And people will ask, why didn’t it matter that they were racist before? And I think like many relatives of racists it was a suspicion constructed from the slips and winks and nods over years. But it was always repressed. What Fox did was make it acceptable to be openly racist.
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In retrospect the borderline comments, the drunken joke, the fury over Obama form a stark relief. The faint signals you received as a naive youth become claxons. They were always this way. Now it’s just in the open. They used to have shame, but now it’s gone.
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So yeah, Fox news didn’t make your relatives racist, it just made them unashamed of their racism. The media keeps asking why we didn’t listen to Trump voters before, what did he offer that was so narcotic? Seems clear now, it’s loss of shame.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle
Totally agree. It gave them permission to say the things that they were thinking, out loud, because someone else was saying it. And now I can't stand to be near them. I don't know if it's recoverable, because now I think of them so differently.
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Replying to @mem_somerville
I have disowned mine forever. The realization that it’s an umasking, not a creation is freeing. It isn’t a loss, it’s a revelation. These people are gross. I never have to associate with them again.
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Replying to @MarkHoofnagle @mem_somerville
Sadly, a friend of mine since high school's become a huge Trump supporter/Fox News addict. Now, in our youth we were fairly conservative politically. Beginning in the 1990s I changed, such that I abandoned the
@GOP by the early 2000s.1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @gorskon @MarkHoofnagle and
My friend, unfortunately, went the other way. I didn't live in Southeast Michigan from 1998 to 2008; so I didn't really notice it. Wed see each other maybe once a year and talk on the phone a few times. But I then moved back to the Detroit area and saw him more often.
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Replying to @gorskon @MarkHoofnagle and
I started noticing things. Casual racist comments about Obama. An outright homophobic remark about gay camp counselors. Politics way more conservative than I remembered. Over time, we stopped talking politics.
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Replying to @gorskon @MarkHoofnagle and
Of course, I realize that I had changed in the interim. The antiscience, the more blatant racism, the increasing radicalism, the lack of compassion of the
@GOP had driven me away. Odd that it hadn't driven him away. In fact it seemed to attract him more.1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @gorskon @MarkHoofnagle and
It was the 2016 election that really capped it, though. He went all-in for Trump and has continued to be a Trump supporter ever since. We don’t talk much anymore. When we do see each other, things go fine, but we seem to instinctively know not to discuss politics.
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He's a decent guy most of the time and still can be fun to hang out with, but our life paths have diverged so far, as have our politics, that things just can't be the same. It saddens me.
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