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Comment by sixothree | Hacker News Reader

Fox News happened.

Maybe. I feel like I watched live on 4chan as Trump was presented as a joke and then true believers started posting as well. Maybe 4chan was documenting the phenomenon but it always felt like it willed it into existence like it did q-anon.

My similar take is that the edgy 4 Chan users were just kids who grew up in Fox viewing households.

They willed into existence the propaganda that had been bathing them since birth.

It's probably multiple factors at play.

Look up the pied piper "strategy" that Dems used to intentionally elevate Trump, exposed by wikileaks.

It's not "maybe". As someone who born in Hungary, and have been experiencing our lovely full blown fascist propaganda longer than it became mainstream in the US, Fox News is definitely worse than our main propaganda channel. I was "lucky" to watch it in February, when I was there, and it's pure hate. I cannot imagine that anybody who don't switch channels quite quickly is not an asshole at this point. You cannot bear that shit if you are not a dickhead.

I understand that it was slowly normalized, and people don't realize this. But right now on an absolute scale, you have to be pure assholes. Similar thing happened in Hungary, but our government never went to this low as Fox News does.

Also looking at right wing pundits' Twitter, there are usually two types of tweets: non-whites making some illegal activities, or stupid; and whites are suppressed. It was funny when Charlie Kirk died and his Twitter account until that point for at least a month contained only, and seriously only these kind of tweets, and it was a question whether he was racist, or not... After his death, Musk definitely pushed the normalization, because my right wing account over there started to be really crazy with these kind of tweets.

And social media. Trump is the social media president.

This. Mark Zuckerberg is uniquely responsible for this. World went to shit when he figured out how profitable it was to platform outrage.

Careless People (the book about Facebook from a rogue insider) has literally a through line about all of this. Zuck is responsible and knew, both times.

Right wing media and Newt Gingrich have really done a number on this country.

Fox News has never cared about Greenland, and was energetically anti-Trump during the 2016 primary, most of his 1st term, during the Biden presidency, and during the 2024 primary. They're almost fully in the bag for him right now, but hate tariffs.

But even now, Fox News refused to sign on to the new Pentagon press pass requirements, and gave up their access.

Important things are going on. It's not good to mindlessly repeat tropes; we have to actually engage with the world as it is.

It's not about Fox News pushing the Greenland annexation bullshit, it's for everything else they did to be a mouthpiece to spread the "libs are bad!". These acts have a direct link to the power Trump amassed.

Refusing the Pentagon prrss requirements is a nothingburger when for the past 10-15 years it brainrotted a large cohort of the American population.

Fox news is also chill with their hosts calling for mass-extermination of undesirables on their channel. That is mainstream right wing in 2026.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8

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