Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

by Clay McLeod Chapman

Fax News took Noah’s parents away. You know their stupid slogan: Just the Fax—cheekily misspelled in some outdated Reagan-era wisecrack. This right-wing propaganda machine masquerading as a twenty-four-hour news network had been reprogramming his parents for years. Years.

He’d laugh with half the country if his own mom and dad weren’t drinking the goddamn ultraconservative Kool-Aid.

Their chyron flashes BREAKING NEWS, but isn’t news always breaking nowadays? Isn’t the news all broken by now? Smashed to bits?

No war at all. Just aimless anger. Anger at what they’re doing in the public schools. Anger at the libraries. Anger at vaccination mandates. Anger at—at— Jesus, anger at just about everything.

Anderson Cooper made him feel stupid. Fax didn’t make him feel stupid. Fax just made him feel.

Doesn’t the loudest person in the room always draw the most focus? Isn’t it the biggest, brassiest, most booming voice that wins an argument? It didn’t matter who was right. It was all about who had your attention. Fax News had had Asher’s undivided attention for fifteen minutes now.

That anger embeds itself into your very soul, his mom always said. A spiteful seed. It will grow inside you, if you’re not careful. Take root. Before you know it, whatever that anger is, it’ll become a part of you…and then it just gets harder to uproot. Anger is a weed.

Fax News Brain. It’s spreading. It’s communicable. Mad cow disease for conservatives.

Dad still believed in a system. That father put his faith in the idea that his family was protected by the time-honored safeguards of the old world.

This is not a zombie outbreak. Get all those goddamn movies out of your mind. This is not an infection. It is not viral. Not in a COVID cough-cough kind of way. This is like some…some…I don’t know. Some sort of social plague. Large groups of people throughout the United States are banding together in some messed-up mob mentality. They have collectively lost their goddamn minds.

There’s a kind of groupthink going on here. A thought or an idea has spread from one person to the next. A meme for the mind. Once that thought locks in, these people…they can’t unthink it. It just keeps looping around their brain, repeating itself. It’s like their mind is on autopilot while this thought hijacks their body.

don’t have anything to corroborate this with yet, nobody’s confirmed this, but…well, it seems like the people primarily affected by whatever are…are…Caucasian. Fax News Brain. That’s what we’re—I’m—calling it. Literal brain rot.

They have been slowly corrupting the souls of our friends and neighbors for so long. They prayed to a false prophet they found on their television, their cell phones. They let them in… Now it’s up to us to cast them back out.

spreads…Now they have control over the images on your screen. The talking heads on your TV. The pundits. The health food gurus. The TikTokers. YouTubers. Every face onscreen is theirs to manipulate.

The daily bath of BS eventually rewires your brain until you welcome your own demon inside.

They isolate you from your loved ones. Tell you what to do. Prepare your body by performing meme challenges. Change your diet. Juice cleanses with mysterious ingredients.

Ironic, isn’t it? The type of world Fax constantly warned your conservative mother and father about, night after night—pumping that paranoia into your parents—is now happening…Cities are full of violence, riots in the streets, rampant with crime and chaos. The right-wing prophesy actually came true, only…it’s not Antifa in the streets. It’s them, our parents, who are attacking.

You guessed it: Half—more than half—of the people in charge of the U.S. are possessed, too. This wasn’t just your parents brainwashed by Fax News. This is top brass. This is the president. This is everyone.

“Their mother was one of them,” he says. “Been stuck on that wellness crap. Saw her slip before our very eyes and didn’t do a damn thing about it when I had a chance.”

“You think this happened overnight? You think this country just went bad now?” This father pulls down his bandana. He’s chewing through his anger, ready to spit it out. “Now you’re paying attention. Where the hell have you been the last ten years? Fifty years?”

“This ain’t new. It’s just new to you. Rest of us have been out here dealing with this shit for decades now. Centuries. It’s only because life got all bad for you white folks that you’re opening up your eyes to it all, but the rest of us have been faced with this shit since the day we were born…”

It was a thought. An idea. The notion—dancing! seizures!—was powerful enough to infect a group of susceptible people. These people just want to belong. Fit in.

We love trends. We love to belong. It doesn’t take much to get people panicking. If one person goes crazy, spouting off about lord-knows-what, guess what? I want to lose my mind, too. It’s the new jam.

Look, just look, at your racist parents! When’s the last time you were able to have a decent dinnertime conversation that didn’t devolve into some complete conspiracy-laden clusterfuck? Months, right? Maybe years? Way, way back. Talk about methodical. These motherfuckers have been planning this overthrow for a long time. That’s some stone-cold shit. But you want to know what the real kicker is? It was easy. So fucking easy. Your family fell for it. They wanted, really wanted, to be taken over. Primed for possession.

there’s any coming back from this, if the switch gets flipped and your racist, xenophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, fucking-everything-phobic family snaps out of it, they’re gonna be all like, “Oh, you can’t hold me accountable for what happened…I was possessed.”

You should have dealt with your fucked-up family when you had the chance. Now we’ve all got to deal with them. They’re our problem now. I’m not holding back. So yeah. This is not our horror story. This is your fucking horror story. An American Horror Story… But whose America, am I right?

This is gonna be the new normal: half of the country’s population hosts a demon while the other half has to figure out how to live without them.

While you’ve been carrying him on your shoulders, crossing state lines, walking for days, he’s been slowly indoctrinated by YouTube videos…and you didn’t have a fucking clue. That’s the insidious thing with YouTube, isn’t it? One video always leads to another, to another, to another, guiding you down a rabbit hole of interconnected clips.

Where are the empirical facts? The scientific data? Who cares what the pope has to say? Just because some guy—on YouTube of all places—says it’s true doesn’t fucking make it so. There are no demons. No devils. This is just you.