Indeed.  While Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Savage scream for the blood of liberals, abortionists, “elites,” gays, etc. each day, certain members of these groups keep coincidentally turning up dead, as the DHS predicted, and no one seems to be able to add two and two, even when every perpetrator parrots different versions of these luminaries’ words to justify their actions, and are avowed fans of their ideology.  For certain groups of people, being murdered by hateful losers who watch FOX is leaping forward as a cause of death, while Bill and Glenn brag about their ratings.  Who advertises on such programs?  Gun stores?  Bail bondsmen? Criminal lawyers?  Oh, and the Depends account as a fallback.

The conspiracies, growing like kudzu in the right-wing media, have joined with our Republican-created economic collapse to create a perfect parafascist moment: fear and uncertainty incessantly blamed on a host of Others, the only answer for which is the other’s speedy elimination.  Doesn’t matter which other, really…  Focus groups can tell you whether gays, guns, God, immigrants or whatever will scare and mobilize the most people in a given market, and loads of corporate money will take the rubes’ eye off the ball while the cash drawer is dumped.  It’s a great system, like the financial one they invented to go with it;  the problem is that they both work really well until they don’t, and when they don’t, it’s too late to keep the shit from hitting the fan.

Like it is now.  FOX, being a business organization as well as a propaganda outlet, has known for some time that it had lost the great majority of the possible market with its hectoring jingoism, parroted GOP hogwash, and abysmal journalistic standards, but hell, it’s only cable.  You can be #1 in that pond with an aging quarter or so of the viewing public, particularly if you make that group proud of the prejudices, hatred, and phobias that had always rightly embarrassed them before.  Nixon showed us that there is a core of authoritarian and bigoted, insecure Americans who are utterly impervious to facts, and indeed grow in loyalty when the rest of the world recoils in horror.

Way back in 1968, Nixon only dared to send Spiro out to say anything close to what FOX says every day, but he was actually trying to get reelected; a contest that includes input from the non-crazy, too.  Roger Ailes, the creepy Svengali who sold us the “New” Nixon, understands the difference, all these years later.  And as then, doesn’t give a damn about what happens when he “succeeds.”

Racism, xenophobia, and a desire to eliminate the “enemy within” are nothing new, and although they can no longer elect a President, they can still “make a difference,” as the recent (and ongoing) unpleasantness is showing us.