The Brainwashing of My Dad: How the Rise of the Right-Wing Media Changed a Father and Divided Our Nation—And How We Can Fight Back

by Jen Senko

This gave Nixon a strong sense of ambition.8 He became a zealous McCarthyite and rabidly anticommunist.

Many working men in the South were racist or were scared African Americans were going to take their jobs. So Nixon capitalized on the multifaceted fears of

White men to build a following,

and it w...

the Southern ...

Instead of encouraging and helping men expand their visions of themselves and allowing women to participate meaningfully in the workforce and society, Nixon and his followers stirred up and exploited anger, frustration, fear, and indignation in susceptible voters. These were some of the same types that Rush Limbaugh would later exploit.

Like everyone else who had watched it on television, Ailes had seen how Nixon had bombed in his debate against John F. Kennedy in 1960. For people listening to the debate on the radio, it wasn’t clear who won, but to people watching it on TV, the loser was painfully obvious.

What’s interesting to me about this though is that I thought Trump came off *horribly* in televised debates, most especially the Megyn Kelly one and the one where he apparently hoped to give Biden Covid. But people who liked trump did not see what I saw; they thought he was great.

It was said he was personally infatuated with him.

Generally, I disliked Nixon intensely. Thought he was a crook, deceitful, unsure of himself…despicable.” She said, “I really don’t remember Dad watching the news with me. Isn’t that strange? It seems we were not that much into politics then. At least Dad wasn’t.” Not yet anyway.

“Roger Ailes understood that TV is about one thing. It’s about emotion and that you need to communicate with the audience and hook into them on an emotional level.”

He told Nixon, ‘America is dumb. So give them something simple, boil it down, and they’ll get it.’”

They considered themselves average Americans—those who were okay with where things stood and were resistant to change.

an enforcer of law and order, a president who would defend White voters against the perceived threats of urban, non-White influences in their lives.

Nixon especially capitalized on this growing cultural hostility by creating a new definition of the “elite” as the people and groups advocating for progressive social movements.

By rebranding who the elite in America were, Nixon successfully turned working-class people’s criticism away from the super-rich country club types who financially backed the Republican Party and toward the Democratic Party and its liberal ideals. His administration called this the blue-collar strategy24

Not vote on their economic issues but vote on their ‘moral’ issues.”

create GOP viewers and thus GOP voters. It stated that “people are lazy” and that they want their “thinking done for them.”

Absolutely true

Ailes was the perfect hire for TVN: he knew propaganda and had studied the dramatic camera angles and the use of chiaroscuro and music that the Hitler propagandist filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl used in the masterful Nazi propaganda film commissioned by Hitler, Triumph of the Will.32 Ailes had even used some of these techniques for Nixon’s television appearances. Wouldn’t you know it, the motto for TVN was “Fair and Balanced.”

The vast majority of Americans were clueless about this strategic push to influence their thinking,

was shocked. I was under the impression that there was so much more spent on welfare than what was actually spent, and the question of how I got that impression in the first place got me thinking.

This major shift in many Americans’ minds not coincidentally was beginning to coincide with the Right’s way of thinking, as conservative think tanks cast doubt upon the value and effectiveness of public education, undermined publicly funded research, and continued to push a conservative agenda secretly backed by billionaires.

my parents moved to Maryland for my dad’s work for the government. He

Nixon won the election in a massive landslide, garnering almost eighteen million more popular votes than McGovern—the widest margin of any U.S. presidential election.

Merriam-Webster defines a libertarian as “an advocate of the doctrine of free will, and a person who upholds the principles of individual liberty, especially of thought and action.”

The following text was David Koch’s platform and manifesto.

We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service. The present system, in addition to being inefficient, encourages governmental surveillance of private correspondence. Pending abolition, we call for an end to the monopoly system and for allowing free competition in all aspects of postal service.

We condemn compulsory education laws…and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.

That’s nuts

We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.

We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.

David Koch’s extreme libertarian anarchist vision was definitely not how most Americans thought our government should work.

I was literally about to say, “We support anarchy.”

an interview I did in 2011 with my dad, who had always prized education, he parroted much of the Koch manifesto.

This conversation encapsulated the dangers of right-wing media as I saw them manifested in my dad. He spouted views that directly contradicted his personal values and philosophy, he was incredibly emotional and angry, and he was obviously using language that had been provided to him by an external source, which he then internalized and repeated back.

Exactly, precisely what I have seen here.

“I used to be a Democrat, but now I’m a Republican! Before I became a Republican I was fat, dumb, and happy.” I had to agree—at least about the happy part. He was clearly unhappy now. And I was unhappy that he was so bitter and full of anger.

Relate. Unfortunately

I did, and her teachings about how selfishness was a virtue were a stark contrast to the beliefs entrenched in me by my Catholicism.

It was a great theory for the already rich, but multiple studies have shown that trickle-down economics doesn’t work,

Reagan made it seem to many like he would take America back to some really great place it had been in the past while never explicitly saying what that place was, using the slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.” (That should ring a bell!)8 Claire

They [the Birch Society and wealthy corporate libertarians] saw 1900 in America like the apex of when we were great as a nation. 1900—before the income tax, before the Federal Reserve, before any progressive legislation was considered or passed. Before child labor laws, before women had any rights, before women even had the right to vote.

Christ!

“Pockets of poverty, however,” he said, “but it was a healthy kind of poverty. Poverty free from government interference, where every man understood that relief from dire want is entirely his own responsibility.

Literally rewriting history.

Murdoch owns Harper Collin’s?! Gah!

At the time, the doctrine had large support, as Americans were alarmed by how much influence radio and TV propaganda had had on the people of Nazi Germany. These laws were put into place in an effort to protect the public from that kind of manipulation.

With the expectation of honest and accurate reporting discarded, the talk radio industry exploded.

And just one year later, extreme conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh went national.

I saw the direct result of the ensuing deinstitutionalization on the streets of New York City, and it sure didn’t look like any version of “making America great again” that I could believe in.

Often called the father of conservative radio, Grant was an openly racist, sexist, far-right shock jock.2 On his WABC radio show, he referred to Blacks and Hispanics as “savages.”3 He believed them to be inferior, and he even once called Martin Luther King Jr. a “slimeball.”4 With his combative and testy style, he was considered a pioneer of the combat talk radio format. Soon, Grant became my dad’s commuting buddy.

Gradually, it seemed my dad started becoming more agitated after listening to Bob Grant. Eventually, he became consistently more irritable, excitable, and easy to anger. Little did we know a metamorphosis was beginning.

Witnessed

1950s sensation Joe Pyne. His show, It’s Your Nickel, consisted of Pyne debating his opinions with people calling in.9 Calls often culminated with him insulting the caller, to the delight of his audience.

Brown makes another good point that speaks to that: “Tell your audience that the mainstream media is corrupt and biased, then there’s all the more reason to turn to your conservative talk radio to get the truth.”

Anger is a hot commodity. Finding an enemy is even hotter.

Since the kitchen opened up to the living room, she often couldn’t hear her news because my dad had Limbaugh on so loud. My dad eventually put up heavy sliding wooden doors between the living room and the kitchen. When the doors were closed, my mother had her TV turned up loud enough that she was able to drown out Rush Limbaugh’s voice.

My mother couldn’t stand Limbaugh. She declared emphatically