![]() Dwight Shrute has what psychologists might refer to as an “authoritarian personality.” Jim had given him, in a roundabout way, the ability to become himself-dictator cosplay, no costume required. But the joke was that Jim had also turned Dwight into something he’d been all along. Jim had turned Dwight into something he wasn’t that was the prank. Fast-forward to Dwight, in a cavernous hotel ballroom, breathing heavily into the lectern’s microphone, pounding his fists, and shouting lines from the script Jim had provided him: the Googled speeches of famous dictators. Dwight is nervous about this opportunity Jim-here is where he stares directly at the camera-gives him some public-speaking advice. His reward is to give a speech at a corporate gathering. Dwight, who sells paper with the militant zeal he brings to everything else he does, wins a company-wide prize for his sales record. T here’s an episode of The Office that ends, as so many episodes of The Office do, with Jim playing a prank on Dwight. Like a vengeful God bringing chaos to Babel, Fox has helped to create a nation of people who share everything but the ability to talk with one another. Every day, the most watched shows of the most watched cable network in the country-a prime-time destination more popular than ESPN-take the familiar idioms of American democracy and wear away at their common meanings. The network turned its translations of the world into a business model. Fox, on its own, did not create that confusion. In the America of 2020, socialism could suggest “Sweden-style social safety net” or “looming threat to liberty.” Journalist could suggest “a person whose job is to report the news of the day” or “enemy of the people.” Cancel culture could mean … actually, I have no idea at all what cancel culture means at this point. You might have observed, lately, how Americans seem always to be talking past one another-how we’re failing one another even at the level of our vernacular. It is one more shared fact of political life that can seem self-evident until someone like Trump, or something like Fox, reveals the fragility that was there all along. Read: Trump is building a dystopia in real-time Over time, if you watch enough Fox & Friends or The Five or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, you will come to understand, as a matter of synaptic impulse, that immigrants are invading and the mob is coming and the news is lying and Trump alone can fix it. ( You are under attack they are the attackers.) Its grammar is grievance. Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation. Fox, for many of its fans, is an identity shaped by an ever-expanding lexicon: mob, PC police, Russiagate, deep state, MSM, MS-13, socialist agenda, Dems, libs, Benghazi, hordes, hoax, dirty, violent, invasion, open borders, anarchy, liberty, Donald Trump. But they don’t quite capture what the elegies for Fox-felled loved ones express so efficiently. They’ve talked about the network as an “information silo” and “a filter bubble” and an “echo chamber,” as an “alternate reality” constructed of “alternative facts,” as a virus on the body politic, as an organ of the state. ![]() ![]() Political theorists, over the years, have looked for metaphors to describe the effects that Fox-particularly its widely watched opinion shows-has had on American politics and culture. At this point, some Americans speak English others speak Fox. They acknowledge how easily a national crisis can become a personal one. The discussions consider a loss that Americans don’t have good language for, in part because the loss itself is a matter of language: They describe what it’s like to find yourself suddenly unable to speak with people you’ve known your whole life. You might have come across the articles ( “I Lost My Dad to Fox News” / “Lost Someone to Fox News?” / “‘Fox News Brain’: Meet the Families Torn Apart by Toxic Cable News”), or the Reddit threads, or the support groups on Facebook, as people have sought ways to mourn loved ones who are still alive. A ll happy families are alike some unhappy families are unhappy because of Fox News.
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