Fox News lawsuit unveils gaslighting that has become common practice in U.S. | Opinion

The documents recently released from the lawsuit which Dominion Voting Systems has brought against Fox News reveal the utter hypocrisy of the network in promoting the preposterous allegations about the software company’s rigging of their systems to divert votes in the 2020 election from Trump to Biden. In doing so, they expose the gaslighting process by which obvious lies are presented as gospel truths in the Radical Right world today.

Fox and its prime-time hosts had initially dismissed the allegations against Dominion as baseless conspiracy theories. Then, when the network discovered that many of its listeners were defecting to OAN or Newsmax who had gotten fully behind the fabricated charges, Fox suddenly became a staunch promoter of them. Concern about ratings and loss of revenue forced Fox to become a dutiful purveyor of lies and disinformation.

At times, one has to lead, not allow one’s listeners to determine what is acceptable truth. That principle applies to politicians as well as it does to news organizations. But, on Jan. 6, just hours after a mob had stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory, a majority of Republicans voted to do what the rioters had failed to do. They rationalized their votes, not on any evidence of widespread fraud but on their constituents’ opinion that there was. As Mitt Romney was quick to point out, they only thought so because of all the conspiracy-mongering which President Trump and his allies had so relentlessly peddled for months.

Thanks to Radical Right influencers in the media and Republican Party, scores of millions of Americans have come to embrace the falsehood that the individual’s opinion is what matters, however unfounded that opinion may be. Consequently, a disdain for facts has become a part of the Conservative DNA in our time. This disposition is on prominent display in a documentary about the continuing Civil War which periodically airs on MSNBC. In one segment, a Mississippi farmer whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy defends the claim that slavery was not the reason the South fought as “my personal opinion.” To this individual, his opinion is all the “evidence” he needs to settle the matter. In his world, facts take a back seat to opinion. The irony is that the “personal opinion” that he values so highly is almost certainly not one that originates with him but rather is the product of the relentless disinformation talk radio, Fox and their like feed him day and night. When Rush Limbaugh referred to his listeners as “dittoheads” he knew his audience. The sad truth is that most people enmeshed in the Radical Right’s media sphere stopped thinking for themselves a long time ago.

The Right’s war against knowledge has generated a growing hostility to education, particularly in its higher realm. Colleges are depicted as left-wing propaganda citadels in which professors push “woke” agenda on captive students. No one has coopted this crusade against the academy more so than Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. The governor recently bullied the College Board into watering down its African American AP course. Central to his argument was the presupposition that parents should be key arbiters of what constitutes an acceptable curriculum. They are best situated to determine the psychological effects of course material upon their children. Increasingly, any personal uncomfortableness which students experience from a candid exposition of a particular topic like slavery is sufficient excuse for excising it from the syllabus. Moreover, the insistence that slavery and Black history are indispensable components of any authentic survey of America’s past DeSantis dismisses as the Left’s attempt to indoctrinate students, to force feed guilt and hatred. What the governor fails to recognize is that the very act of removing courses or topics because of their take on things Black, including slavery, is itself a form of indoctrination by suppression.

The South has a long history of such suppression. In the decades leading to the Civil War, the region tried to impose an intellectual blockade on any attempts to abolish slavery or even to criticize it. Today, the forbidden topics are different – race and gender – but the goal is the same: the maintenance of white supremacy and patriarchy. DeSantis is cynically calculating that racist and sexist pandering will move a critical mass of Americans to put him in the White House.

Robert Emmett Curran is professor of history emeritus at Georgetown University. Next month Louisiana State University Press will publish his “American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.”