Yesterday started out a bit comically on Fox News. They had a new crusade, and it was a laughable one, the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises not to continue publishing six of the late Theodore Seuss Geisel’s lesser-known works, which Fox then spun out for 21 hours as everything from cancel culture to censorship to fascism. To hear Fox News tell it, this was Fahrenheit 451 come to life. Books were being burned, reading would soon be outlawed, the libs were out of control. Even Obama got dragged into it, with a late afternoon chyron proclaiming that the then-president had said in 2015, “everything you need to know is in Dr. Seuss books.”
Now the logic of this trip down the rabbit hole was obvious: if you’re kvetching about how woke culture is destroying the fabric of life for everybody else, then you don’t need to focus on the fact that the director of the FBI was telling Congress in no uncertain terms that there was 1) no voting fraud during the 2020 election and 2) the insurrection on January 6 was part of an ongoing pattern of domestic terrorism in the country.
Or, there was the landmark case under discussion at the Supreme Court concerning voting rights. Or, there was the story of Greg Abbott further endangering the people in Texas who elected him with his elimination of the mask mandate in the state. These were the major news stories yesterday, as agreed upon by every media outlet from the world press down to the humblest Twitter thread. So why oh why was Fox “News” ignoring vast swaths of reality to focus on a deceased author’s copyright holder making a fairly routine decision about what selections of its catalog to publish or not?
Good question and everybody was asking it, as the hours ticked by and Fox News was like the Energizer bunny, it just kept going and going with the Dr. Seuss faux outrage. And then it started to make sense, in a forest for the trees kind of way. You needed to step back from it to see it. The Dr. Seuss story fed into that which is the central theme at Fox News right now, which is white grievance, because that is the central tenet of Trumpism and that is what the GOP stands for in 2021.
Think about the news the past few days and you’ll see this connective thread running through all of the stories. A GOP lawyer at the Supreme Court voiced white grievance, when he told Amy Coney Barrett that the party would be at a disadvantage if voting was made easier. The simple truth there is that POCs tend to vote Democratic and the lawyer didn’t even bother whitewashing that fact, he basically came out and said it.
When Josh Hawley was declaiming at CPAC last weekend, that was the message that sang out loud and clear. He was a guy, he wanted you to know, who demanded “election integrity” — translating as “we’re not gonna let those mongrels vote, we’re gonna keep things the way they are, don’t worry.” Ted Cruz screaming that “Donald J. Trump ain’t going anywhere” was the same thing. Even with Trump gone, you can depend on Hawley and Cruz to mind the store and keep things the way they were, the way they should be.
So if you think about it in this light, it makes total and complete sense that Fox News went all out on the coverage of “banning” (nobody banned anything) books with racist themes — the sublime irony here, being that it was Dr. Seuss Enterprises who made the decision themselves, after consulting with educators, and decided to promote other books in its catalog, instead. It was an internal corporate decision by private parties and had nothing to do with politics. But that is not what you heard on the airwaves yesterday, or are still hearing today, now that Glenn Beck is in the mix and screaming “fascism.”
White grievance is the recurring theme in the GOP symphony. White grievance is the mother lode, and the GOP knows it. White grievance got people to send Steve Bannon many millions for the wall and then when he got prosecuted for it, of course Donald Trump pardoned him because wink wink nudge nudge, can’t fault a guy for devotion to a project like that, right?
But look at a few other things that have taken place recently and if it wasn’t obvious to you before, you’ll see this theme coalescing and codifying until it shines through with a dazzlingly awful clarity. Washington Post:
The party has been swiftly repositioned as an instrument of white grievance. It refuses to condemn racists within its congressional ranks. Its main national legislative agenda seems to be the suppression of minority voting. Trumpism is defined by the belief that real Americans are beset by internal threats from migrants, Muslims, multiculturalists, Black Lives Matter activists, antifa militants and various thugs, gangbangers and whiners. And Zubatov is correct that this viewpoint implies and requires dehumanization; resisting our animal instincts is the evidence of political correctness. The whole Trump movement, and now most of the Republican Party, is premised on the social sanctification of pre-cognitive fears and disgust.
“Zubatov” is Alexander Zubatov who recently published a piece which has been getting widely disseminated because it’s so blatantly racist. And this is in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, where people felt free to tote Confederate flags around, while wearing Camp Auschwitz tee shirts.
A periodical called American Greatness — the closest Trumpism gets to an intellectual house organ — recently published an article by Alexander Zubatov that provided a night tour of New York City. Addicts he encountered lay in “piles of rags and filth and the stench of their own excrement.” Some “brown bums” were “like ungainly insects going through the motion of a mating ritual.” The city and nation, he explains, are filled with “a growing mass of fat, lazy leeches, slugs, thugs, gangbangers, rule-breakers, whiners and perpetual ne’er-do-wells.”
Suffice it to say that the New York City tourist office will not be linking to the article. But Zubatov’s reaction is worth quoting in full: “I know the unyielding ukase of my educated pedigree and those who share it is that empathy and compassion are the only sanctioned responses to this sorry spectacle. But that would require me to rationalize my way out of a feeling and override all my sound, sane animal instincts. Those instincts are of pre-cognitive repulsion and disgust, and I refuse to let them go. I refuse to humanize those who cannot be bothered to lift a finger to humanize themselves. The mentally ill need our care. The rest need the whip.”
Dehumanization of the other is the core of fascism. It doesn’t get more basic than that. And the myth that the black or brown others are loafing and being supported by an enabling core of Democrats in office has been key to understanding racism for some time. Ask Mitt Romney about his catastrophic “47%” comment. That’s the belief, that the hardworking whites are doing all the work and paying all the tax money and this in turn gets transformed into welfare Cadillacs for the lazy bums, who happen to be POCs.
White grievance has been around for a very long time. It’s not going away. And certainly not with this iteration of the GOP nurturing it like a precious orchid. And if you’re wondering what Fox News is going to focus on next, plot spoiler: whatever gives them an opportunity to project white grievance the longest and loudest, whether it has any basis in fact or not. I daresay that Dr. Seuss will be looked back upon as one of the more reasonable news campaigns over there.
Now let’s be fair here. If Faux Noose didn’t spend hours reporting on non-events, they might actually have to resort to actually broadcasting REAL news (and/or be truthful) – and that would be way outside their scope
The issues with Dr. Seuss have been around for many years. This is not new. If I ran the zoo came out in 1950. If Theodore was still alive I am sure he would be glad to cancel all of these illustrations. I know he was very embarrassed by some of his cartoons in later life. One thing fox does not do is share the actual images that are controversial from the books. You can find them online if you like. The books are not banned, they are available and in a few years they will be in public domain so anyone can publish them. Dr. Seuss has many other books that I love. Read those, they are really great.