SATURDAY: It's hard to be totally wrong on the merits...

SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2024

...if you're on the air at Fox: This very morning, the regular Fox & Friends Weekend crew shot out of the gate rather fast.

The regular crew was back in the saddle. We'll call the roll of that lineup:

Regular lineup, Fox & Friends Weekend:

Rachel Campos-Duffy: genial observer of Communists, Marxists and pagans

Pete Hegseth: Princeton / Harvard Kennedy School grad who hates the Ivy League

Will Cain: Panelist most likely to tamp down overheated assessments

Following last Sunday's repeated discussions of pagans, this crew did, in fact, shoot out of the gate rather fast:

The program began with a two-minute discussion of whether it's sufficiently "masculine" for a male TV host to wave at his program's viewers when his show goes on the air. After that, Campos-Duffy called our attention to a new op-ed by Victor Davis Hanson—a new opinion piece for Fox, an opinion piece bearing these titles:

11 ways Biden and his handlers are hell-bent on destroying America
The path to civilizational destruction should be very familiar by now

You can read the column here. According to an editor's note, the somewhat thinly-argued column "is adapted from a tweet."

Is President Biden actually "hell-bent on destroying America?" Has this president, along with his handlers, deliberately found eleven ways to do that?

Whatever you think of this president's policies, that claim might seem to be a bit overwrought. It's the kind of claim which closes the door on any hope of reconciliation between the forces of our current pair of nations—Red America and Blue America, as defined by Peter Baker.

The claim that the president is intentionally trying to destroy America might seem a bit overwrought. Unless the claim is being profiled by the extremely genial weekend co-host, Campos-Duffy.

"He's kind of saying what we're all thinking," the genial co-host instantly said. She dropped her first M-bomb at 6:03, saying this as she finished reading the list of Professor Hanson's eleven points:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (4/6/24): Number 11, "Turn world-class universities into indoctrination centers."  I would add, Marxist indoctrination centers. 

Here is Victor Davis Hanson on the bottom line:

(VIDEOTAPE: Professor Hanson, discussing his new column on the Fox Business Channel.)

Professor Hanson has always struck us as an interesting person who is also the western world's saddest, most mournful human being. By way of contrast:

As we've noted in the past week, Campos-Duffy strikes us as am extremely genial person who doesn't seem to possess the tiniest hint of the nuance gene. 

Campos-Duffy is inclined to see "Communists" and Marxists" wherever people display a viewpoint which slightly differs from hers. She seems to lack the nuance gene, along with the gene which allows for the possibility that different viewpoints can exist in the world in something resembling good faith.

As we noted this week, Campos-Duffy added "pagan" to her list of invectives on last weekend's Easter morning broadcast. The conversations which ensued made us think of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, in which a well-financed secret society is attempting to maintain an extremely ancient cultural tradition through a set of ceremonial activities which are religious / liturgical in their basic construction.

Yesterday, it was the Marxists again—and President Biden is deliberately trying to destroy the nation! We humans are wired to think in such ways, some of us a bit more than others. 

As a general matter, we humans will be inclined to react to others in such ways until we develop the ability to moderate such impulses. In our view, her constantly name-calling doesn't make Campos-Duffy a bad person. It means that her chemistry contains a bit too much of the million-year-old "tribal identity" juice.

(More specifically, we refer to the "my tribe or the highway" juice. Stating the obvious, a diverse and very large modern nation can't expect to run on such fuel.)

Campos-Duffy is a warm, constantly smiling presence—until she starts dropping her bombs. That said, our own blue tribe is inclined to drop a great deal of ordnance too. 

(A bit like the patrons Cummings bitterly described at Boston's Old Howard theater during World War I, we tend to "applaud all songs containing the words racist, bigot and homophobe" when sung on our cable news programs. We have quite a few other bombs we may tend to add to that last.)

We're the pagans and they're the bigots and rarely the twain shall meet! We've rarely seen this impulse go as far off the rails as it did last Sunday morning when Campos-Duffy and Hegseth, joined by the disappointing Joey Johnny Jones, mangled the basic facts of at least four news events to spread the idea that a bunch of "pagans" are now "spitting in the face of the people who love America most."

Large modern nations can't function that way, in the grip of that ancient tribal wiring. That said, the Weekend friends came out of the gate in a similar way once again this very morning.

By 6:07. Campos-Duffy was assuring Red America's viewers about the actual source of President Biden's eleven-point attempt at destroying the nation. As she dropped her first S-bomb, she told us where it comes from:

CAMPOS-DUFFY: You know, Barack Obama, I think, is behind so much of this. It is clear that President Biden isn't. 

And Barack Obama said, you know, his goal was, How do you do these socialist policies without the Americans actually knowing it is happening? And I think what's happening is we're at the point where we're finally seeing the fruits of it...

But I think a lot of people are writing, "Thank you for writing this. I'm not crazy. I'm not a conspiracy theorist." You know, somebody is intentionally trying to make this country worse—destroy it.

HEGSETH: For sure! If you want to read the whole thing, go to FoxNews.com, the entire op-ed is there, eleven points, the reason why. As always, Victor Davis Hanson giving some clarity, some perspective on something we're always kicking around here on the show: Why are they doing this?

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Yeah, absolutely.

They're always kicking this around on their show! (For whatever reason, the policies in question had been bumped down by now to the point where they were merely "socialist.") 

That said, is President Biden—or more likely, is Barack Obama—secretly trying to destroy the country? 

"For sure," Hegseth quickly said. Campos-Duffy said, "Yeah, absolutely."

We were seven minutes into the day and we'd already reached that point. Within the realm of Blue America, the handbook is clear at this point:

Based on what Campos-Duffy said about Obama, we're supposed to denounce her as a racist. It can't be something as simple as her internal wiring lacking the first hint of the nuance or complexity genes, in much the way our own Blue America internals may sometimes seem to be wired.

When men fought on the wide plains before the towering walls of Troy, nuance and complexity played little role in the basic conflict. There was little need to manufacture otherization.

This was a war between two separate civilizations, with the Achaeans (the Argives, the Greeks) laying siege to a powerful city in what is part of present-day Turkey. Helen had left one world and gone to the other.

The Argives wanted her back.

What languages may have been spoken if some such combat really occurred? According to modern-day scholars, we still don't exactly know:

Trojan language

The Trojan language was the language spoken in Troy during the Late Bronze Age. The identity of the language is unknown, and it is not certain that there was one single language used in the city at the time.

[...]

In Ancient Greek literature such as the Iliad, Trojan characters are portrayed as having a common language with the Achaeans. However, scholars unanimously interpret this as a poetic convention, and not as evidence that the Trojans were Greek speakers...Some scholars have suggested that Greek-origin names for Trojan characters in the Iliad motivate a more serious argument for the Trojans having been Greek speakers. 

Putative etymologies for legendary names have also been used to argue that the Trojans spoke other languages such as Thracian or Lydian. These arguments have been countered on the basis that these languages would have been familiar to classical-era bards and could therefore be later inventions.

And so on from there. But that was a war between civilizations. Ours is a war between two coterminous nations, two nations which abide in one place. 

Under the circumstances, we have to find ways to persuade ourselves that we Americans are actually two separate nations. The kinds of otherizations perfected on Fox provide one of the ways we can do that.

Last Sunday's show was "cable news" about as throwback as it gets. In Eyes Wide Shut, a well-financed secret society was ceremonially maintaining an ancient sexual tradition. On Fox, the friends were explicitly seeking the continuation of a two thousand year old religious tradition.

Everybody else is a pagan. With that, the war was on.

Campos-Duffy is strongly inclined to otherize others. That said, given the state of present-day politics and policy, it's very hard to be totally wrong on the merits if you're hosting a Fox News show:

No matter how far over the top you may seem to go, you'll almost surely have a large amount of Blue American folderol to deal with.

In our view, that fact is clear in Professor Hanson's list of eleven points. His aim is reasonably true in at least a few of his basic points, though he tends to go light-years over the top in his motive-based otherization.

Good lord! Even Greg Gutfeld is sometimes arguably right on the bare bones merits of certain issues, once he has offered his standard joke about the way liberal women are just too freaking fat. 

Gutfeld would have been in that Long Island mansion in Eyes Wide Shut, engaged in those throwback procedures. But just because he seems to in the grip of some extremely unhelpful genes, even he gets to be basically right on the merits a fair amount of the time.

We'll have more on that claim next week. We'll be discussing some of the things our own bad case of tribal myopia won't allow us denizens of Blue America to see.

In our view, Professor Hanson is working with some basic points which carry some obvious merit. That said, he's also the world most mournful man, and it only took his genial admirer three minutes to spot her first batch of Marxists.

Two can play this unhelpful game. It seems to us that two modern nations, Red and Blue, are currently doing something like that!