MAJORITY RULE

Anyone who grew up with a parent or family member who was a disciple of Fox News knows the concept of “the silent majority”: the invisible group of white/Christian conservatives who secretly represent most American citizens. No matter what the truth is, Fox News tells its viewers: You are the rightful majority. And the majority always rules.

This false majority played out on a small scale in my house. There were more of the rest of us: my mother, my sister, and I. My dad (and Bill O’Reilly) belonged to another group, asserting his dominance; an exercise that also asserted his necessary victimhood.

EARLY LESSONS

At night, before I went to sleep, my dad sat at the end of my bed and asked me to recite the three branches of government and what they were for. Executive, judicial, legislative. They are the balance of powers. Having completed my assignment, he said I was much smarter than other kids. 

Starting when I was very young, I was told that I couldn’t always trust my teachers. Some of them were working for the liberal agenda. I worried about this, because I loved my teachers. It was usually clear to me when their beliefs didn’t align with what I learned at home. I feared for them—I even pitied them.

TALK RADIO

I don’t remember a time before Rush Limbaugh. When we were adults, my sister texted me one day: “omg, listen to ‘my city was gone’ by the pretenders”

The opening of “My City Was Gone” was the theme music for Rush Limbaugh’s show. This song—engrained deeply—took me back to hot summer days, home from school, trying to drown out the radio. My dad kept the radio on so loud that it could be heard from any room in the house. At times I resorted to literally covering my ears.

Rush Limbaugh was angry. It made my dad angry, too; gathered him up in rage that could last all day. When Limbaugh was given the presidential medal of freedom by Donald Trump, I had an unexpected visceral reaction. I saw no freedom in Rush Limbaugh.

And when he died, I was glad. (I should be honest. I was vindictive: “I wish hell existed, so he could rot there.”)

BLOCKHEADS

My dad referred to all Democrats as “Blockheads.” You could almost hear the capital B. Al Gore? Blockhead! Bill Clinton? BLOCKHEAD. As a child I thought I could identify a Republican versus a Democrat simply by whether or not he (always a man) looked “nice.” Certain facial features became indicators: a long, vertical face; prominent nose; Democrat / a round face; wrinkles around the eyes; Republican. My mind busily created categories that matched what I was being taught. George W. Bush looked nice. John Kerry didn’t.

(When the stakes got higher in 2008, “Blockhead” as a descriptor became quaint.)

GLOBAL WARMING

People talked hesitantly about climate change when I was a kid, which we then called global warming. My dad was angry that they’d shown us An Inconvenient Truth in school. He told me it was all liberal propaganda. The earth warmed and cooled naturally, and humans had no impact.

This soothed my existential dread. I didn’t want the world to end. I was sad for the polar bears. I didn’t know how I could do anything to fix it. How nice to be told there was nothing to fix. 

But the dismissal did seem awfully convenient, even then.

RELIGIOUS VALUES

There was little religion in our “conservative values” because there was no religion in our house. We didn’t go to church or read the bible. My dad still espoused religious views (one nation under God; always say Merry Christmas) because he repeated what was said on Fox News. But since those values didn’t carry through into our daily life, they became obvious to me as contradictions. Why say Merry Christmas exclusively, when we never prayed, or even mentioned Jesus beyond curses? I wanted my friends who didn’t celebrate Christmas to have a nice holiday. What about New Year’s? “Happy Holidays” covered every possibility, so why not use it? And when a religious person wished me a Merry Christmas, I was quite aware that my Christmas was not the same thing. 

CAPTIVE AUDIENCE

My dad’s footsteps on the stairs meant that he was, whether I liked it or not, going to tell me about a Fox News segment he had finished watching moments before. For some reason, I got into the habit of hastily putting away whatever I was doing when I heard him approach.

The most consistent captivity was the car ride on the way to school. We would get in the car, and for the first several minutes listen to deadening commercials on the radio in silence. In a habit that I never understood, my dad would wait until a song finally started to play before he reached out, turned down the volume, and delivered his diatribe. I developed a pattern of irrational anger whenever someone tried to talk to me while I was listening to music, which persisted into my adulthood. 

VILLAINS

Certain names and phrases were imbued with dread. Nancy Pelosi. Harry Reid. Government handouts. The ACLU. I didn’t even know what “ACLU” stood for. I just knew they were evil. 

The most notorious villain: Barack Obama. A strange shock when the people I met in college talked in casually positive ways about Barack Obama, like it wasn’t even a question. The emotional associations of his name ran so deep. In reality, I knew nothing about him. Except the birthplace scandal, his middle name. That he was a “community organizer,” poor qualifications, apparently, for the president of the United States (this was shockingly hypocritical by 2016, of course). He would be like Hitler.

Such a horrific day when he won in 2008. I was fifteen. My dad raged and then cried. The world was ending. It was over.

In 2012, I was nineteen and voting for the first time. I knew I was not conservative. And yet. I could not bring myself to vote for Barack Obama. Since I couldn’t vote for Mitt Romney either, I voted third party. I was glad Obama won, but the psychological prejudice still reverberated; prevented me from checking the box.

After 2016, I saw a man every day on the subway with a backpack covered in pins and photographs of Barack Obama and his family. Faded with age. Seeing him sent me back to my own experience in 2008. Turns out the end of the world is a pretty subjective thing. 

IMMIGRATION

My dad lectured us with all of the common propaganda about immigration available on Fox News. But there was a problem: we lived in a city with a huge population of immigrants from Mexico. My dad would say to us, “If you come to America, you have to speak English!” And then I would see tons of signs written in Spanish all over my city. My schools had more students of color than white students. Many of my peers were bilingual, and I watched them help their families navigate an English-dominated system. My dad told me at home that Mexican immigrants were lazy criminals who were stealing American jobs (somehow simultaneously?). Were all my Mexican peers “aliens”? I could not possibly reconcile these two realities without keeping them separate. As a very young kid, that’s what I did.

A telling diary entry from 2005, when I was twelve years old. I found a flyer on a desk at school about a protest in solidarity with Mexican immigrants. According to previous entries, protests had been going on all week around the city, and most people at my school were passionately in support of them. I taped the flyer in my journal, and wrote underneath:

I don’t understand. It says bring your American flags, but don’t they march with Mexican flags?

I had been taught that Mexican immigrants were not Americans; that they had no interest in being Americans. This was not what immigrants said. 

AFTER 9/11

On September 11, 2001, I was eight years old. We lived on the West coast, so when I woke up early in the morning, New York was already on TV. I watched the second tower fall. 

My dad’s lectures in the following months were about Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. Justice: that was the simple fact of the matter. Justice must be swift and severe. He told me that if I ever encountered Osama bin Laden, the evil man would kill me on the spot. He didn’t care that I was a little girl. He would kill me just because I was American. When I imagined being murdered by Osama bin Laden, he lived in a palace.

I had a nightmare. The news was on. I was very familiar with the geography of a newscast. A pundit wearing a suit, some text on the right side in a box, and a running line of text at the bottom. All of a sudden, the newscaster hooked his fingers under his chin and pulled off his face. He’d been wearing a mask. Under the mask was Osama bin Laden. He was sobbing. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” he screamed, pounding his fists on the desk.

DOUBTS

You do begin to have doubts. The first real clash my dad and I had was about marriage equality. I was seventeen and believed in supporting LGBTQ+ rights. We argued in the kitchen.

“I don’t have a problem with gay people, I just think marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

“That’s your problem with gay people, Dad.”

I was still unsure about every other important issue. It seemed unlikely to me that so many people I respected and loved (friends, teachers, writers, famous people) could be unilaterally wrong. It seemed especially unlikely—given the sheer number of well-educated people on the formless concept I had of the “Left”—that all of them could be brainwashed. It felt like I had no outlet for real understanding, despite people all around me who could have answered my questions. Ultimately, I didn’t want to ask. I was desperately afraid of being stupid and wrong.

The ideology is not meant to foster any discourse or curiosity. Every issue comes down to the same recycled “truth”: they are un-American. A purposely isolating belief system. If you don’t trust anyone enough to ask the question, then you will never know the answer.

Ignorance is not always bliss. Anxiety and fear is often produced by ignorance, not soothed by it. 

RECORDING AND HOARDING

My dad’s favorite hobby was his video camera, which he kept on my sister and I constantly.

Sometimes he would make us redo our movements. Something about what he’d captured didn’t reflect what he’d seen.“Can you just go back to what you were doing a minute ago?” We begged him to stop. Especially begged him not to bring the video camera to our school (ultimate preteen embarrassment). He refused—claiming that we would appreciate his efforts later when we could watch the videos as adults.

I doubt I will ever see these images. One: technology changes since the early 2000s will make watching them impossible without time-consuming conversions to modern digital files. Two: my dad was a hoarder not only of memories but of physical objects. It probably won’t be easy to find the tapes.

But I can empathize with my dad about this. I see how he wanted to preserve the moment, to keep proof of us as children. I share a tendency to accumulate evidence of my life. My early diaries include catalogs of names, dates, events, photos… things I wrote down and taped in because forgetting seemed like a terrible fate. These details are less interesting to my adult self than I thought they’d be.

The drive to keep things seems to be born from the fear of scarcity rather than the hope of posterity. Recording and hoarding are attempts to package up life, control it, and prevent it from changing (but of course, this only creates the appearance of staying the same).

A LIBERAL EDUCATION

When I was a senior in high school, my dad signed up—using my name without my permission—for application materials from a “classical” liberal arts school in the Midwest. He knew that I loved to read and wanted to study journalism, but was terrified that I would go East and be brainwashed by radical professors. This school was his answer to that threat. I could study humanities with the moral basis of the Great Books and “America’s Founding Principles.”

I didn’t consider that college. In a way, his worst nightmare did come true, with an important distinction: my first teachers were my women peers. But his assumption that my mind would be clay in the hands of liberal authority figures speaks to an important part of Fox News’s message. There is power and purpose bestowed on the viewer, even while claiming the role of the victim. A daughter, undoubtedly worthy of love, can not possibly dissent unless her good sense has been polluted. Her dissent doesn’t need to be taken seriously or even considered at all. It becomes the father’s duty to exert his rightful supremacy (granted by Fox News) and protect his daughter’s impressionable mind.

Later, I wondered if my belief that people were manipulated by Fox News was just the other side of the same thin argument. But the entire metaphor depends on a more subliminal distortion: a belief that brains exist in some pure form, waiting to be enlightened or corrupted. Really, our brains are like clay; formed and reformed by the messages we put into them and the experiences we have.

So rather than argue about who compromised whose purity of mind, we should ask: What kinds of messages do we listen to? How do we want to feel?

ANGER

I’m concerned by the power I give to Fox News even as I oppose it. The concern leads me to work and rework my writing. Is this for watchers of Fox News? Am I trying to persuade them against a bad habit? Should I attempt philosophical arguments about those beliefs? In some versions I try this, but the arguments fall flat. The mostly likely readership will not need to be convinced.

So is this for people who don’t watch Fox News? Is it supposed to make them feel virtuous? Or sorry for my dad, sorry for me? Should I explain why my dad was the ideal victim of the right-wing media machine? Should I further describe his controlling and intrusive behaviors? In other versions, I do, but it seems hollow; it doesn’t feel like the full picture of who he was. (I remember asking, very young: “Dad, when you die, if you find out that God exists, will you try to tell me?” “Yes,” he said gravely. “I promise.”)

Mostly the writing makes me angry. But anger gives away to other emotions. Hopeless, ineffectual—that’s the deeper feeling. My life isn’t mine. There is nothing I can do. Everything is constantly barreling toward something even worse. My anger shifts to despair, and I write nothing.

COPING AND HOPING  

The standard Fox News-abiding person might be seen as a cultural control freak. They are determined not only to avoid change, but to retract all unfortunate changes that have occurred so far, presumably back to 1776 (or at least 1950). The rollback of these changes is triggered by fear that their influence as a “no-nonsense” white Christian is waning. Which, of course, proves the point: if being a minority is no big deal, then why are they so worried about becoming one?

But my experience of Fox News was not quite standard. My dad’s entire life was in total contradiction with the values he claimed to uphold. I was told he had not always been like this. I tried to psychoanalyze it (a deep inferiority complex? bad coping with a narcissistic wound? negligent parenting?). I tried to find the answer.

Return to the actual events. What happened? My dad had to drive a lot. He didn’t have FM in the truck. He didn’t work during the day, so he could listen to daytime radio. One day he turned on Rush Limbaugh. Rush Limbaugh said: Do you feel bad? My dad thought, Yes. Rush Limbaugh said: This is why. And the message builds the world.

What can we do besides send other messages? Clear an alternative path, which anyone might turn down, should they come across it? Or a million alternative paths, as many as we can build, so there are lots of new ways to go?  

A CONSPIRACY THEORY

Is it surprising to consider that this right-wing media thing is not a conspiracy? No one is pulling the wool over people’s eyes. There are no wiretap recordings, waiting to be exposed, of the various media men admitting what they’ve gotten away with.

You can read selections from Roger Ailes’s memo to Nixon titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News” online whenever you want. More than enough people have revealed the hypocritical bullshit, the willful ignorance, the straight-up lies.

It doesn’t need to be a secret if no one goes looking for the truth anyway. The people who ultimately benefit from Fox News are probably indifferent to the suffering outside their spheres. They are probably indifferent to pretty much everything—wealth frees them from the imperative to care. Is there a way for this to be hopeful? The task is not to save the world. There is no villain to defeat and no obvious climb to swift, severe justice.

We have never really been silent, and “majority” is a useless designation. There is only our time and we spend it. There are only questions and how we answer them.

How do we want to speak? How do we want to feel?

Emily O’Kane is a writer in New York City, but can often be found on a train somewhere between Boston and Philadelphia.