Fox 'News'

Fox News did not break the United States by accident. It did it on purpose, in daylight, for profit, and with extraordinary discipline.

What we are living in now—the distrust of science, the contempt for institutions, the reflexive hatred of expertise, the street-corner epistemology where "I heard" outranks evidence—did not drift in like fog. It was manufactured. Night after night. Segment by segment. Host by host. Over decades.

In 2009, Fox amplified "death panels"—a term that didn't exist until Sarah Palin invented it. Within 72 hours, Fox treated it as fact. By week's end, elected officials were responding to a lie as if it were policy. That's not coverage. That's creation.

Fox News was built to solve a very specific problem: how to make sure the next Nixon wouldn't fall. After Watergate, conservative power brokers decided that facts were the enemy, and journalism was the delivery system. The solution wasn't to get better ideas. It was to destroy the referee.

Rupert Murdoch understood this instinctively. He didn't want to persuade the public; he wanted to own the narrative space. Fox wasn't designed to inform conservatives. It was designed to isolate them—inside a sealed environment where contradiction felt like persecution and correction felt like violence.

This is the origin point. Everything else follows.

I've written before about the machinery—the money, the voter suppression, the algorithmic amplification. This is about what came before all that: the murder of the commons.

Fox trained its audience to distrust any institution that could contradict power: universities, courts, medicine, elections, climate science, epidemiology. It taught viewers that expertise was elitism, that credentials were scams, that "educated people" were laughing at them. And once you convince someone that the people who study reality are enemies, you are free to replace reality with whatever serves you next.

That is how you get a country where people don't trust vaccines but trust cable hosts who sell gold coins and erectile supplements between rants. That is how you get a public that believes elections are rigged but corporations are honest. That is how you get a nation where a virologist with a lifetime of research is treated as suspect, while a man yelling from a studio in Manhattan is treated as truth incarnate.

Fox didn't just lie. It taught people how to lie to themselves.

This matters because democracy is an agreement to share a factual baseline. Once that's gone, voting becomes theater and power becomes brute force. Fox spent decades sawing through the floorboards of that agreement, smiling into the camera while it did.

Then came Trump.

Donald Trump was not an aberration. He was Fox's logical endpoint—a man with no loyalty to facts, no respect for institutions, and an instinctive understanding that outrage is currency. Fox didn't create Trump, but it trained his audience. Fox hosts became unofficial spokespeople. Trump's lies became Fox's talking points. Fox's talking points became Trump's policy. The feedback loop was perfect.

This is where PrumpTutin enters—not as a joke, but as a diagnosis.

Vladimir Putin doesn't need tanks to weaken the United States. He needs distrust. He needs Americans to believe that nothing is real, that everyone lies, that democracy is fake and strength is all that matters. Fox did more to advance that worldview than any foreign adversary ever could.

You don't have to prove coordination to prove alignment. Outcomes are enough.

Fox normalized authoritarian language long before Trump arrived. It framed compromise as betrayal, opposition as treason, and loyalty to a man as loyalty to the country.

And the damage didn't stop at politics. Fox metastasized into culture.

People stopped trusting doctors. Then teachers. Then judges. Then neighbors.

Once you convince someone that every institution is corrupt, the only safe authority left is the loudest voice they already agree with.

Fox didn't just radicalize the right. It poisoned the commons.

This is not journalism. It is behavioral engineering.

The result is a country where elections require armed guards, public health collapses under conspiracy, and trust is gone.

Fox will say this was opinion. Entertainment. Just another channel.

It was a project. It succeeded. And the bill is due.

Further Reading:

I've written about Fox before. Here's the link.

Fox Lighted the Match - on the machinery, the money, and the deliberate demolition.