"I've gotten older and gained my own political views, and he's become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it's really further radicalized him in a lot of ways."
Explaining to the Star that Lester was caught up in "a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia," Ludwig added:
"And then the NRA pushing the 'stand your ground' stuff and that you have to defend your home. When I heard what happened, I was appalled and shocked that it transpired, but I didn't disbelieve that it was true. The second I heard it, I was like, 'Yeah, I could see him doing that.'"
Lester had been mainlining the heroin of hate for hours ever day, his grandson said:
"He was fully into that, he'd watch Fox News all day, every day, blaring in his living room."
It took a toll on the old man's mental health. And reinforced the hateful worldview so many white men grew up with in early 20th century America when the Klan was openly represented in Congress.
"I believe that there have been some positions that he's held that have been bigoted or sort of disparaging," Ludwig told the Star. "But it's stock Fox News, conservative American stuff. It's 'anybody who gets an abortion is a murderer.' And 'fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.' It's stuff everybody's heard at the Thanksgiving table every year."
On MSNBC's Morning Joe program yesterday, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough laid out exactly the heroin-like power of Fox "News":
"It is deadly, and it is by design. " And when I talk about this hyper-individualism that has taken shape in America, that lack of trust, that lack of community that binds societies together, this didn't just happen 'because': this happened as a direct result of a strategy by groups like the NRA and people like Glenn Beck and others that would get on television and tell people every day that the government is coming to get you. "
"We talk about Fox 'News,' they have told their viewers over the past six months that marines and members of the Army are coming in the same helicopters they used in Afghanistan to kill people who voted for Donald Trump. " This has been a deliberate plan for 25 years!"
I wrote Wednesday about people like Ashli Babbitt and other insurrectionists who believed Fox "News" and, as a direct result, ended up dead or in prison. Just like Oxycontin addicts who break into pharmacies and end up in jail or dead from gunfights with police.
As Scarborough so elegantly said, this is deliberate. And it's being done to make billions of dollars for the Murdoch family and other rightwing media moguls, just like the Sackler family profited off selling Oxycontin to unsuspecting Americans.
Rupert Murdoch is now the 73rd richest man on the planet, having turned hate and fear into a commodity he then peddled for decades across three different English-speaking nations, overturning administrations, encouraging the UK to separate from the European Union, and ripping apart the fabric of each of those country's societies.
So, what do we do?
Social media, hate-talk radio, and television aren't pharmaceuticals that can be regulated by the FDA or DEA. And because they traffic in speech, protected by the First Amendment, they can't be shut down or removed from the airwaves.
But to continue to exist and profit from peddling fear and hate, they must continue to enjoy a societal consensus that they're legitimate parts of the American media landscape. Without that, they're reduced to an Alex Jones-level "subculture" status like the John Birch Society was for so many years in the US and the Klan is today.
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