Unfortunately, as too many people in this fine nation seem content in basking in red, white and blue stupidity, "Ignorance Is Strength" because the inability of voters to recognize the contradictions of Republican presidential nominees cements the power of the totalitarian GOP.
Many racist, sexist, homophobic and elitist purists complain about the liberal P.C. culture that is swarming American discourse and societal attitudes. For the sake of being fair and balanced, let's address how Fox News is the politically correct euphemism for B.S.
The number one news network amongst retirement homes, paranoid conspiracy theorists and those recently emerging from comas they suffered during the Reconstruction Era, has a firm grasp of a Republican Party that has a tenuous grasp of reality.
This is largely responsible for distorting American conservatism from fiscal prudence and free market enterprise to extreme right-wing theocratic corporatist authoritarianism.
"It's a real mistake to call Fox a conservative channel. It's not. It's a partisan channel," political scientist Jonathan Bernstein said. "To begin with, bluntly, Fox is part of the Republican Party. American political parties are made up of both formal organizations and informal networks. Fox News Channel, then, is properly understood as part of the expanded Republican Party."
Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and Treasury official under George H. W. Bush, published a study for Social Science Research Network in June titled "How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics."
The report details the rise of Fox and how it has changed the way conservatives consume and think about news and politics.
"Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking," Bartlett said in the report. "Fox now exercises such powerful control over the GOP that it has become the party's kingmaker."
A Pew Research study released in October 2014 that surveyed 2,901 about their news sources confirms this observation.
Forty-seven percent of those who labeled themselves consistently conservative chose Fox News as their main source "for news about government and politics" and 31 percent who are mostly conservative said the same. Fox News more than doubled the second highest news source between both groups.
But this is affecting the national perspective of its viewers, who predominately vote Republican, as they are inundated with corporate-packaged, contrived pseudo-conservative propaganda.
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald said of the news channel:
"In America, it has come to seem normal that a major news organization functions as the propaganda arm of an extremist political ideology, that it spews a constant stream of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, paranoia and manufactured outrage, and that it does so with brazen disregard for what is factual, what is right, what is fair, what is balanced."
Last September, Politifact revealed statements made on air by Fox, Fox News and Fox Business personalities and their pundit guests are 58 percent false, mostly false or "pants on fire" lies.
This shows that Americans who live under a rock, obsessively preoccupied with selecting the right filter shading on Instagram for their fall selfie with a pumpkin spiced latte are more knowledgeable about current events than those who watch Fox News.
Fairleigh Dickinson University's newest PublicMind survey asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents 5 questions about domestic affairs.
On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs. Someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer 1.04 domestic questions correctly compared to 1.22 for those who watched no news at all.
The current state of the Republican Party and Fox News has created a Big Brother-esque culture that has trained its subservient followers to accept American conservatism as dogmatic rather than political positions that should be modernized for the 21st century.
This "Leave it to Beaver" idealism of America attempts to address modern issues with 1950s solutions and prevents our country from making any substantial progress in recovering from the Great Recession and preparing for globalization and the Information Age.
More Americans are becoming wary of establishment politics, and the continuation of regurgitating stale, unenlightened and contradictory talking points is losing appeal.
Columbia University political scientist Lincoln Mitchell said after the demise of Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, "Fox has now become a problem for the Republican Party because it keeps a far right base mobilized and angry, making it hard for the party to move to the center or increase its appeal, as it must do to remain electorally competitive."
At this point, the Republican Party can really only hope their dumbed-down doublethink resonates with those clinging onto America's golden age of institutionalized racism, 19th century moral purity and unrestrained capitalism that disproportionally benefits wealthy white business owners.
Planned Big Brotherhood: The Republican Doublethink Contradictions (Part 2) can be seen here