Once again, it’s all Fox News’ fault. The Omicron Variant is spreading like wildfire across the nation, and we haven’t got a prayer of containing it because a huge faction of our population refuses to get vaccinated and resists wearing masks. They don’t believe in science, they don’t trust their own elected government, and they think that some raving charlatan they saw on TV is more knowledgeable than experts who’ve studied and worked in their field for decades.
What’s wrong with them? How did they get this way?
They watch Fox News. Fox News isn’t actually news. It’s right-wing propaganda delivered by serious-looking talking heads in suits so it looks like news. When summoned to court to explain why it broadcasts damaging misinformation, Fox’s lawyers had this explanation: “We aren’t a news channel, we are an entertainment channel. No rational person would believe that what we say is actually true.”
Yet, for more than two decades Fox News has been pretending to be news, and its viewers take every word they say as gospel. Because the “news” that comes from Fox is usually at odds with mainstream news, Fox’s commentators tell their viewers that mainstream news is lying, and that they should never watch it. They frequently say that the media is part of a nation-wide conspiracy to deceive everybody for various nefarious purposes, and conservatives eat that right up. The idea that everyone else is being duped by a vast conspiracy, and they themselves are privy to the actual, little-known truth, particularly appeals to the conservative mindset.
Fox News tells them what they want to hear, convinces them of what they want to believe, and no conspiracy story is too outrageous for Fox. The government, naturally, is in the thick of the conspiracies, and so are the scientists, the experts, the doctors, the college professors, and essentially all the smart people in the world, whom conservatives have always been suspicious of anyway. They’ve always resented how smart people talk too fast and use too many big words, and they were pretty sure those people were up to something all along. Now, thanks to Fox News, they know it’s true.
So who’s to blame when forty percent of Americans refuse to take the COVID vaccine, because they think the pandemic is a hoax and the vaccine contains tiny tracking chips so their own government can spy on them? Whose fault is it that the Coronavirus continues to hospitalize and kill people by the thousands, carried across the country by unmasked, unvaccinated people who think it’s just a hoax?
Will Fox News, and the robust family of clones and echo-chambers that make up the right-wing conspiracy factory, come clean and admit they made the whole thing up so we can end the pandemic and save the American economy and hundreds of thousands of lives? Or will they continue to spin their ridiculous conspiracy theories, bilk their viewers, and make more money than they can possibly spend? I think we all know the answer to that one…