with climate change, redistribution, democratic socialism, CRT, Black Lives Matter, corporations who decry voting law restrictions. For Levin and Hannity, Marxists are running academia, media, big tech companies, and the whole Democratic Party. For Levin and Hannity, all these American Marxists don’t believe in free speech or debate (talk about projection!). Levin says about them: “when [these] fanatics are confronted with facts, history, experience, truth, it’s of no consequence, they have found their calling and won’t be dissuaded from it” (more projection!). “All of them think alike or are ostracized” (tell that to Liz Cheney!).
It goes on and on. Ingraham talks about how the Democrats don’t want the pandemic to be over and how having a child in school wear a mask is “shaming them.” Bartiromo lists what she calls the big lies of the left: “the Russia hoax, the Steele dossier, impeachment with no crime, Hunter Biden’s laptop and business deals, origin and treatment of COVID, voter laws as Jim Crow, and armed insurrection without arms.” She had Trump on who is still claiming the election was “corrupt, rigged, stolen – we won in a landslide.” He said “the Supreme Court didn’t have the courage to take it up and they should be ashamed” – yet it was a Court that he and the Republicans had packed.
In such a world, it is hard to be optimistic about the future of the U.S. A majority of Republicans believe Trump’s election lie, a significant proportion think the January 6 insurrection was justified. Many won’t get vaccinated or wear masks. It’s good that the courts rejected the election lie, it’s good that we are prosecuting the insurrectionists, and the unvaccinated, masks-are-an-assault-on-our-freedom crowd are most directly harming themselves (although it fosters more variants). But a rapprochement is a long ways away. In the U.S., labelling those who disagree with you as socialists, communists, or Marxists generally prevents any conversation about our differences. I will still repeat my offer last week to Levin and include Hannity – in your eyes, as a left-leaning university professor, I am clearly one of the American Marxists who frighten you so – read my book, The Conscience of a Progressive, and I’ll read yours and we can talk!
As I was about to post this, I started watching Trump’s speech to CPAC (July 11). Practically his opening sentence was: “We will defeat the radical left, the socialists, Marxists, and critical race theorists.” Shades of Hannity, Levin, Carlson, and the rest of the Fox gang!
Trump’s talk went on and on. I may watch the rest and report on it next time.