Fox's "The Five" Is The Craziest Of Crazy

Some disinformation shows are truly insidious, taking the art of misinformation to a whole new level of absurd.

Case in point is the Fox "News" program called 'The Five.' Conceived, apparently, as an antidote to the popular daytime program 'The View,' and launched after Glenn Beck went off the air around 2011. Five panelists toss out nothing but opinion with very little fact-checking in a way that totally muddies the water. Four hyper-right-wingers, Greg Gutfeld, Dana Perino, Jesse Watters, and Judge Jeanine Pirro regularly beat up on a token liberal (usually Jessica Tarlov, although sometimes it's Harold Ford, Jr. or, more rarely, Geraldo Rivera), whose job is apparently to get shouted down and ridiculed at every step. And this is easy to do since it's a 4-to-1 advantage.

To highlight how they operate, let's take the program from last Friday. Dana Perino kicks it off by saying, "Illegal immigrant murderers and rapists are roaming free in America. Those are stunning new details revealed just hours before Kamala Harris' first border visit in more than three years. ICE officials releasing stunning data revealing more than 425,000 convicted illegal criminals, they're just -- walking the streets. Including over 13,000 convicted of homicide and some 15,000 of sexual assault."

Now, obviously this is deliberately timed to thwart Kamala's efforts to peel off some of Trump's supporters who make border security their main issue. It shouldn't really be a hard sell. Trump derailed a bipartisan border deal, and then had the audacity to actually campaign on that. All Kamala really needs to do is remind Americans of this, and then ask, "Oh, yeah, whatever happened to that border wall Trump promised? Wasn't Mexico supposed to pay for it?"

But that doesn't stop Dana Perino. She kicks it over to several sound bytes of Trump saying that Kamala Harris is responsible for such horrible things. Best example:

"They're dumping them in our country and I never had proof. And I can finally look at them and see... say, 'I told you so!' to the fake news."

They then cut to earlier clips of Kamala singing a bit of a different tune when it came to supporting immigration reform and a border wall, as if people can't change their mind about things.

Greg Gutfeld chimes in, "In the real world, she [Kamala] would be toast. And I don't like getting riled up for no reason, because this story is so unbelievable, I wanted to see if it was reported elsewhere, you know, I couldn't find it on MSNBC, CNN, Drudge, you have the release of hundreds of thousands of, uh, of foreign criminals, like they emptied the jails, raped... thousands of rapists, thousands of murderers, and on the pages of all of these networks the death of Maggie Smith - which is sad, great actress - Lana Del Rey's marriage, uh, PTD rumors, but nothing about what is easily one of the most big - probably the biggest crime story I've ever seen. So, we know that Democrats watch this show, uh, and some of them hate-watching, but if you're watching this, the media doesn't want you to know this information. They don't want it to reach you. They would rather you die, or be raped, than Trump be right, or find out the truth. So you can hate Fox all you want, you can hate Trump all you want, you can hate me, but you - you can't hate yourself and your family so much that you gonna ignore a story that puts them in danger. Now, even if these numbers are off by 50%, please, I think that the fact-checkers should fact-check it. You know, tell, tell us, 'No, it's not 60,000 rapists, it's only 8,000.' 'It's only 7,000 murders.' Cool, I'm glad you're okay with that. I'm - I'll take your fact-check. But anybody who defends this, or says it's not that big a deal is complicit, uh, and they should be held accountable, every victim of every crime by the people that are in here, uh, that we haven't vilified who are actual villains... you need to file a class-action suit against this government."

And that's how you get your own show on Fox "News." By being that extreme.

Thing is, it was fact-checked. CNN jumped on this almost immediately, or at least they did after this crap was regurgitated by Trump on Saturday. (Right on cue, because Trump gets his talking points from TV shows like this one.) Gutfeld was surprised that this wasn't covered by anybody else, including Drudge. Well, this is why: The facts were radically different from the way The Five were "reporting" it. The statistics released were not exclusively from the Biden-Harris administration. No, they actually went back decades, including those allowed in during the Trump years (going back 40 years or more), recording all criminality of extant illegals, over all that time, most of whom are currently still in jail.

In other words, the statistics weren't half as bad, or even one quarter as bad. They were a tiny fraction of that!

This is why not even Drudge would touch it. It was a shit story.

Gutfeld goes on, "You know, these bastards were more offended by stories of cats being eaten than real stories being reported here of rape and murder."

Oh, thanks for admitting they were only stories, Greg!

"And if you ask why those other stories existed, it was the only way to get these A-holes in the media to even look at this story."

Oh, they looked at this story, all right. They saw that the Haitian migrants were legal, that pets weren't being eaten, and that you were all so full of shit that you were willing to exploit the situation in Springfield for cheap political points which revealed endemic racism within your ticket. Congratulations! I'm sure the made-up story did exactly what you intended.

This crap went on for ten minutes straight before token-liberal Jessica Tarlov was finally given a word edge-wise. And she actually scored a few good jabs. I was impressed. But then she was shouted down by the other four, as she always is.

And this is where it gets really insidious: because this occasional insertion of liberal talking points doesn't actually get through the bubble and make the audience think twice. It actually inures the viewing audience against those liberal talking points, because it looks like the points were made and then shot down (as opposed to being given a fair evaluation). Thus, when people encounter those talking points online in social media (if one can even penetrate that social media bubble anymore, because the algorithms prevent interactions of that kind) the Trumpers laugh it off, as if the points weren't legitimate. Because to their minds, those points were already shot down (though in actuality, they only appeared to have been shot down by infotainment theatrics).

But every once in awhile the truth leaks through. Like in this aforementioned Trump quote:

"They're dumping them in our country and I never had proof. And I can finally look at them and see... say, 'I told you so!' to the fake news."

You never had proof, huh? Thanks for admitting it! And, guess what? You still don't!

This is the reality of the world in which we live. In order to keep a junkie hooked, suppliers refine their drug to be more and more potent. This Right-Wing Media Cult drug is now so potent that it's a lie-per-second misinfo-blast, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And this is why a convicted felon, rapist, insurrectionist, losing his marbles moron actually has any followers at all.

Eric

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