How far-right media manipulated a father — and a nation

 

SHEFFIELD: And very racist as well.

SENKO: I was just going to say. Openly racist, openly sexist, made that a badge of honor for himself.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let me just play the trailer here of the film, just to introduce people a little bit more and then we’ll get into how things were.

(Begin clip)

NARRATOR: In the 1960s, Jen Senko’s dad never had a bad word to say about any race, or people, or person.

SENKO: In the eighties, after my dad discovered talk radio during a long commute to work, he suddenly didn’t like black people, poor people, gay people, feminists, Hispanics, and especially Democrats. After he discovered Fox News, they became the enemy. What happened to Dad?

HILLARY CLINTON: The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it, and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy, but it has not yet been fully revealed to the American public.

NOAM CHOMSKY: By the seventies and the eighties, the media had been taken over by the extreme right.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA FIGURE: Homosexual marriages is such a threat to civilization itself.

CHOMSKY: Fox News came along.

RIGHT-WING MEDIA FIGURES: Mass murders, committed by immigrants… God controls the climate, come on!

NARRATOR: In asking the question, what happened to her dad, it was really like asking what happened to our media. And in asking what happened to our media, it was really like asking what happened to our country.

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: All right. Yeah. And you tell the story in really great detail with lots of interviews with media scholars and researchers and activists. But can you give us just the sort of little Cliff Notes version of the larger, basically you discovered that what had happened to your father was part of a larger phenomenon, right?

SENKO: Once I started doing the movie, people, as I say in the movie, started coming out of the woodwork getting in contact with me, telling me, oh, this happened to their mom or their sister or their father. And then I started experiencing similar things that were happening to my dad with my friends. One friend who had moved down South, one time came up to visit, and she said the exact same thing, or she would say something around the same time, in the same time-period like that my father would say it.

She was saying all this similar stuff. And I realized, wow, this is a phenomenon. These people that I know, they’re just changing right in front of me in ways that I never thought they would change. And when I found out it was a phenomenon happening all across the country, eventually I came to think of it as an epidemic.

SHEFFIELD: And it was it wasn’t just something that was accidental. It was the deliberate product of people’s, it was their ideological project, right?

SENKO: Right. Yeah, I think after FDR enacted all these social programs, all the economic royalists and oligarchs were pissed off, they were calling it communism. He created Social Security, the Radio Act programs, which led to the Fairness Doctrine, to ensure there was not consolidation of ownership in the media.

And that really got them nervous. Because before that, there were three Republican presidents and it was a more laissez faire type of society. And so they felt like they were losing control over their oligarchical society.

And then after 1954, after Brown v Board of Education, there was this economist called James McGill Buchanan. He resented that rich people had to pay for kids—especially black kids to go to school. And he hooked up with the father of the Koch brothers, and they started to organize. So it started in the fifties.

SHEFFIELD: Fred Koch.

SENKO: Right. Yeah. And then came the [John] Birch Society. Everybody thinks like this move to the right was just accidental, and it wasn’t. It was a plan. It was a plan for them to take the country back for themselves so that basically they could earn profits and not have regulation.

And actually, when Goldwater ran for president, he adopted some of the Birch Society’s extreme views. Now the Birch Society, they were hyper-anticommunist, like so crazy anticommunist that they called President Eisenhower a communist. So people just thought they were crazy.

So after Goldwater lost his run for the presidency, then pundits were saying the right is dead. And then that’s when they started really planning even more how to get control, and how to get people to vote for this libertarian Republican idea.

SHEFFIELD: Basically an anti-government idea.

Yeah and I think a key to the discussion was this idea that the media has to, we want the news media to report whatever it is that we say without question. And that if they don’t do that, then they’re biased against us. The public shouldn’t hear fact checks of us, of our message.

And this was something that became very bothersome to Richard Nixon when people would question him, he lied all the time. He was just like Donald Trump in that respect. And then he had a vice president, Spiro Agnew, who actually had to resign because he was under criminal investigation for various things.

And he really crystallized the idea of attacking the media into a sense of Republican identity.

SENKO: I think they knew that if the media just continued to go forth in an objective way, that they would not be able to win voters.

So they knew that. They made many plans with think tanks and were institutionalizing, but they knew that they had to get ahold of the media, they could not allow it to be objective. That’s when they started clamoring for balance, fair and balanced, so that the wrong sides could be covered as if it were legitimate.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it’s an interesting idea because when you think about it, if you have a political party that says we need to give more money to rich people, any objective news media that says what they actually believe and want with their policies is going to be harmful to them.

And so that’s why. And so you had the development subsequently of kind of this sort of alternative focus. So Barry Goldwater ran on the 200 proof right-wing, anti-government ideas of that, we’re going to eliminate all these departments here. We’re going to get rid of Social Security, it’s socialism. We’re going to get rid of Medicare. These are civil rights. We’re going to allow private discrimination as much as people.

SENKO: And that was considered way too radical.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. He ran on what they actually wanted, and he got destroyed in the 1964 election,

SENKO: ‘What a weirdo, what a wacko.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so instead of changing what they wanted as a policy platform, in responding to the public, they said we’ll just get the public to think about other things instead of what we actually want. And that basically has been the right wing political agenda from 1980 ever since.

SENKO: It was a bull fight. Let’s distract them. Let’s put other people up that they can blame for what we’re going to do to them, we’re giving more money to the rich. Let’s blame poor people, black people, gay people, feminists.

SHEFFIELD: Transgender people. Yeah. And and get people to think about those in many cases, imagined controversies. More recently, Fox News was obsessing over the shoes worn by an M&M cartoon character. I think it was the green M&M stopped wearing stiletto heels and was wearing flat heels. They literally talked about that on a national news network for days on end.

And they knew these things because they want their audience to think about those things rather than the tax cuts that we want to give to billionaires. Here’s how we want to go after public education and cut the budget for it and things like that.

SENKO: Right. And that creates uncertainty. The way that these things are presented, they’re presented in a very emotional, angry manner.

And, people were not used to seeing that on the news, at least from the days of Walter Cronkite. So it made these newscasters seem like they were right. They were being righteous. They must have a point. Something like the shoes is symbolic of what they’re painting is wrong with society.

And yeah., that’s one of the things that creates brainwashing is creating uncertainty. And once you create that mindset, it’s more easy to feed them stories that seem like the reassuring answer to those scary stories that they’re feeding them.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also it helps evade accountability. Because if your audience, if your base is really only interested in voting for you to promote Christian identity, or to keep black people in their place or whatever the motivation is, then simply winning the election and having power— it doesn’t matter what your policies are from the brainwashed person’s standpoint, because all that matters is that their person is in office.

SENKO: Yeah and that’s it. Yeah. And that they’re they’re now right. They’re now on the side of, righteousness and justice.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay, now your father, he started listening to Bob Grant, then he got into Rush Limbaugh and then he got into Sean Hannity and Fox News once that started in the mid 1990s.

SENKO: And emails.

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Let’s talk about those, because I think that’s an aspect that people don’t know about. What are these emails and junk mail letters you’re talking about?

SENKO: So my dad was an electronics engineer. He had actually worked on electronic mail in the eighties. And so he was one of the early older people to use a computer. Rush Limbaugh told him about all these other things like Judicial Watch, the Heritage Foundation. He would talk about the NRA. So my dad got on all these email lists, like hundreds of lists of right-wing propaganda.

And he began sending them out to the family. And nobody wanted him to send them, but my mother would respond and say: ‘This isn’t true. That’s not true.’ But he was caught up in this angry world and would send them to everybody. What I found curious and disturbing is that I would see these same emails popping up at work too, and people would send them around the office.

And that’s another thing that made me queasy, like what, what’s going on here, that all of the emails had one thing in common. And that was to demonize Democrats. Whether it was liberals hate Christmas or they want to take “In God We Trust” off the penny because they’re godless.

So emails were really a big part of it. It was a full-fledged plan. You have the radio, you have the TV, and then you had the emails. And then on top of that, you would get the snail mail.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Now a lot of these emails that are sent out to people trapped in the right wing media vortex, they also are selling them scam products. So things like telling them if you eat 20 sticks of cinnamon a day, you can be immune to cancer or things like that. Did your father ever get into any of those fake cures medical stuff?

SENKO: It wasn’t there yet. It was mostly laying the groundwork for hating everything that Democrats and liberals stood for—or didn’t even stand for, but were accused of standing for.

There would be an email, let’s say about a professor, right? Because professors, they think poison the mind, make people liberal, who in a classroom said ‘I challenge anybody that can prove that there’s a God. And the email goes, ‘a Marine got up and punched him down and said, there’s your proof.’

So that was the kind of email that was saying, professors are bad. They’re Democratic. They’re godless. They’re teaching our kids to be this way and then glorifying like the military and Marines and violence. So like the one, one example killed me the most was when my dad sent me the email that said liberals hate Christmas. Because I was, I lived in New York, and we just blew Christmas up. Like we loved Christmas. So I just knew something really bad was going on.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. The philosophical term of what they’re doing with this is that they’re trying to, they’re trying to create an alternative epistemology, not just alternative facts, but an idea that knowledge itself is equivalent to your feelings basically. So if you feel that the Bible is, a hundred percent literally true, then it is. And if you feel that such-and-such Democratic politician is a pedophile rapist, then it must be true. Because your gut feeling is all that matters. And anybody who tries to deal in the realm of facts and figures or science, these are people you should be suspicious of.

SENKO: That’s right. There was also in that email an anti-intellectual meaning in there as well. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it’s important because this idea got started as a way of pushing back against economists actually, that was how it originally started. Because these right wing laissez-faire economic policies, not only do they allow the creation of monopolies that actually destroy a free market. So there isn’t actually private competition, but they also do make it so that there is vast inequality, and actually harmed the people who are voting for these policies.

So they don’t work and they’re harmful, but they still want them because they want, they want to keep their money and they want to keep their religious hierarchy and keep things the way they were used to.

SENKO: Yeah. It’s about the greed and the power.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So after the film came out, you also have turned it into a book. Let me put the cover up on the screen here. Tell us a little bit about what’s different with the book here compared to in the movie. Is it more of an update or what did you do differently here?

SENKO: Yeah, it is an update and it had more research, but I also felt like to me I was just trying to ring a bell and tell everybody save the country. This is what’s going on. You’re being bamboozled. And because I felt like the movie wasn’t getting as much attention as I felt it should.

I noticed that authors were always being interviewed, or that there were some, a little bit more cachet with authors. So I thought, okay, I’m going to write a book too. And then I took the opportunity to delve more into my dad’s past, to look at how Hitler came into being, the roots of propaganda.

And and then, I also did more research and I read Ann Nelson’s book, Shadow Network, about the CNP and then—

SHEFFIELD: That’s Council for National Policy for those who don’t know.

SENKO: Right. Yeah. And Democracy in Chains and found out that the roots went further back than even I had thought. And that’s where they were.

And then I just have been doing research on what can we do about it? And and also stories, personal stories people, we have a website with all these personal stories. Most of them heartbreaking, like how, what happened to my dad, or my relative, my loved one, some of them positive because they were able to help make their loved one have more of an open mind and lose anger and get back to being themselves.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And actually that was something that I did really like about your film. Is that in your own case, like that was what happened. So I’m going to just play a little bit from the end where you talk about how your father was able to escape.

(Begin clip)

SENKO: Mom would shut down his computer at night and she started subscribing him to Truthout and AlterNet and Reader Supported News,

GREG MOORES (Brother): and he would just read whatever ended up in his inbox.

SENKO: He would just read everything. He’s an avid reader. He sits at that computer and he reads whatever’s in front of him.

MOORES: That’s very interesting. And see his thinking changed

SENKO: because

His politics have totally changed. He voted for Obama.

MOORES: What? He voted for Obama?

SENKO: In these past couple years, there’s finally been peace in our house. My dad is more content than I’ve ever seen him. He’s not angry, he’s not argumentative. And he’s really fun the way he used to be. And we get along really well. And I dote on him.

In fact, I get along with him better than I ever have. And it’s a bittersweet pill because I know these are his last years, but I’m happy that he’s happy. He is my pal and I’m his.

FRANK SENKO (Father): (laughs)

(End clip)

SHEFFIELD: That’s a lovely ending. And I’m glad that you guys were able to help him escape that before he passed away.

SENKO: I’m glad too. Cause it was his whole demeanor changed. He was happier than he’d ever been. And that was nice to see in his last couple of years, he wasn’t raging and full of anger and hatred.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And just to recapitulate a little bit about what you said that your mom helped him get a better information diet basically, and got him subscribed in addition to right-wing stuff, got him looking at some progressive news and things like that. What was his reaction at first? So he just literally read it didn’t care what it was, or did he get angry at about it at first?

SENKO: His whole change happened over a long period of time, probably over a year. So it was gradual.

And in the meantime, my mother learned how to source. So she would research the emails that he sent her. And she would write back, no, that didn’t happen. This happened. So he was hearing some of these ideas, it wasn’t that he was just in his pod anymore. He was hearing some of these ideas.

And then when they moved, the radio broke and he lost Rush Limbaugh. And immediately, they were having lunch together again and his mood was lifted. His mood was better. And then it wasn’t until he went into the hospital for a week for kidney stone that— she was, they have old computers so she, she felt like that the emails are just backing up on his computer and like something would happen to his computer.

And she asked me to get rid of them. I said, mom, they just keep coming. Cause they’re subscribed. So she unsubscribed and then she got the idea. Subscribing them to some of the stuff that I read.

And so I think he was so happy to be home and just content, like sitting at his computer. I don’t think, I don’t think he realized it. I don’t think he recognized it so much. If he did, though, he was always curious. If he did, he just probably would say we’re going to see what the enemy is up to, or I’m going to read this anyway. So he had a great curiosity.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that I think is, a great tool for helping people break out of this alternative media disinformation network is just to spark curiosity. Like that’s the thing about Q Anon, for instance, is that it actually feeds people’s curiosity and lets them have this idea that they’re doing research, that they’re smart too.

And that’s what hooks a lot of people is that they, they’ve really think they’re learning things and educating themselves.

SENKO: And that they belong to a tribe.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah exactly.

SENKO: And we’re in the know, just like the tribe is. And so the tribe looks at them like: ‘Hey, you’re with us. You’re really smart.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess in my own case, so I was born and raised in as a Mormon fundamentalist. So I believed that all other religions were false.

A lot of people don’t know that Mormons actually got started on this whole Christian nationalism thing. It’s literally in the Book of Mormon that America was created by God as a choice land above all other lands. And that only countries that serve God could be allowed to occupy the land here. That’s in the Book of Mormon in the 1830s.

And that type of messaging, I was hearing from these far right pundits, like it, it matched exactly what my own religious messaging that I’ve grown up with. And my parents didn’t really have any contact with right-wing media. And, but it was when we started driving along on cross country trips, doing a lot of driving that, there was nothing else to do, but turn on the radio.

And in many cases that, the AM signal was the strongest, because FM just doesn’t travel very far. And so we just started listening to Rush Limbaugh and getting more and more right-wing. But, I always did try to keep a an interest in having a true knowledge and not cutting myself off from other sources.

So once I became a right-wing activist, I started saying I’m going to take it upon myself to start rebutting the left because I don’t see anybody in conservative media. They don’t do it. They don’t talk about what the left is talking about. So I’m going to start doing it.

And then, so I started doing that, reading more progressive sites and little did I know, I started looking at it and then I saw: ‘Oh no, they’re right (laughter) about this thing. Okay. Let’s put that aside. I just won’t talk about it anymore.’

(laughter)

SHEFFIELD: And it just kept happening over and over. And then I got fully exposed to the Christian right and what they actually want, and how they hate everyone else who is not a far right Christian, and how they literally want to have more legal rights for themselves and say that in private to themselves.

Like they say that, there’s this guy named Tony Perkins, who’s the head of this hate group called the Family Research Council. He said repeatedly that if you’re a progressive Christian who believes that your church should do same-sex marriages, that you are not entitled to religious freedom because your doctrines violate traditional Christianity.

And so you don’t get religious freedom, no religious freedom for you. And once I started seeing that, I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t be a part of what these people are doing anymore. And that was my own exit.

SENKO: Yeah growing up, we were taught by the Catholic Church that there were no other religions that were accurate. And I believed, I don’t know if they taught it, they probably did. But I believed going into another church was a sin. And that’s what the whole right wing media ecosphere reminded me of: ‘No other media is right .Only we’re right. Listen to us.’

And then creating a bubble, creating doubt about anything else. ‘We’re the ones that right. Only listen to us.’ That’s also very cult-like behavior. Being a Catholic, I had that similar experience and they’re doing the same thing, even though they’re not religious, they’re doing the same thing.

You know what I mean?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, no, like that is what kind of happened. I basically was in a cult run by my father. And once I escaped that and then when I started looking at politics a little bit more deeply, I started realizing, wow, all these things that happened to me earlier in a religious context, are actually being done to people on a broad scale, in the political sense by the the reactionary movement. And that was, I decided I had to start talking about this stuff a lot more because, as you said, earlier the mainstream media, they don’t understand this stuff.

And they don’t want to talk about it. I think—

SENKO: Because they’re corporate run. It doesn’t serve them to talk about it anyway, because they’re corporate run. They’re run also by really uber rich people who don’t want to pay more taxes and would prefer less regulations. So there’s only so far that they’ll go, they also don’t want to offend their advertisers.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing also is that for those who might be willing to say that, having worked in mainstream newsrooms, ‘I’ve encountered this idea. We already ran an article about that, two and a half years ago. So why do we need to have one today?’

And it’s like: A) no one read your article two and a half years ago. And B) even if they had, it’s okay to talk about a subject more than once.

SENKO: And C), it’s about repetition, as we learn from them because that was a Goebbels mainstay. And that was the Republicans’ mainstay. And if you watched any of the hearings the other day, they just all kept repeating. It takes a while for people to learn something. Yeah, you have to hear it. What I heard is, we’re absorb it like seven different ways. You got to read it, you got to hear it, visualize it, whatever. But one article isn’t going to cut it. And that also speaks to how important they think it is. You know what I mean? It can’t really be that important because there was just one article written about it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Now, so the hearings you’re referring to, just for those who might be watching this later, or listening later, you were referring to which, which hearings?

SENKO: The Supreme Court justice Jackson .

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Ketanji Yeah. Yeah. And and they kept the Republican senators kept repeating the same attacks and it doesn’t matter to them whether they’re true or not.

That’s something that a lot of mainstream journalists don’t get is that, they will go in and invite, these various right-wing people on to have a debate quote, unquote. But the reality is they’re not trying to debate all there, there is to just repeat their talking points.

They’re not this, isn’t a reasoned dialogue that they’re trying to have. It is purely propagandistic and they’re using these outlets purely as a platform and nothing more than that. They are not there to have a discussion.

SENKO: And that’s what these libertarian Republicans do in general. So they’ll use a opportunity to do that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah and that exists also in their media side. If you’re watching Fox News or Newsmax, or you’re listening to right-wing podcasts like Joe Rogan, or any of these other people, they don’t ever have debates with people who disagree with them. They simply do not.

If you are a Republican who doesn’t like Donald Trump, you’re banned from Fox News. If you’re just somebody who challenges Republicans in a tough way, Joe Rogan will never invite you on his show, despite constantly proclaiming: ‘Oh, I just want to have conversations. I just want to have talked to everyone about everything.’

And the answer is no, actually you don’t. Because you explicitly avoid topics that are against your right wing ideology or undermine your ideas.

SENKO: Right. And in right-wing radio, that we were speaking about earlier, the way it was responded to, if somebody with another point of view called in, as they were berated, they were yelled at, they were made fun of, they were hung up on.

Yeah. So there, there wasn’t any debate then. And then some people that are listening to that, it’s almost like a sport, turns into a sport rather than a debate. And so they like it for that reason rather than liking it for the intellectual reason that we’re exchanging ideas here. They’re liking it that well, this person is telling this other person who he disagrees with often. Gee, I wish I could do that. Yeah. So it started back then with the talk radio and then not allowing any.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, yeah, definitely. And actually, Rush Limbaugh used to have a feature on his show in the nineties where he would say, I’m going to do a caller abortion. I’m going to abort this liberal person who hurt my feelings. And then he would try to simulate whatever he imagined an abortion sounds like, after cutting off this person. Because yeah, the reality is that they cannot debate their ideas. Their ideas are not based on reason. They’re not based on research.

And this is why they have to attack actual legitimate forms of knowledge. So for people who do know this stuff, it can be hard to get this information out. I’m sure, in the course of your advocacy, you’ve encountered that, as you said, that a lot of the corporate media, they don’t want to talk about this stuff. They don’t want to understand that. And they have this idea that you can defeat fascism with milk toast centrism.

SENKO: You can’t.

SHEFFIELD: And why and why not? Why would you say?

SENKO: First of all like [pollster] Frank Luntz said, I forget exactly how it was, 80% of our life is emotion. Another 20% is rationality. And these people that are all fired up and full of anger because they’re listening to a radio host that’s angry or watching Fox TV, and they’re all angry. What it is, their amygdala has taken over, and their prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that does the rational thinking, is not turned on.

You’re not going to get them with anything milk toast. I think that because when it’s milk toast, it’s also creating uncertainty. It’s also milky, it’s mushy. It leaves room for doubt. Because they’re too afraid to be objective to be truly objective. So the message isn’t clear enough, the message has to be much more clear and that milk toast approach doesn’t work.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. For people who have an emotional, as you were saying, an emotional attachment to beliefs, just simply saying here are some other facts and you could decide for yourself. They didn’t reason themselves into that opinion. So why would they look at those facts at all? They wouldn’t.

And some people have an innate curiosity that can be appealed to, but doing it in a way that’s just simply ‘here’s some stuff that you hate you should look at it.’ It’s not going to work. It’s simply won’t.

SENKO: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. And that’s, what’s scary about it, because look at the point where we got to January six and this just built up over the years. I feared it would get to this point where now violence actually seems okay. And anything goes. Again, I refer back to the hearings where [Missouri Sen. Joshua] Holley, and [South Carolina Sen.] Lindsey Graham, and the other guys, they were like barking at Jackson and seething underneath and that’s okay. That’s okay now.

And that’s because of pushing the envelope over the years, right-wing media pushing the envelope. Let’s get a little more aggressive. Let’s get a little more insulting. Let’s push stochastic terrorism.

SHEFFIELD: You’re going to have to define what that means.

SENKO: So stochastic terrorism is speaking in a way, not directly inciting people to violence, but it is speaking in such a way that incidentally, it incites people to violence.

So let me give an example like Alex Jones, for instance, in talking about the massacre.

SHEFFIELD: Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut.

SENKO: Telling people that they were actors, telling people where they lived. And they just really, this is just a plot by the government so they can take away your guns. Stuff like that creates, can create violence. That’s what stochastic terrorism is. I might not be explaining it that well, but and then that also happened on Fox News, like [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony] Fauci saying something like ‘get him in the cross hairs.’

And you’re not saying commit violence, but the things you’re saying provoke people into committing violence, because they think there’s no other alternative.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and Donald Trump on January Sixth kind of did the same thing. So he would say we’re going to peacefully demonstrate. But then earlier in the speech, he said, if you don’t fight hard, you’re not going to have a country anymore—

SENKO: And he.

SHEFFIELD: —If you don’t fight like hell.

SENKO: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he said, and I’ll be with you. And then of course did not have any intention of going. But basically the idea is to create a sense in the audience where there is no hope, unless you engage in violence. Violence is the only possible recourse.

SENKO: Right. These people, these Democrats, these liberals slash pedophiles, QAnon are so bad, and are so evil that they are destroying everything that you love. And yeah, it makes it seem hopeless and then on top of that, saying that there was voter fraud, there’s not much voter fraud to speak of, but if they think that there’s voter fraud, then they’re even more desperate thinking: ‘We don’t have a chance.’

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. We can’t vote our way out of this. We can’t win the election. So what course is there other than violence?

SENKO: Yeah. Consequently, they think that they’re the patriots and it’s just such a screwed up cycle.

SHEFFIELD: But the good thing is that it is possible at least for some people to see their way out. Do you want to maybe talk about some of the experiences of some other people that you have come into contact whose loved ones have escaped this?

SENKO: One thing that I’d like to tell you about is a recent, I just very recently, someone got in touch with me from the UK who had a positive experience.

She had been very close to her dad. And he was in his seventies and he was home bound. So he was listening to a lot of TV and watching a lot of YouTube stuff. And one day she heard him cursing and yelling something about immigrants. And she asked him what was wrong.

He said: ‘Oh, what I’m listening to is really making me mad.’ And it was something with Steve Bannon and she said: ‘So why [do] you like Brexit?’

And he said: ‘Because terrorists are going to come into our town.’ And they lived in a really sleepy little town, so it wasn’t likely to happen.

So she she made him breakfast. They always had a really good relationship. And she said, I don’t think you’re receiving all the correct information. And she showed him The Great Hack and then my film. And then he had a come to Jesus moment. He realized that he was being bamboozled.

He was like my father, a really friendly guy would talk to anybody, and then suddenly he was hating any immigrant, just because they’re an immigrant and they’re probably likely to be a terrorist. So that was a positive story that I got. I’m really happy about that they’re posted on the website, but there are other horror stories too.

I guess the one that sticks out most is Maria from Florida. This was when Obama became president, I think it was the second time. Yeah. And she went to her aunt and uncle’s house for Thanksgiving and she brought something about, up about the economy and Obama.

And her uncle got really mad and said, told her, you get out of my house. And she said, no, I’m not getting out of your house. That’s just silly. And he went upstairs, got a gun, came downstairs and shot into the floor twice. And then she did get out of his house because basically she was scared to death.

So that was one of the stories that I got. We got so many stories on the website, heartbreaking stories, a woman whose husband changed because he got into an accident and he was home and he just would listen to right-wing radio all day and then Fox. And before you knew it, his entire personality changed and he was angry and hateful even towards her daughter. She and her daughter.

And they finally separated and it was, she felt it was really sad. It was really sad. Yeah, there’s, I don’t know how many stories you want me to tell, but there’s a lot of them.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I do think though that all these stories that you’ve received and collected and told, they really show that there needs to be a drastic reorientation of the way that people who are progressive utilize media. So whether it’s the donors or whether it’s, big donors or small donors.

A lot of people are willing to go out and donate to a candidate X. But they need to realize that the candidate, even if they were to win, they have to have some sort of support mechanism for their ideas to ever become law.

Because, as it is —let’s say Bernie Sanders had become the president in 2016. He would have been attacked. His ideas would have been attacked nonstop, Medicare for All and things like that. Even the mainstream media was attacking these ideas.

And so if you want the public to support these programs, you need to have more media outlets. That’s just the bottom line.

SENKO: Right. Yeah. And they really got restricted in 1996 with the Telecommunication Act, which basically became a free for all media, it deregulated. And now you have maybe six billionaires that own most of the media outlets everywhere, and then journalism, local journalism has been greatly affected, we know like hedge funds have been buying them up. So there are people that have some ideas to bring back local journalism, tax credits, voucher systems. Robert McChesney, he has some good ideas. I think his tax credits.

But yeah what would be really good is if we had some progressive billionaire, working with somebody like George Lakoff creating— it doesn’t really have to be progressive, but it has to be objective, and where they stick to the truth. And then there are ways, maybe even with a conscious effort to figure out ways to combat what has been in place for the last 40 years, which has poisoned so many Americans. Literally millions of Americans have been brainwashed and it’s just astounding.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. What are some of the things that the audience can do from their standpoint where they’re at? Would you suggest?

SENKO: I am very happy to say that now there are other people who have hopped on board and realized right-wing media is really a problem.

And so there are these grassroots groups that are developing like DDAD. Their website is stopdisinformation.org. They’re dedicated to fighting disinformation. And one of the projects right now is Fox. And eliminating Fox from your cable TV and there’s various ways to do that. So they have a website where they tell you how to do that. Then they also have sessions you can attend to figure out how to ask people in a public place, how to turn off Fox, without having it be confrontational.

My big thing right now, which I’m trying to get more and more attention to, is getting Fox out of the military because it’s right now, it airs in the military. And if they’re so concerned, like Secretary [of Defense Lloyd] Austin, one of the goals is to root out radicalization in the military. Then it makes sense to me to start with a source. Certainly Fox is one of the sources, if not the main source. And right now it’s, anti-American, it’s not patriotic, it’s pro-Putin.

I’m trying to raise awareness to get for people to write Austin, write their representatives and get Fox out of the military. So we’ve got several grassroots going on. There’s also Truth Tuesdays. They demonstrate in front of Fox every Tuesday, they operate through this group called Rise and Resist.

I think we all have to really make this a focus. Another thing that we should do, really the most unpleasant thing, is to talk to people who disagree with us. And there are experts in that. There’s Steven Hassan, who’s a cult expert and he wrote The Cult of Trump, but there’s also a small group called Hear Yourself Think, and they’re connected with DDAD, Defenders of Democracy Against Disinformation.

Yeah, Hear Yourself Think, they actually have an approach. They understand the science, like the amygdala is on fire and that you have to bring people down, get their trust, kick that into the pre frontal cortex so they’re thinking rationally and then start talking to them.

But also you have to realize you have to have patience. It takes a really long time. But I think we have to do it ,as unpleasant as it is. And we have to also stop hating these people so much. My dad was a really kind person who would do anything for you. Love everybody. There are people who do succumb to cults. Look at Jim Jones, were they always like that? No.

SHEFFIELD: It’s important to understand that these people are, they’re not the leaders, they’re not the ones that are coming up with these amoral, dishonest ideas. They were tricked by them basically.

SENKO: Yeah and bamboozled.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah and it that’s, it can be hard to have that, to accept that’s what happened.

SENKO: I know.

SHEFFIELD: But it is necessary, I think, in order to have long-term progress.

SENKO: Yeah. But they can people can pick up my book and I’m not just trying to sell my book. But those, I have a lot of suggestions in the back. I think, the Telecommunications Act really screwed us up. So we have to push for more regulation, more media regulation, antitrust.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right, yeah, there’s there’s a lot to be done, but the core approach is to get people who are aware that disinformation is a problem to take the next step and to start realizing they can do something about it.

SENKO: Basically, we all should raise our voices to our representatives as often as we can, that there is a problem with right-wing media and let them know that we’re aware of it. We care about it, that it’s dividing our country, and try and get them to focus on that a little bit too.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And to creating alternatives to that as well.

So so while I think the work that Media Matters does is great or Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is great, these are only two organizations, they cannot possibly counteract thousands of entities that are out there that are funded by giant billionaires. Two things are not enough.

You need a lot more than two, and progressive philanthropy needs to be reoriented. And people who have a national platform in progressive media, there are a bunch of podcasts out there that are making tens of thousands of dollars a month.

And they’re not doing anything with that money in terms of reaching the public or expanding what they’re doing beyond just a few episodes a week watched by their initial audience. Gotta do more than that. There are a lot of people out there that say, oh, democracy is under threat. Then you need to change what you’re doing.

All right. Jen, this has been a great conversation. So if people want to check out your work, they can go to TheBrainwashingOfMyDad.com, right?

SENKO: Right.

SHEFFIELD: You’ve got you have a mailing list on there. They can sign up for, is that right?

SENKO: Yeah. And I don’t overdo it if. It’s not weekly. It’s not monthly. It’s according to um, uh—

SHEFFIELD: Occasional.

SENKO: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Great. And then people can also follow you on Twitter. You are at jensenko, that’s S-E-N-K-O.

All right. So that’s another program for everyone today. I wanted to thank you for being here, and I did want to remind everybody that Theory of Change is part of the Flux.community media network. So a new network dedicated to discussing the larger and deeper trends in politics, media, religion, and technology, and how they all intersect with each other. So please check that out at flux.community. And then if you want to go to theoryofchange.show, that will take you directly to the archives of the program.

And if you like what we’re doing here, we definitely can use your support, go to patreon.com/discoverflux. So thanks for being here. I am Matthew Sheffield, and I will see you next time.