Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Three things we can do.

The first thing we should all do is stop watching Fox. I don't care if it means missing the concussion-festival we call football. Or the baseball playoffs and, in the parlance of Ring Lardner's rook, the World Serious.

This is serious.

Fox, Murdoch and his affiliates in print, radio and TV, is rife with racist hate-mongers.

How far is it from lending credence to the canard that Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim, to the hate-filled-events that are shaking our country, most recently in Charlottesville, Va. (Actually, most recently in Boston, where a Holocaust memorial was vandalized last night.)

Do we really want to watch a station populated by hate-spewers like Sean Hannity, who has contrived the phrase "alt-left," to create a false-equivalence between the KKK and the Nazis and god-knows who else, and those protesting them?

The second thing we can do is to encourage our clients to pull their advertising from such places.

Advertising--and I don't care about its reach and efficiency--is putting money into hate's pockets and legitimizing it.

These are not normal times, and by advertising and viewing channels steeped in racism and hate, we are endorsing hate.

The same will go for the stations of the nascent Sinclair network which will be further poisoning our airways when their manipulation of the FCC allows their brand of hate to penetrate the troposphere.

170 years ago, Henry David Thoreau went to jail rather than pay taxes that would support what he saw as an evil war, the Mexican-American.

We can no longer NOT pay tax--taxes are taken from us up-front, but we can max out the number of withholdings we claim--up to nine.

Yes, this is inconvenient. And will probably mean writing a big check in April. But in the meanwhile, the monies going to our Racist government will decrease.

None of these things are major. 

I wish we had stronger ways to show our contempt for this illegitimate state-supported hate, but we really don't. We can march, we can yell, we can write stupid blogs.

My two cents says the best thing we can do is withhold our eyeballs and our dollars.

They understand dollars.



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