Let’s Talk About Fox

First and foremost, if you didn’t see Jon Stewart talk about the drastic ‘liberal’ turn FOX News has taken of late, watch the clip below. Trust me, it’s worth your time.

I’ve had a problem with Fox’s coverage of politics for a while, and not just because they’re conservatives. It’s fine to disagree with the policies of the government – that’s why we have the First Amendment. One should be able to voice their opinion without fear of harm in a free country. However, while I can tolerate a difference of opinion, I have a very different feeling over what has been highlighted here, albeit in a very comedic way.

Fox News is full of hypocrites.

When there was a Republican in the office of the president, an attack on that president’s policies were unpatriotic, stupid, and possibly an indication of a terrorist frame of mind. Now that a Democrat is in office, it is clearly the duty of a fine, upstanding American citizen to point out how socialist, racist or fascist their policies are, especially if a given policy is all three at once. Expanding the amount of wiretaps put on Americans isn’t fascist if it’s a Republican claiming to protect the country, but trying to fix what’s wrong with health care is clearly fascist because it takes money away from people who have growing piles of it.

When last I checked, this was a country with a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” To me, that means that everybody contributes or even sacrifices for the betterment of the country as a whole. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” proclaims the Statue of Liberty. There’s no stipulations to that – no color restrictions or religious bias or base income requirements. Now, that might be considered a socialist frame of mind by some, but in my opinion, those who consider a tendency towards charity and goodwill to those less fortunate as socialist are more fascist than they realize.

Fascism, after all, a political ideology that follows the same lines as Darwinist evolutionary theory: “Only the strong survive.” In a free market economy, this could be interpreted as “Only the rich survive.” Instead of promoting the rise of an Aryan race, a lot of conservatives talk about not “spreading the wealth around” and letting the rich hold onto their assets while the poor wither and die in obscurity and silence. They’d be quite pleased if the disenfranched simply ceased to exist, though I’m sure they wouldn’t say “put the homeless in concentration work camps” out loud. Fascist societies of the past saw abortion as a crime against the state, opposed homosexuality, and spread propaganda through media domination and scare tactics. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies, the disenfranchised need help to get back on their feet, and every citizen of a free country should have access to health care without worrying about extravagant bills or obfuscatory ideas such as “pre-existing conditions.” These, to me, are not opinions, but rather moral imperatives. And if that makes me a socialist, I’ll start speaking Russian and eating more borscht.

But I know for a fact I won’t be saying things to contradict those imperatives four years from now. Unlike some people.