Paranoia sells, and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News enterprise likes to scare the hell out of its viewers for fun and profit if there's good money to be made — especially when it's got skin in the game. But this time the political stakes are much higher than usual: America's future as a democracy is on the line.
Witness the obsessive preoccupation at Fox with the "great replacement" theory, as if hyping such a transparently fabricated existential crisis to its targeted demographic — that is, mostly older white conservatives — was purposely intended to raise doomsday anxiety levels in a gullible audience, the sort of viewers long conditioned to interpret events in a conspiratorial framework. Following the twisted path of this racist creation myth to its origins reveals a provenance that stretches well beyond Tucker Carlson's nightly pitch to his loyal fans, many of whom share a collective fear that the traditional barriers intended to keep certain groups of others outside and out of sight are no longer working as expected.
