Features
Foxitis – The New American Plague
by Vijaya Chandrasoma
Legal counsel for some Trump-incited insurrectionists, accused of storming the Capitol on January 6, are using a novel defense, a mental disease they have termed Foxitis, which they claim spurred their clients to “fight for their country”. In their deluded minds, they believed they were heroes, patriots. Foxitis is a disease to which millions of old white Americans and Sri Lankans of all ages have been exposed for decades, some to a level of chronic, sometimes violent lunacy.
Fox News, a multinational, conservative cable news and television channel, is owned by Australian-American media mogul, Rupert Murdoch. It caters exclusively to a conservative television audience in America. Fox has grown from the 1990s to be the dominant news channel, with the largest slice of TV ratings.
Fox News enjoys a predominantly white, Republican audience (over 90%), with a median age in the mid-60s. There are households today who get all their news from Fox and Friends, and refuse to watch any other news channel. Even more after Trump described the media, except Fox News, as the Enemy of the People.
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, he made Fox his own propaganda channel. It became a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, covering up its lies, and misrepresenting or downplaying its criminal acts of incompetence and corruption. Fox became a government-run TV, much like the state owned Russian news channel, TASS.
According to political scientist, David Hopkins, “Fox News tends to raise the profiles of minor scandals and controversies involving Democrats that receive scant attention in other media”, while giving no coverage to, or grossly misrepresenting, the real scandals of the Trump administration.
After Trump lost the November election, Fox News bombarded its mainly Trumpist audience with The Big Lie, that the election was stolen from Trump, which has resulted in over 70% of Republicans questioning the legitimacy of the November election, even though every claim of election fraud has been laughed out of court. Such is the nature of the disease. There is no cure. Giving medicine to those afflicted is like giving medicine to a corpse.
Fox News covered the January insurrection in a manner vastly different from other channels. They downplayed it to the level of a peaceful protest. They paraphrased Trump’s incitement to the mob before the Capitol was stormed, when he used the words “fight” and “fight like hell” 14 times. Fox translation: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and Congressmen and women”. Cheer them on to repudiate their formal, constitutional duty of certifying the Electoral College votes on the November election, and anointing Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States.
And assassinate them if they did carry out their constitutional duty. The gallows with a hangman’s noose had already been built for the purpose on the Capitol grounds.
Fox’s description of the violent insurrection which raged for four hours, leaving six people dead, hundreds wounded and the beautiful Capitol building, the seat of America’s democracy, vandalized and violated:
“The doors were already opened to them, and the barricades had been pulled down already”. People simply “wanted to be heard in the Chambers, wanted their voices heard as they were sick and tired of what had been going on – the goings on being The Big Lie that the election had been stolen from Trump.
The relationship between Trump and Fox had soured a bit after the election. The rot started when Fox prematurely gave the Arizona election win to Biden, when the result was still in the balance. No other news channel had given Arizona to Biden at that time. Trump was indignant to the point of lunacy, as he realized that he was losing all the swing states, and the election, to Biden. After the election, Trump claimed, wrongly, that Fox ratings had collapsed because of that premature declaration.
Trump tweeted, “Very sad to watch this happen, but they forgot what made them (Fox News) successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose”. Which was another attempt at grandiosity, as whatever this particular goose laid cost him at least $130,000 a pop. Fox had been the No. 1 news network from the late 90s, enjoying the highest TV ratings.
Fox News clawed itself back to Trump’s favor, with a 100% sycophantic misrepresentation of Trump’s criminal action during and after the Lame Duck period of his presidency.
At a recent interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, Anthony Antonio, a Trumpist insurrectionist said he was at the Capitol on that awful day, “because Trump told him to do so.” He said that he was a devout Christian who believed in God and was taught to have faith in the governance of the President of the United States. He had been watching only Fox News as the main news source of his family since he was a child. When he lost his job because of the pandemic, he was watching Fox News all day. His Bible says “have faith in the government like you have faith in your God”.
After listening to Fox News, that Trump was doing a fantastic job during the pandemic, that it will disappear “like a miracle”, Trump replaced God in his mind. After all, people were calling him The Chosen One. This is the man he looked up to, the Almighty, and when He told him to go to Washington, and fight the “stealing of the election”, he drove 11 hours, expecting to be a part of a peaceful protest. He soon realized that he shouldn’t have been there, that he had been misled.
After a few days, Antonio realized that what had happened shouldn’t have happened. The Bible says “no violence and follow your government whether you believe them or not”. Is that the Newest Testament, According to Fox News?
Antonio takes full responsibility for his actions, and throws himself on the mercy of God and the American people. He insists that this is not a cop out, he believed what the Bible told him. He has only himself to blame. “I have asked God for forgiveness”.
Cuomo then showed him pictures of Antonio carrying a bullhorn and throwing a bottle at a cop, at the epicenter of the violence. There is also a video of Antonio screaming, “You want war? We got war! 1776 all over again”.
His lawyer, Joseph Hurley, who was present at the interview, piped in and said that his client was using the bullhorn to call for peace, and was throwing the bottle not at the cop, but at an insurgent who was trying to attack the cop. Hurley said that the screaming was caused by a sudden act of Foxitis. The “smorgasbord of lies, slanders, calumnies, hogwash and fraud the network had served up for 25 years”, came to head and drove him to temporary and violent insanity.
Scientists have produced several vaccines to eradicate this plague of Foxitis, including new strains of the disease like Newsmax and America One. Strains even more dangerous than the original Foxitis, with the capacity to undermine the very foundations of American democracy. These new strains are suspected to be emanating from the sand traps of a golf course at Mar a Lago, Florida, spread by a demented old lunatic and his minions.
The vaccines to immunize the public from this deadly plague, including the new strains, have been produced in record time, and are now available to the public.
200 million Americans, mainly Democrats and Independents, have been vaccinated against Foxitis and its ancillary strains. Unfortunately, there is resistance against the vaccine from 44% of Republicans. They fear that the main antibodies in the vaccine, which include the twin venoms of fact and truth, may cause further damage to their already flawed mental structure.