Growing Up in TheWorld of Fox News
By Christian Thrailkill
I vividly remember the first time I experienced profound melancholy. It was in fourth grade in 2004. I’d wait in the back of my mother’s minivan, waiting for my sister to finish her soccer practice. As we’d wait, my mom would play talk radio in the car. At this time, Rush Limbaugh’s daily discussion centered around the proposed federal ban on gay marriage. Hours of calls would follow, talking about how the Democrats wanted to fundamentally reshape the country to allow a sin like gay marriage to become accepted as a moral good. First, it was Roe v. Wade, and now it was the sanctity of marriage and the family unit. I recall feeling a profound sense of despair, where if gay marriage wasn’t stopped, then the America my parents had immigrated to wouldn’t be that special America anymore.
Fast forward to 2008, and I became a phone banker for John McCain, looking to stop the America-hating Barack Hussein Obama. On election night, we went to the local rally at Miami-Dade College. We were waiting for the results, and I was excited because I was certain McCain would win. After all, surely everyone knew how bad Obama was. Then Obama won, and I remember spending the whole night worried that America had lost. Looking back on it now, it’s a patently silly thing to have believed as a kid, but I truly believed it with all my heart.
A few months later, in my JROTC class, Sgt. Quesada played a Youtube clip starring the then popular Fr. Corapi urging us to join the Tea Party movement. Sgt. Quesada told us it was our moral duty as young Americans to stand up to the tyranny of Obama and socialism in the guise of universal health care. I remember being excited to join a movement meant to fight for our country against a president who bowed to foreign leaders, and wanted to take over the economy through health care. I would later became involved in Tea Party politics throughout high school.
This story is not unique. In fact, it’s shared by many of my peers. The social conditioning I experienced as a child in the conservative ecosystem isn’t an isolated incident. I spent much of my youth listening to conservative talk radio and watching Fox News. I would listen to the wisdom and clarity of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the like. I was able to go to political rallies and events by my mother. My family, Cuban immigrants, never took democracy for granted, and made sure that my siblings and I understood the importance of being politically active, lest America turn into another Cuba. With our family history, it made sense that anything that looked like big government would be a dangerous first step to communism. My mother taught me about Bill Buckley and Reagan, the failure of the Carter administration, and the shame and evil of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, when a president violated his oath of office and marriage vows, and then got away from it. Now there was a president trying to hoodwink us into giving up our freedoms. Of course the Democrats were the bad guys, and there was only one news station willing to put out the truth: Fox News.
We are now two generations into a post-Fox News world. I, a 25 year old man, do not have living memory of life before Fox News. My adult sister and brother were both born after Fox News. My younger sisters have never known what the GOP was before the Tea Party. I don’t think that older generations of right and center-right voters have really grappled with the systemic impact this has had on the intellectual foundations of the modern GOP. For two generations now, conservative politics hasn’t been based in the revolution started by Buckley and Goldwater. Rather, conservatism has been Bush, The Tea Party, Trump, and the various pundits and politicians that have come along with them. The standard bearers of conservatism were the likes of Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Rush Limbaugh, Dinesh D’Souza, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopulous. To call any of these people serious political intellectuals is disingenuous. This is a collection of men and women who have built a livelihood in eroding people’s trust in institutions and fellow Americans. One just has to look at how Ben Shapiro and others are profiting and fundraising off the latest Kyle Kashuv scandal.
While conservatism has lacked a major uniting intellectual figure, it has never been short of effective spokespeople. The problem is, instead of being advocates for conservative principles, they advocated for a political apparatus, and against the Democratic Party as “the other”. These grifters and charlatans have always had a crisis to discuss. It first was the Starr and Clinton impeachment. Then it was the war on Afghanistan and Iraq. It would follow in subsequent years with the war on Christianity, the fake global warming scam, the economic recession and Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, The 2013 government shutdown, the Flight 93 election, the crisis on the border with invading illegals, and now the Deep State and the fake collusion crisis. These are the panics that have been discussed at family gatherings and with friends who have devoted most of their lives to a political jihad to defeat the Democrats, who hate the country and personally hated the life and faith of my family.
Conservative Americans have been indoctrinated into a quarter century of fight or flight, desperate last stands, and rebellious fervor to take the country back. When there’s a perceived threat on such a monumental scale, it’s very logical to fight back with such fervor. To do otherwise is to risk the very lives of you and your family. The insidious effect this has had on the conservative movement is that it’s also rendered conservatives with the inability to distinguish between perceived and real threats to the movement. Democrats are fellow Americans, not evil child molesters and godless heathens, but you wouldn’t know that if you were listening to Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.
This also created a quarter century dearth of policy ideas and legislative accomplishments. There’s been a lot of ink spilled regarding the grift problem in the conservative ecosystem, yet if you met someone confirming all your worst fears about the evil mainstream media being in the pocket of the Democrats, wouldn’t you donate to anyone who’s willing to fight them? Just on the hope it makes a difference? Even if it there’s no actionable political outcomes? Even more time has been devoted to figuring out why Republicans abandoned their traditional beliefs and voted for a dictator approving, protectionist, isolationist, serial philanderer like Donald Trump, just because he owned the Republican brand. But how can conservatives trust a media they’ve spent 25 years being socialized into believing is unfair, untruthful, and in the pocket of a political party?
When you’ve spent such a significant part of your life believing you’re in a life or death battle for the soul of America, it’s hard to readjust your point of view. It’s the political equivalent of having shell shock. It’s why the GOP’s reelection policy is not to focus on Trump’s limited accomplishments, but rather on painting the Democrats as the standard bearers of the dreaded socialists. And so even though people hate Trump, they’re more afraid of socialism, and when the situation is life or death, why wouldn’t they take another desperate gamble on Trump? The only other option is the death of America. And the cycle will continue until conservatives start holding their own media accountable. We can clearly see this psychosis manifest in the latest scuffle between David French and Sohrab Amari, where Trumpist Republicans are even willing to give up liberty if it means “Saving America”. The only way to truly combat this psychological conditioning is to have the hard conversations in the movement about the role our media has played in suckering us.
Christian Thrailkill is a graduate of Southern Methodist University, musician, and columnist. He lives in Dallas, Texas.
