I Was Plugged Into The Fear Machine For Ten Minutes

Last night in a Stamford, Connecticut hotel room – one with a full sized blow-drier, which is nice – I flipped through TV channels in the last moments before my eyelids grew too heavy to resist and stopped at Fox News, as a treat.

It was more like an experiment. I used to occasionally watch Fox News during the George W. Bush era to get a feel for what the right was fretting about, or what they planned, as if it really mattered, as if I could somehow stop the entire right-wing cultural apparatus bearing down on us like a high speed train from hell. Back then, Fox controlled the entire Republican Party. The network doesn't have that sway today, which is somehow worse considering the even more extreme outlets now shaping conservative culture.

When I stopped and watched Fox for ten minutes last night, the spectacle was some mixture of sad, comical, and deeply confusing.

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There was a substitute host for Sean Hannity and the guy was calling last night episode's a Special Edition of the Hannity show. How it was special was never specified, but I suppose if baby boomers – trained from a young age to pay deference to the television – hear "special episode," they perk up.

The segment I watched included Senator Lindsey Graham raving about "two fighting age males from the Mideast" being arrested at CIA headquarters or something. This was treated as the biggest story in the land. I couldn't figure out why anyone should care all that much about two dudes being arrested for what may or may not be espionage, but it seemed pretty damn important to Graham – his jowls swaying as he got worked up about these two "fighting age" men – and to the guest host of the show, who ended the segment by asking Graham if he would have thought on September 12, 2001 that the United States would be allowing immigrants into the country ever again. I don't recall that specific discourse in the months and years after September 11. Then again, I didn't jam the right-wing news plug into my cortex back then.

The show ended with the Hannity host throwing it to a large blonde man at the California-Mexico border. In panicked tones, the "reporter" talked about long lines of people waiting to enter the US from Mexico, seeking asylum. He then went down a line of these bedraggled asylum seekers – almost entirely men – and asked their country of origin.

A bunch of the men said India, some said Pakistan, some said Honduras and Argentina and Venezuala. They were all polite while this Fox News reporter shone a light in their faces and demanded to know where they were coming from. The reporter eventually got to a man who said he was from Iran; the reporter stopped in his tracks and looked back at the camera. We got one, his look seemed to say.

Why, the reporter asked, would you come to the US from Iran? The asylum seeker, a meek young man with a cascade of black hair, said he sought refuse in American because he was not free in Iran.

"No freedom," he said into the microphone shoved in his face. "No freedom for song or for art. No freedom for thought," he said, pointing to his head.

Another man chimed in: "We only seek freedom."

The Fox reporter, perhaps expecting the man to break into a "Death to America" chant, was silent. He knew he had engendered sympathy for men he had been assigned to provoke and vilify before millions of Fox viewers. These freedom-seeking men had humanized themselves before an audience that has been training to have pavlovian hate for anyone seeking refuge in the US. The Fox viewer, for once, got to see what an actual, real life asylum seeker looks like. It is not someone who deserves scorn and ridicule, but protection and basic rights and yes, love.

Host and correspondent unsure what to do with such a human moment and audience fear levels falling to unacceptably low levels, the screen quickly turned to armed young men scrambling in a desert somewhere far away.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.