America is experiencing the spasms of an increasingly kinetic (second) civil war. So think whatever you will of Russian ransomware attacks and Chinese rhetorical bullying. The only things Americans have to fear are Americans themselves. And “the culture wars” now raging over things like Critical Race Theory and the National Anthem should be far from the sum of their fears.
Red-Blue divide more checkers board than Mason-Dixon line
Nothing demonstrates this quite like the warpath Republicans are on in red states across the country. They are hell-bent on enacting laws to make it not only difficult for Blacks and Hispanics to vote, but virtually impossible for any Democrat to even get elected dog catcher.
And, continuing the ominous analogy, The Roberts Court is aping The Taney Court (of the 1850s) by affirming their laws. This, despite their patently discriminatory intent and, worse, that they are bound to divide the country on matters related to America’s “original sin”- just as similar cases did in the years preceding the Civil War. If those who fail to learn from history are doomed, God help America.
Remarkably, these current events are playing out exactly as Ulysses S. Grant predicted. He, of course, is the master strategist who won the Civil War and preserved the Union. More to the point, what he said at the Annual Reunion of the Army of Tennessee in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 29, 1875, bears repeating time and again:
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.
(State Historical Society of Iowa)
Fox News as instigator in chief
Ever since Barack Obama was nominated to become the first Black president of the United States, Fox News has been playing a catalyzing role in this burgeoning civil war. I discussed this looming conflict at length in a recent podcast episode titled “Online Comments and the Fate of Democracy,” June 12, 2021.
But this is why having even a former top executive bemoan this network as “poison for America” is anticlimactic. Indeed, it’s rather like Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, suddenly bemoaning former President Donald J. Trump as such. Er, duh!
Still, because stating even the obvious in this context is so rare, it is worthy of recognition and comment.
Preston Padden launched Fox News along with Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. But, at long last, it seems his conscience is finally getting to him. This might explain why he published on Monday what I’m sure he hopes will be an expiatory testimony, which thoroughly condemned Fox News. The problem is that it smacked of an unwitting perversion of that old evangelical trope of condemning the sin but not the sinner.
Here in part, according to Yahoo! News, is what Padden:
__________
Things have gone badly off the tracks at Fox News. Fox News is no longer a truthful center-right news network. The channel (especially the leading prime-time opinion programming) has contributed substantially and directly to:
- the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by disparaging the wearing of life-saving COVID masks;
divisions in our society by stoking racial animus and fueling the totally false impression that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are engaged in nightly, life-threatening riots across the country;- the unnecessary deaths of many Americans by fueling hesitation and doubt about the efficacy and safety of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines [Fox News provided me examples of pro-mask/vaccine on-air comments, but in my opinion, they were heavily outweighed by the negative comments of the highly rated primetime opinion hosts];
- former President Trump’s “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from him by providing a continuous platform for wild and false claims about the election—claims refuted by more than 60 judges, Republican State election officials, recounts in numerous States and Trump’s own Attorney General; and
- the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the U.S. Capitol by continually promoting former President Trump’s “Stop The Steal” rally.
Fox News has caused many millions of Americans—most of them Republicans (as my wife and I were for 50 years)—to believe things that simply are not true.
Over the past nine months I have tried, with increasing bluntness, to get Rupert to understand the real damage that Fox News is doing to America. I failed, and it was arrogant and naïve to ever have thought that I could succeed. I am at a loss to understand why he will not change course. I can only guess that the destructive editorial policy of Fox News is driven by a deep-seated vein of anti-establishment/contrarian thinking in Rupert that, at age 90, is not going to change.
___________
Why Murdoch, why?
Notwithstanding my introductory remarks, I appreciate Padden’s insider account. It’s just that he appears stupefyingly oblivious to the fact that Murdoch seems more hell-bent on doing everything to destroy this country from the inside than Vladimir Putin is on doing so from the outside.
Padden is “at a loss to understand why.” But, at this point, who cares? It is self-evident that Murdoch harbors deeply rooted resentment of America. He might be a naturalized American but, in his heart, I suspect he’s still all Australian. And the Potemkin patriots at Fox News are too motivated by greed to give a damn about the welfare of their country.
Hell, Padden fails to even hint at any reckoning for Murdoch. Instead, he ends his testimony by conceding that, at 90, Murdoch is too stuck in his way to change.
But those of us actively engaged in this war know that this is a time for reckoning (not just for insurrectionists but for their inciters and enablers too) and, more crucially, a time for choosing … sides.
Again, as Grant foresaw nearly 150 years ago, you’re either on the red side of superstition, ambition and ignorance, which Fox News is exploiting and galvanizing; or you’re on the blue side of patriotism and intelligence, which any American in their right mind will see is worth fighting for.
In fact, I had cause to hail ordinary folks fighting this good fight just months ago in “Treated Like Pariahs in America, Fox-News Murdochs Flee to Australia,” April 8, 2021. It featured parents who – so disgusted with the poison Fox News is feeding America – literally drove Lachlan Murdoch and his family out of their comfortable Los Angeles enclave.
No doubt I was exceedingly pleased that Rupert, the wizard of Trumpism, and his like-minded son were finally being pilloried, and sued. But I expressed sympathy for the Murdoch children, naturally. I duly noted, however, that their father and grandfather spent over a decade making things far worse for the Obama children.
That said, I cannot overstate that a critical mass of Republicans appear to have given up on the United States of America. They seem only interested in the red states, where they not only still hail Trump as their president but worship him like a two-legged orange calf; you know, the way the Israelites worshipped that proverbial golden calf.
Of course, red is red and blue is blue, and never the twain shall submit. So, like I said in the aforementioned podcast episode, wake up America! Because, if you think dimwitted slogans to “defund the police” had unwitting deadly consequences, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
This restive state of the Union is all too familiar. I regret and fear in equal measure that it has come to this. But the sooner people like Padden realize this the better.
Truth be told, his commentary is analogous to a Southern plantation owner complaining about a rabble-rousing, curmudgeonly secessionist, but failing to cross the Mason Dixon line to join in the good fight to end slavery and preserve the Union … like so many Southerners did.
Related commentaries:
podcast fate of democracy… treated like pariahs…