[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: One of the themes of the talking we’ve been doing for the past nine years is that Republicans in America just keep getting worse. I think we’ve used the analogy of a black hole that in traditional black hole theory, you reach a point where the gravitational attraction in the collapsing matter is strong enough to overcome any other force and at that point nothing slows it down from then on and all the matter collapses into roughly a point in space. It’s a similar process with Republican pundits and leaders and people who are on the right word chunk of Republicans that there’s nothing stopping them from just collapsing into worse and worse badness. We’re not at the point of full-on fascism. I mean the odds that we have something like Nazi Germany or fascist Italy happen is still low for a couple reasons.
One is, we have the examples of the 20th century to remind people of what could happen. Two is, there’s just so many means of sharing information so that the cause of a lot of this collapse which is people lunatics and idiots and just regular folks being hit with a fire hose of messaging that deranges them because it’s not the sophistication of the messaging that makes people crazy, it’s the frequency of getting hit with messaging. Initially the Cambridge Analytica stuff was like “Oh, people are getting characterized and profiled with such precision that they’re getting hit with these messages that are tailored to mess with their minds.” It says, “No, people are being divided into like five different silos, they’re not being precisely profiled but once they’re in a silo then they get hit with a thousand messages a day,” and that’s the problem but it’s also the solution to some extent because everybody else can exchange a gazillion messages and track all this bullshit and get irated at the bullshit that’s happening and make sure that everybody’s aware of it.
You’re tending to horses a lot and not following American politics. Immediately after the election talk in November 2020, Fox News attacked Dominion Voting Systems as part of their attack on the legitimacy of the election. Fox News along with other right-wing media and Trump himself and a bunch of Republican politicians said the election was stolen, that Trump, the best president ever, couldn’t have lost the election legitimately. And among the attack was an attack on this company called Dominion Voting Systems, saying that they have these machines that could be rigged and were rigged to stop Trump from winning. Dominion Voting Systems sent turns out Fox 3600 debunking emails. They just constantly sent Fox emails and tried to contact them in other ways saying we didn’t have any voting machines in this election and you’re destroying our business and what you’re saying isn’t true at all.
So eventually that turned into a 1.6 billion dollar loss defamation lawsuit against Fox and this past week Dominion released a redacted version of a 211 page filing for summary judgment in the case which is almost never done by a plaintiff. Summary judgment is this thing that gets used increasingly in the American legal system where very few legal actions actually go to trial before a jury. They usually end before that and one of the means usually used by defendants is to file for summary judgment where you argue that given the facts of the case, there is no way that a non-insane jury, a reasonable jury could find any way but this way. You’re saying that the facts are so persuasive and so they prove your case to such an extent that you don’t need a jury trial because there’s no way that a jury could find other than the way we’re saying and the defendants usually say that.
Fox filed their own summary judgment in this thing. But Dominion filed this 200 plus page thing with all these redacted, not all of it should be for public consumption but Dominion said a lot of it should be for public consumption because the facts are so damning. And the facts are that they had hundreds of pages showing that Fox knew full well Hannity and Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson, all knew and were emailing each other and calling each other and eventually giving depositions in which they said yes we knew that the claims of election fraud were fake; that we couldn’t say it on air because we were afraid of losing our viewers.
Scot Douglas Jacobsen: That’s crazy.
Rosner: It’s fucking crazy and also there was an essay on Salon, the website today, where it argued that not only did Fox know it was bullshit and couldn’t say so because they don’t want to lose their viewers but the viewers themselves knew it was bullshit and didn’t care and just wanted to keep being told it because it made them feel better. So, this is where we are with Republicans and truth now. There’s no downside to lying. It’s like being a sports fan where you want your team to win by any means necessary. And it’s a fucking mess.
Jacobsen: Nightmare.
Rosner: Yeah and it’s very addicting for me where I don’t know if this is on purpose or what Elon Musk is showing himself to be very right wing and also kind of a charlatan. It’s like if you took Trump and replaced real estate with science and technology, you’d have Musk but one smart thing he did was to feed liberals like me all the feeds from Mike Pompeo, Lauren Bobert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Tucker Carlson himself. Tucker’s tweets show up in my feed and I can’t break myself away from just saying something shitty right back to him every time I get one of their tweets. It’s addicting because it’s infuriating and also my fucking traffic has gone up tenfold, 20-fold just from me saying shitty things back to these lying motherfuckers. It’s a fucking mess.
Another thing saving is from fascism is that these fuckers are pretty inept. They failed to succeed in their coup in 2020 and the hope of everybody is if they get called out enough, decent people will show up and vote. Another thing, Tucker Carlson; huge liar, proven liar… the speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy said that he would release all 41,000 hours of video of the attack on the Capitol on January 6th if he became speaker so that people could make their own judgments. So today or yesterday he announced that he’s doing that but only to Tucker Carlson and then Tucker Carlson will pick and choose clips among the 41,000 hours that will make it look like it wasn’t so bad and that it was an inside job from the FBI and Democrats and again more blatant lies. So that’s where we’re at.
The fear is all it takes is one bad election where you get a bunch of people who are willing to throw out all the rules and you’ve got something like Germany in 1933 when Hitler wasn’t really winning elections, he just won enough of a presence in the whatever you call Germany’s government at the time, to get his hands on the levers of government and he shut all the protections for democracy there down. So I don’t think we’re there yet and I don’t think we’ll ever be there but it’s not a zero percent chance that we won’t get there.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 