Maybe We The People should file a class-action suit against FOX News for its malicious influence on our society.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
Since October 7, 1996, hundreds of millions of the people we love and live alongside have been hourly exposed to a corrosive, cancerous toxin that has rendered them shells of the people they were before. We all have the stories of the people we’ve lost and the moments we realized they’d been polluted.
A couple of years ago, my family and I walked into an older relative’s house unannounced. They’d been expecting us that day from out of town, but we’d arrived thirty minutes earlier than we’d planned, so we knocked lightly and walked in. The small TV on the kitchen counter was playing Fox News.
When one of them came down the stairs, almost in the middle of greeting us, our relative walked hurriedly over to the sink, grabbed the remote, and turned off the TV, looking like a teenager caught watching porn by their parents.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
All the dots connected.
Over the last couple of years, we’d noticed this couple changing. They’d become more and more outspoken on things like immigration and women’s reproductive rights and police shootings, surprising us with the intolerance and cruelty of off-the-cuff comments that seemed out of character for them. We questioned whether we were just being overly sensitive or projecting our fears onto them.
But after the surprise peek into their viewing habits, it was clear: they were merely following the script. They’d been pulled into the false story. The indoctrination had begun. The poison had taken hold.
Now, we could rewind over the previous months and see all the alarmist talking points in their words at family gatherings and on social media: open borders letting in floods of dark-skinned rapists, baby-killing Democrats coming to take their guns, terrorist Muslims bringing our demise, Transgender perverts lurking in public restrooms, and violent black men threatening police at traffic stops.
Their growing tolerance for cruelty suddenly made sense.
Their social media feeds became increasingly littered with fictional horror stories about vaccine dangers, LGBTQ people converting their children, space lasers, and immigrants eating pets: the kind of garbage they’d have easily spotted and rejected before.
The moral alteration in an unthinkable expanse of people who call this place home has been stunning in its velocity and stomach-turning in its depths, and the worst part is that we can’t reach them in the ways reasonable human beings can be reached. Before Fox News, Franklin Graham, and MAGA propaganda, we could meet the people around us on the common ground of our shared faith in Jesus, our respect for the Constitution, the clarity of objective truth, or shared compassion for vulnerable people. Now, they no longer have use or tolerance for such things.
The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ counter-cultural, counterintuitive manifesto of humility, gentleness, and love, has been replaced by venomous, incendiary Sean Hannity supremacist propaganda and Laura Ingraham white fear porn.
The barrier-breaking, table-expanding hospitality of Christ has morphed into sneering Trump rally rant rhetoric about violent illegals and foreign predators, and callous “build that wall” refrains.
These people used to know better. They were good-hearted, generous human beings who aspired to love their neighbors. They flatly rejected bigotry and defended vulnerable communities. They were people I could count on for rational, level-headed decency. They once instantly recognized men like Donald Trump as the antithesis of Jesus
But this is what happens when decent, intelligent people become radicalized: they get polluted by the things they watch and the sermons they sit through and the nonsense they read, and they surround themselves with an echo chamber made of equally deluded, equally terrified people, until one day they are the hateful extremists that they always used to warn you about.
Those of us who’ve lost people we love to this curated pestilence should file a class-action suit against Fox News for thirty years of malpractice and murder: for the relationships they’ve destroyed, the deaths they’ve been complicit in, the betrayal of the public trust, and for purposefully killing the goodness in human beings who will never be who they might have been otherwise.
We’ll never know exactly how our nation or the people around us would be different had this venom never been allowed into our systems, but it would have been a hell of a lot more compassionate, loving, and equitable. It would be a whole lot closer to anything resembling greatness.
It’s infuriating to know that right now, in nursing home common rooms, in car repair waiting rooms, on kitchen countertop TVs, and in the palms of their hands, they are being unrelentingly eaten alive, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it and rescue them.
I still love my relatives, my former church members, my high school friends, and my neighbors, but I grieve what has happened to them. I lament the poisoning of their once-soft hearts, the way Jesus has been all but squeezed out of their religion. I fear that they’ll never fully recover from the corrosive narrative that has been continually injected into their brains about the world and about disparate people and about the expansive, lavish, audacious love Jesus calls us to extend.
I only hope these moms and ministers and nurses and schoolteachers and football coaches and favorite relatives get a truer story or meet someone who wakes them up, or that they rediscover Jesus enough that they change the channel, turn off the TV, escape this hateful cult, and find the truth that truly sets them free:
Hatred is a waste.
Empathy is the antidote.
The world is bigger than America.
We are our brother’s keeper.
Kindness is the better path.
If they’re going to join a cult, I wish it were that kind.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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