Look to the right now and you’re apt to find an alternative reality in which the same set of facts is rearranged to compose an entirely different narrative. On Fox News, host Lou Dobbs offered a representative example on Thursday night, when he described the Donald Trump Jr. email story, with wild-eyed fervor, like this: “This is about a full-on assault by the left, the Democratic Party, to absolutely carry out a coup d’état against President Trump aided by the left-wing media.”
Mr. Dobbs isn’t some wacky outlier, but rather an example of how over the last several years the conservative underworld has swallowed up and subsumed more established right-leaning outlets such as Fox News. The Breitbart mind-set — pugnacious, besieged, paranoid and determined to impose its own framework on current events regardless of facts — has moved from the right-wing fringe to the center of Republican politics.
.. “They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk-show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you.”
.. “The relationship has always been largely transactional,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Conant told RealClearPolitics this month. “Republicans in Congress can pass laws, and Trump can sign them. Therefore, it’s mutually beneficial.”
.. Another argument holds that Mr. Trump’s efforts to discredit mainstream outlets, echoed by the right-wing media, have stripped his followers of their ability to distinguish what’s real from what isn’t.
.. Culture has always been a driving obsession of the conservative underworld of Breitbart and its ilk. “Andrew was always more interested in changing the culture than he was in changing what was going on in Washington,” Steve Bannon,
.. a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now believes that colleges and universities — the flash point of our current culture wars — have a negative effect on the country. This number is up sharply from the 45 percent who agreed with this same statement last year.
.. If you’re not a Republican, watching Republicans react to the news can feel a bit like witnessing a mass hallucination.
.. There’s no guarantee that this will endure. Even on Fox News, there are scattered signs that the latest Russia developments may finally be breaking through — at least to a few folks. “This was a bungled collusion,” the Fox pundit Charles Krauthammer said the other night, noting that he had previously been sympathetic to the White House line. “It undoes the White House story completely.”
Climate change poses ‘significant risk’ to US military, report says
U.S. military officers and national security officials reportedly believe climate change pose a very real threat to U.S. military operations and could increase the danger of international conflict.
A Washington-based think tank, the Center for Climate and Security, said in a statement that climate change “presents a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security, and inaction is not a viable option.”
Want to Get Rid of Trump? Only Fox News Can Do It
For many conservatives, they support Mr. Trump because he’s their de facto leader in a cultural war. Liberals mock Christianity and demean Christian morals. Conservatives respect our police and military, while liberals romanticize street thugs. Conservatives’ tax dollars help pay for public schools and colleges that indoctrinate liberal values. Out here some conservatives aren’t even calling them “public” schools anymore. They call them “government schools,” as in, “We don’t want to pay for your damn ‘government schools.’ ” They’re afraid to send their kids to them.
.. A sergeant major in the Iowa National Guard recently overheard a pro-Trump law enforcement friend and me disagreeing about Mr. Trump. He shook his head and smiled, telling me, “Well, all I know, Bob, is that my unit’s budget just doubled.”
.. my conservative friends should ask themselves, what has President Trump accomplished that a President Mike Pence couldn’t have, without all of the drama? And what matters more: President Trump or their conservative values?
.. Mr. Hannity and other Fox hosts could provide cover for congressional Republicans to consider impeachment.
.. Right now, Mr. Hannity might have more power over an impeachment process than Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.
.. Even if the investigation turns up clear evidence of presidential misconduct, I believe it would be impossible for the party to consider impeachment without Fox’s support.
.. Yet if Fox turns, it’s inevitable. For reasons I do not understand, that network has that kind of power among most of the conservative rural voters I know.
Jamie Horowitz fired as head of Fox Sports amid reports of sexual harassment
21st Century Fox launched an investigation last week into allegations of sexual harassment, and that several women at Fox Sports have been interviewed.
.. Jamie was hired by Fox to do a job, a job that until today he has performed in an exemplary fashion. Any slanderous accusations to the contrary will be vigorously defended.”
.. “We sincerely regret and apologize for the fact that Gretchen was not treated with the respect and dignity that she and all of our colleagues deserve,” Fox said in a statement at the time.
.. Since arriving at Fox Sports in 2015, he lured controversial commentators such as
- Skip Bayless,
- Jason Whitlock and
- Colin Cowherd,
heavily promoting them across all platforms.
.. Horowitz had been a rising star at ESPN, steering programming away from news and highlights and focusing more on debate and personalities.
.. Shortly after taking the FS1 reins, he told The Washington Post he wanted programming that was “
- provocative,
- independent,
- original,
- fearless,
- blunt.”