Global Courant 2023-04-21 15:00:00
We know that now Andrew D. Lesterthe 84-year-old Northlander who shot the 16-year-old Ralph Jarldid not act alone.
Oh, he’s the only one responsible for pulling the trigger. Unless of course rap made him do it.
But according to his grandson, Lester had been “radicalized” in recent years by the highly profitable and paranoid fantasies spread by Fox News and its equally unbalanced imitators.
That, Lester’s 28-year-old grandson Klint Ludwig told The Starfor example, the retired aircraft mechanic “fell further down the right-wing rabbit hole in terms of doing the election-denial conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, going full-on on the Fox News, OAN sort of line” while immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”
A 24-7 spicy diet race baiting And white nationalist talking points is corrosive, not only for your brain on Fox but for our democracy.
If we believe Ludwig, watching Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham monetize hate night after night contributed to Lester’s sense that a black boy calling at his door could only mean that an act of violence was about to happen. to happen. And that happened.
Lester, who has been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action, shot Yarl twice, once in the head. No, thanks to the neighbors who refused the help, surely they would have offered an injured animal, he survived anyway, thank God.
But no, we can’t just go back to what we were doing. Because there’s a reason that, as Lester has come to see it, Ludwig said, “fatherless black families are why crime exists in this country.”
Pumping that pollution into our atmosphere day after day and year after year is not harmless. But as long as it keeps viewers scared, upset, and tuned in, why change a winning formula?
This week, Ingraham referred to “wildings by kids across the country,” while the chyron stated: “Roaming gangs of teenagers are becoming commonplace.” Her guest, former NFL player Jack Brewer, said this was due to the sad shortage of “dads who would hit our butts.”
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“This is the result of a fatherless nation,” he said.
Like Tucker Carlson, Missouri Governor Mike Parson focused less on the crime or the victim than on how terrible it was that the president “politicized” it. But that Parson thinks people are upset about Yarl’s shooting because of everything Joe Biden said just shows how little he knows his own constituents. And for Missouri lawmakers to think the answer to gun violence is more guns, I think is like counting on ice cream to cure obesity.
If you read this paper, you know that emails exposed by Dominion Voting System’s defamation lawsuit against Fox, which ended in a $787.5 million settlement, showed that the channel’s news anchors don’t necessarily believe what comes out of their own mouth comes: Their private messages revealed that Fox hosts knew that Donald Trump’s election fraud allegations were false. But they didn’t let Andrew Lester or any of their other viewers hear the joke, because they also knew their audience wouldn’t like to hear it.
That is only one corner of the damage done to civil society by their propaganda, which is not conservative but reactionary.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, here’s Carlson on April 18: “If you let the mob loot you, you’re doomed. This is why we shot looters – not because we hated them, it wasn’t personal – but to defend the basis of all we have, which is private property protected by law. Without it we would live in cruelty and chaos.
“They already are in Chicago. It makes no sense. Nobody benefits. What you see instead is a civilization falling apart, unrestrained violence and destruction not actually fought by government agencies, the mindless breaking of things, the wrath of stupid children. If you let it go on like this, nothing will stand.” So run away?
Yarl wasn’t there to steal. He was there to pick up his younger brothers and knocked on the wrong door.
But when you’re faced with brutality and mayhem, you can’t be too careful. Why hold back when civilization is at stake? And when Lester shot Yarl, it really wasn’t personal because he shot before he saw him as a person.
If violent lyrics could inspire murder rather than just reflect it, and books about race and gender should be banned to prevent them from “indoctrinate children with a dangerous ideology,Why shouldn’t watching frightening urban crime stories hour after hour affect behavior? However, those whose livelihoods depend on Andrew Lester having to fear Ralph Yarl seem unconcerned about it, and in fact show no sign of caring about any of them.
