Thread by @SteveSchmidtSES

This is a really good conversation and an important one. The debate below is around how to think and talk about @FoxNews. What is it? @brianstelter thinks about this directionally and ideologically; describing Fox as moving further right. He is correct, as is @jayrosen_nyu who 1

https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/1405879973009936387

Evaluates @FoxNews along a different axis. For him, it is the drift into fantasy and the unreal. The authoritarian movement in America is real, powerful and present. All authoritarian movements are nourished by an ecosystem that includes three powerful components (2)

A. The Financiers. “No Bucks, no Buck Rogers” said the PR man to the disdainful test pilots who were to become America’s Mercury Astronauts in one of the all time great movies “ The Right Stuff”. There is no autocratic movement without money and they have a lot. (3)

B. CYNICAL ELITES. @EliseStefanik @tedcruz @HawleyMO @GOPLeader are but a few examples of people who have tried to manage the toxic reverberations from Trump’s cult by manipulating it for power, self interest and vanity. They have aligned with the fringe and Venomous ideas (4)

C. PROPAGANDISTS. All authoritarian movements rely on Propaganda that is sustained by a particular type of lie. THE LIE OF AUTHORITY requires the abandonment of belief, truth, ethics, values and intellectual agency. It demands submission to the lies of the Leader/Party. (5)

We live in a three dimensional world. Right-Left, in the tradition of American politics, has long been explicable with a two dimensional rendering, specifically, a horizontal line. It doesn’t work any more. When @brianstelter talks about Fox and moving (6)

“Right” it is important to pause and look at the measuring system. (ie metric vs imperial). Trying to explain the metastasized Conservative Media by marking a waypoint on a line used to measure ideological distance between Christie Whitman and Orrin Hatch. (7)

profoundly disorients the user around the actual reality that surrounds them. The “Right”we are talking about here is a very specific variant, that no matter how easily identifiable, seems to induce a blindness in people who should see it clearly and an allergy towards (8)

confronting it by the people who have the most at stake in the fight. We are talking, of course about an authoritarian Right that is steeped in fantasy, delusion, hate, scapegoating, scientific racial theory, menace, violence and coercion. This AmeriKan Right is cousin to (9)

the noxious movements that have long been built on a fetid marsh of lies, grievance, scapegoating, hate, menace, fear and fantasy nostalgia for a world once pure. That fallen world, is the nucleus of a powerful and evil fantasy. (10)

that is at the core of a terrible and dangerous mythology. The mythology is fear based and architected around the imagined birthright of one group to feel superior to others. It always leads to subjugation under the power and boot of the state for the purpose of preserving 11

the power of the few and fabulously corrupt over the common good of the great many. @FoxNews is moving in a new direction and has been for some time. @TuckerCarlson has brought discredited scientific racial theory back to the mainstream. It is getting worse and more extreme

every day. That is a fact and it is both a condition and an observation. The metastic ideological drift and the demand for submission to fantasies is at the core of understanding what all of this is. I hope enough people can see the totality of it all before we lose it all