A Generation Lost To Fox News

Edwin Lyngar discusses how he lost his father to conservative rage via Fox News. Thrashing hysteria indeed. Some of the highlights.

I enjoyed Fox News for many years, as a libertarian and frequent Republican voter. I used to share many, though not all, of my father’s values, but something happened over the past few years. As I drifted left, the white, Republican right veered into incalculable levels of conservative rage, arriving at their inevitable destination with the creation of the Tea Party movement.

Incalculable levels of conservative rage...I wonder if he has ever checked out any right wing blogs:)

I don’t recall my father being so hostile when I was growing up. He was conservative, to be sure, but conventionally and thoughtfully so. He is a kind and generous man and a good father, but over the past five or 10 years, he’s become so conservative that I can’t even find a label for it. What has changed? He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.

I was the same way when I watched Fox News after 9-11. They thrive on anger and fear but it's not just them. Conservative media as a whole is patterned after the Fox model.

Truly, this is a sad piece. As Lyngar notes, his father's generation are "a wounded and thrashing legacy of white hegemony." This is why they act the way they do. They are afraid.