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Bill O'Reilly: Culture Terrorist

Steven Weber
Actor
Posted: June 14, 2009 10:39 AM

We create the news, we report the news we've created, we tell you to decide in our favor.

Conspiracy theories aside, I suspect that fomenting discord, even to the point of violence, is in the Fox News manifesto of blatant bias, outrageous Orwellian newspeak and basic shit-stirring, all in an effort to distract their audience, one which I feel certain they laugh at and/or regard as lab mice, from their right to truthful, responsible information.

Using their demographic's genetic predisposition to trust authority, they disguise their agit-prop as old-fashioned Huntley-Brinkley newscasts, throw in some archetypal American-looking leggy women to echo the sentiments of the patriarchal anchormen/fathers and their aforementioned racist, xenophobic messages are disseminated widely and effortlessly.

It's The Cabinet of Caligari here, with the mesmerist (O'Reilly) sending out a mass suggestion to its suggestible somnambulist audience. And, by golly, so far several have indeed been given to violent responses prompted by thinly veiled cues:

"Daddy is angry at the baby killing monster. I want to make Daddy love me. I will kill the monster."

O'Reilly has much in common with the inspirational rhetoric and impassioned, arguably effective gesticulations of certain historical demagogues and despots, who find their métier when harnessing their unique gifts of persuasion. In Bill's case, he is the embodiment of the stern but loving father, the one who alternately kneels alongside you at bedtime and prays and takes a belt to you if you misbehave. If he were to have been a success publishing erotic literature loosely based on his own steamy adventures, he would have been the current version of the original Continental character, cooing and wooing an equally impressionable audience, eager for romantic escapades instead of blood-soaked fantasies of Christian-American hegemony. Instead, he is Bill O'Reilly: Culture Terrorist.

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currently the most recent comment:

I have a personal O'Reilly/violence story.

I've never gotten along politically with my father, and the 2004 election really drove us apart. A year after Bush stole the WH again, I was living with my parents due to financial troubles and my father made it a point to have right-wing radio and tv on 24/7, knowing it drove me crazy (he was also out of work at the time). One night I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother within earshot of the tv, O'Reilly was on, and said something completely outrageous about liberals. I railed against him from the other room. My father lost it, came into the other room, and beat me unmercifully for five minutes calling me an effing liberal traitor while my mother was trying to pull him off of me. I spent three days in the hospital.

My father was not always a violent man, but O'Reilly tapped into his anger and helped it blossom, and me and my father no longer speak. I never got an apology, except for him saying that I should know better than to rile up a man in his own house.

I know at least one person was driven to violence by the far-right media machine. I have the scars to prove it.

Posted by Koxo at 01:57 AM on 06/16/2009

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