It Ain’t Necessarily So: Fox News, Guns and Capitalism

It Ain’t Necessarily So: Fox News, Guns and Capitalism

By Joel Levin

I say this; you say that. I say there are 20 kids in the class; you say there are 24. I say the restaurant closes on Monday; you say it does on Tuesday. I say the empty lot on the corner is zoned for commercial; you say it is zoned for residential. Vaccines are generally safe and effective; you say they are ineffective and pernicious. I say Biden won; you say, Trump.

In short, we disagree. Is that the end of it? Is it just now a matter of agreeing to disagree? Nothing in our common sense says anything of the sort. We offer evidence, proof, counter-examples, and ways of judging. We observe, count, call, measure, investigate, or experiment to settle the dispute. We usually spend our time not proving we are right but proving the other side is wrong. In short, we begin by trying to falsify those matters we believe are false. We say to those who disagree: “Look” and “Look in places trustworthy or using sound methods.” Count the kids in the class, call the restaurant, examine the property records at the county courthouse, read the scientific journals, and look at judicial findings in election controversies. Figure it out. Even if, for example, one cannot prove every dose of every vaccine is safe, one can prove that a vaccine is safer and more effective than an alternative treatment. For example, the Covid vaccine does not contain microchips and has a lower mortality rate than ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. By doing so, one might falsify statements that claim otherwise.

In this case, common sense and profound philosophical insight amount to the same thing: judgment starts with proving something false long before we might demonstrate the contrary. Truth can be too challenging to track down, elusive to discover, and vague to state confidently. Perhaps that is why we add “absolute” before truth, to show just what a struggle it is to in down. We are too often burdened by a lack of evidence, conflicting accounts, dubious history, experimental limitations, poor theoretical structures, or promoters who lie, are fraudulent, or have ulterior motives. All of this makes us unsure with certainty that we have arrived at the truth. However, being uncertain about the truth comes in different flavors, and we will return to how that works later.

In the meantime, knowing what is false often proves to be a much easier matter. 2+3 does not equal 6; Stephen Douglas, John McCain, and, in 2020, Donald Trump were, in fact, not elected President, and while Columbus is the capital of Ohio, New York is not or is no longer the capital of the United States. Essential matters once taken to be true – the world is flat, the sun circles the earth, men are superior to women, kings enjoy divine rights, the Hebrew Bible accurately calculates that the world was created in the Garden of Eden 5783 years ago – are all false and have been demonstrated to be clearly erroneous. It is often easy to show that something is incorrect simply by pulling out a quick piece of evidence, a stray fact lying around, an inconsistency in the position of those asserting the false statement, a counter-example

 Or through a hundred other ways. That is common sense.  

We see this despite fits and starts, through fog and misdirection, in the shadows that Plato described in a cave, by discounting mirages, smokescreens, and magic tricks, despite the indistinct blurs that distort reality. Falsity is only sometimes apparent at first. Any single piece of evidence needs to be ultimately confirming or completely disconfirming. Nevertheless, it may be because of the fits and starts and because we have once seen the mirage, the snake that was, in fact, a stick, that we become more careful, more astute, and more accurate. 

These experiences help us reassess the world around us and figure out at least what is false. We quickly understand much of what is false and, equally quickly, know that we reach this point with absolute confidence. That same determination of what is true, other than simple, logical negatives – if some statement, S, is false, a contrary argument, -S, must be true; or for example, if the statement S ‘All dogs have six legs’ is wrong, then the statement -S, ‘At least one dog does not have six legs,’ must be accurate – proves to be far more complex. One way of getting around this is through a concept called “verisimilitude in theory.” A theory with a greater degree of verisimilitude can generate more truths and fewer false statements than one with a lesser degree of verisimilitude.

However, that is a dodge – how many more truths or fewer falsities and how are we to measure that – and is not the fundamental insight of philosophy. That insight was developed mainly by the Viennese-turned-English philosopher of science, Karl Popper. It is the concept of falsifiability. Falsifiability says that for any number of reasons – prudential, social, political, rational, scientific, or otherwise – we should not continue to believe in any statement or set of ideas, or principle or set of principles, or theory or grand theory when we cannot clearly state how we could logically prove it to be false. It is not the same as proving something to be true.

Take the typical example. We might never be able to prove as accurately that all swans are white unless we spotted every swan and noticed they were all white. Given that difficulty, we could never prove the statement ‘All swans are white is true’ to be, in fact, true. However, we might be able to figure out a way to falsify it if we could, at least logically, find or surmise the existence of a single black swan. Then, we would prove the statement ‘All swans are white’ is false. (By surmise, we might know that all birds have a rare gene that expresses itself by removing all color from their feathers and that swans, being birds, carry that gene). Finding the truth is often plain too hard or not feasible or not possible, or ridiculous in many cases, but it is worth ensuring that things we consider not to be true are false. Popper suggested, for example, that grand theories, like those of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud and Christianity, were not worth believing or pursuing, as everything that happened in the world seemed, at least to Marxists and Freudians and Christians, to confirm their theories. No piece of evidence whatsoever would show them to be wrong. We might now pejoratively think such theories or views to be ideology. Still, much dogma masquerades as general theory or simply sticking to one’s principles or somebody’s facts. Falsifiability gets the concept of impenetrable correctness against all possible evidence out of the closet.

Of course, much of what people believe is relatively closely tied to common sense or, if inaccurate, is often only casually held. They may think they will get a promotion, that their football team will win, or that it will not rain tomorrow. They may believe that for a set of reasons they hold internally but cannot easily describe or express. They will continue to make those kinds of predictive mistakes, but the beliefs have some basis in empirical reality (Bad weather predictions can begin with practical reality. It is typically rainy in April and generally sunny in August. Hence, good weather weddings, picnics, and trips to the ball game may be reasonably predicted. Failures are typically not a matter of catastrophic rethinking. Sometimes there is sunshine in April and rain in August). Moreover, common sense quickly degenerates into cliché and trite expressions – ‘he will get over her death,’ ‘she will do better next time,’ ‘that unpleasant (put in your adjective here) person will eventually get what he deserves’ – may not be falsifiable, and may not even be accurate, but have some reasonable degree of verisimilitude, as they are not far from reflecting ordinary reality.

That benign talk can sometimes spin into the pernicious. Consider the initial reaction of a person surviving a catastrophe. “God saved me,” said the survivor. That might offer him comfort and explain an otherwise relatively inscrutable situation as to why he survived. In contrast, others didn’t, whether it be a mining accident, building collapse, or cancer trial. Nothing, of course, will falsify it. The inability to falsify here is not because of the failure of a repeatable empirical proof. That would make Popper’s falsifiability idea essentially useless. We cannot rewrite history or tell why certain things happened one day, year, or 1000 years ago. In the same way, we could design some experiments, tests, or studies for the future.  

Popper’s position is that he is not interested in whether God saved the survivor. What is important to him is that, for the religious survivor – and those who claim God saved them would be typically or perhaps, by definition, be religious – no explanation would prove their belief to be false. A beam that fell one way or another, or a fire that suddenly moved away because of an oxygen source towards another room, or a tsunami that rose 30 feet when the person on a roof sat at 31 feet: none of these would count to that person thanking the Lord as falsifying the statement that God saved them. Because of that, statements like “God saved me” hold no interest.  

The same would be valid for the original theory of psychoanalysis. Suppose a Freudian attributes everything to repressed emotions or some inscrutable calculus of the ego, id, and superego. In that case, that is of little interest to Popper or anyone who might think that reason had something to do with it. Nor does Marxism, which has a view of inevitable, historical economic progress (historical or dialectical materialism) with every political and economic event proving it, have any interest. All of this is, for those who want to focus on falsifiability, at best, nonsense, and, at worst, prejudice.  

A different problem arises because such statements do not merely defy falsifiability, not simply because they are superstitious or not even because they are wrong. The problem is that they disguise real solutions that would improve the lives, prosperity, peace, health, and safety of any other number of individuals. Let us consider what might seem to be a remote example, but one that unfortunately has natural resonance in America today. That example is drawn from the matter of an unfortunate individual named Inta. Consider the account provided by the anthropologists David and Jarawan Engel:

The economic boom of the 1990s brought a young man named Inta from the rice fields of northern Thailand to a factory near the city, where he operated a stamping machine making cardboard boxes. It was dangerous work and paid just 144 baht (about $3.60) per day. The brake on the stamping machine didn’t function properly, and other employees had already been injured. No one, not even Inta, was surprised when his hand was caught in the machine one day and mangled beyond repair. What may be surprising, however, is the explanation he offers for the horrifying injury and his assumption about who – or what – was responsible. 

Inta’s injury narrative does not characterize his employer as irresponsible or greedy. He never blamed his employer, nor did he attribute fault to the manufacturer of the defective stamping machine. Instead, he asserts that the primary causes of his injury were a ghost and his karma. As Inta tells the story, he was riding to work one day on his motorcycle when he came on a group of villagers at the scene of an accident. He stopped to see what happened and observed a shocking sight: the corpse of a man who had just driven his motorcycle into a banana tree and broken his neck. Inta learned that two unnatural deaths (tai hong) had occurred at this very spot: drowning and stabbing.

Because of that, Inta needed to make an offering at the local Buddhist Temple, or the dead man’s ghost would (rightfully) haunt him. Inta failed to do that, and it was that failure and that ghost that caused his accident. No other blame could be had, and no further explanation was necessary. 

From our smug Western perch, we might think that such beliefs turned causes as the need to make an offering (essentially offer a prayer) or activities of a troublesome ghost who can change events are mere ridiculous superstitions. We should just cast all this aside as the beliefs of people so deluded that they might as absurdly believe in a God who would part the seas or turn those with a wandering eye into a pillar of salt or initiate a virgin birth or allow the favored to walk on water or be resurrected after death. Such superstitious ideas are not worth considering. All that might be true. The problem here is that, given Inta’s typical explanation for a machine operator in Thailand, plant workers remain at risk as factories remain dangerous. Where such views are dominant, employers are not required to initiate safety measures, nor are manufacturers and sellers of equipment in certain parts of the world needed to act responsibly when profiting from the sale of devices that are little more than amputation machines. Such views preclude the various benefits that arise when one thinks the workplace should be safer and machine design and manufacture should reflect that safety concern. Those who otherwise experienced crushed and amputated limbs, blindness and bone fractures, and burns and death would, in significant numbers, be spared. Such can be the problem of belief systems that fail to incorporate any notion of falsifiability.

Such a situation gives rise to a more significant problem. We might think that for authoritarianism to grab hold of society, not only is there the need for dominance of beliefs that cannot be falsified – the views of Marxists, Freudians, the profoundly religious, Inta, QAnon – those in power must act to distort reality in service of non-falsifiable beliefs. The Dominion v. Fox News lawsuit showed clearly that the tool for that has existed for a quarter of a century with Fox News. That tool was put in authoritarian service to the vision and election of Donald Trump.

This is not a place to enumerate all the lies, deceptions, corruptions, frauds, and malevolent distortions of the truth spoken by Trump, his agents, and acolytes. It would be sufficient to say, and it is easily observed, that for many Trump supporters, likely most of them, nothing counts as evidence that Trump and Trumpism are wrong. There would be no way to falsify the Trumpian belief circus, not about immigrants, Russia, Covid, gun violence, the deep state, the election, or almost any other matter Trump touched and distorted. 

What the Dominion v. Fox lawsuit demonstrated explicitly was that Fox News was not only not buying into the non-falsifiable belief system, its executives, presenters, and on-air personalities, time and again, not only showed that they disbelieved the Trump line about a stolen election, they were happy and quite cynically to present it as accurate. At the same time, they held in contempt those who advanced that line. Trump agents, acolytes, and apologists were ridiculed. Nobody believed their messages. A few examples then (and these are very few, given the vast array available):

From Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ most popular on-air personality:

(On Trump): I hate him passionately… What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion at that. 

(On one Trump lawyer): Sidney Powell is lying all the way. I caught her. It’s insane.

(On Dominion): The software shit is absurd.

From Suzanne Scott, Fox News CEO:

(On fact-checking): This has to stop now. This is a terrible business. There needs to be more understanding of what is happening in these shows. The audience is furious, and we are just feeding the material. Bad for business.

From Rupert Murdoch, Fox Corporation Chairman: 

(On Rudy Giuliani): Stupid and damaging. The only one encouraging Trump and misleading him. Both are increasingly mad. 

(On the Senate Majority Leader): The more I think about McConnell’s remarks or complaints, the more I agree.

(On Trump’s insistence of a stolen election): Trump insisting on the election being stolen and convincing 25% of Americans was a huge disservice to the country. Pretty much a crime. Inevitably, it blew up on Jan. 6th.

The falsifiability analysis then: Fox News was speaking to an audience predisposed and then well-trained (one might say, in their pedophilia obsession, groomed) to follow the party line, the going ideology, the singular way of looking at the world, the narrow gestalt, an audience trained to ignore any voice that would falsify its beliefs. The first component of authoritarianism is met, but a significant part of the population is ready to accept a simple-minded, good against evil, us against them, unchanging, nostalgic, chauvinistic, nationalistic, and unfalsifiable belief system – is always with us. That same kind of populace has formed the core of any number of messianic and nationalistic movements. Certain populations see dissenting or contrasting beliefs as heretical and nonconformity worthy of capital punishment. Such a population presents, of course, one of the significant problems of civilization. 

The dream, some might call the conceit, of the Enlightenment was that, with more education and greater exposure to new cultures, localized ignorance and prejudice would disappear, and people would become more broad-minded and generous. That may be true, as measuring such things across the centuries is complicated. Whatever value that belief or conceit has, and undoubtedly it has certain things going in its favor as the America of today – without past de jure segregation, with greater interracial marriage, with less religious parochialism, with increasing support for the rights of gays and women and people with disabilities, and with some generosity towards alien cultures – than in the past. All of that is, at this moment, in danger of being lost. There is a degree to which education has moved backward with book-banning and don’t say gay and no historical disparagement when institutional competence becomes suspect with labels of the deep state when more considered study and research and writing becomes tainted as with the NIH and medical schools on the Covid vaccine or vaccines generally, and with any journalist or media outlet that is not on board with the correct thinking at that moment publishing fake news. The cult mentality is made more cult-like, the ability to be skeptical is repressed, and different voices become alien and dangerous. The difficulty of falsifiability becomes not just that, a problem. It becomes impossible. 

A condescending view holds that many of these cult and nationalistic populace members don’t know any better. It is condescension in the service of liberality, but too often a liberal posture and too often lacking empirical evidence at both ends. Many at the demographically bottom are astute and skeptical; others at the demographically top (usually better off and better educated) are cult followers. In addition, it is not unlike the protestation of the heroin addict, who claims to be hooked absent any personal fault, and, once again, has been unable to escape the ad. One might remain skeptical about this effort, as it seems any number of individuals can get drawn in and still escape, have done so, and are, in fact, capable of getting it out when given enough intellectual ammunition to shoot their way out of the non-falsifiability idea prison. These lambs to the ideological slaughter certainly knew well enough not to get in the first place. However, it is the case that the real fault lies squarely with the authoritarian leadership, Fox News, and Trump Regime. 

During the lawsuit, by way of the interrogatories, the requests for admissions and production of documents, and the depositions that constitute civil discovery, Fox News confessed to doing two things: first, being aware that what it said on the air about the validity and results of the Presidential election was false. (Of course, there is quite a history of untruths before Fox managed to rile up a corporation, Dominion, with sufficient resources to challenge and expose one set of such falsehoods). Second, Fox continued the process of promoting a non-falsifiable lie by challenging – early and often, in a way that was profound and wide and utterly disingenuous – the reliability and good faith of any who would challenge the idea. All the reasons for its name-calling, from deep state to fake news to coddling pedophilia, were put in service to ward promoting the same thing: barricading the falsehoods against any falsifiability intrusion. The consequences are numerous, but they certainly include the Jan. 6th insurrection, a resulting matter predictable and predicted and now proven to be encouraged by Fox’s own words in the documents revealed in the Dominion lawsuit.

But it continues. That is, the Fox beat goes on, as do the lies. The latest storytelling involves guns. This issue is simple and complicated but consists of several things that defy falsifiability.  

First, the right to bear arms involves individuals alone and not individuals as part of militias, as guaranteed in the Second Amendment to the Constitution. This is false, although the Supreme Court has said it is true, but that is a story for elsewhere. However, it is worth examining the plain language of the Second Amendment, the right thing to do per conservative jurists, and, quite simply, ask what happened to the first comma, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. 

Second, the right to bear arms means the right to bear any arms and to bear them in any place. AK-15s can be bought without training or background checks and can be openly carried to church, inside preschools, within intensive care units, and anywhere else one might want to aim and fire. This is false. Even if there is a right to bear arms, that right, like all rights, is subject to restrictions based on reasonableness, necessity, and countervailing other rights. Free speech rights don’t allow people to scream “fire” in a theater, lynch him when pointing to the defendant in a jail cell, or, as the Fox settlement proved, Dominion engaged in voting fraud when it did no such thing. It makes no sense to restrict speech more severely than guns. 

Third, there is a pernicious crime wave in American cities. That wave is the fault of progressive mayors and prosecutors and can only be stopped by more citizens having more guns and better and bigger ones. Such a view is false at both ends. Crime is diminishing in virtually all cities (homicide was down the last two quarters of 2022 by 17% for America’s 45 largest cities), including New York City (down 5.6% year-over-year per most recent statistics), where Rep. Jim Jordan held a kangaroo hearing about increased crime in New York, and the progressive prosecutors’ failure to stop the crime. (While crime in New York is down, it is, in fact, up in Rep. Jordan’s more rural district). 

Moreover, the connection between aggressive and moderate prosecution (moderate here typically means lighter sentences for nonviolent crimes, drug crimes, and financial crimes, and alternative treatment for those who are addicted or cognitively impaired, seemingly a good solution) is challenging to make, in who is arrested, the status and conditions of jails, judicial sentencing practices, how harsh prosecution and sentencing were before. The quality of diversion programs can tilt numbers in a way larger than any of the smaller swings up and down on the crime rate. Given that moderation mainly appears for financial crimes, drug crimes, and crimes with greater justification or excuses (the cognitively impaired case and the burning bed case), none of it would seem a matter that ought to motivate more greatly arming a concerned citizenry. However, up or not, the paranoia created by the imagined crime wave makes the solution of having everyone armed in the face of what looks like a state of nature with menacing hordes at the gate, invading armies in the driveway, and roving brigades in the backyard seem like the best solution. It is not.

This analysis, one where nothing could falsify it – indeed, not contrary statistics by the FBI of the deep state, not the fact that mass shootings involve weapons with no sporting or self-defense purpose, not the fact that crimes can be stopped by somebody Wild West-like being quicker on the draw, nor the tragedies of accidental shootings and shootings by the mentally incompetent, by accident or by those who steal guns. None of this matters. Nor does the fact that the U.S. has more guns and more homicides than any other Western nation. Those facts falsify the lie that more guns are the only safe solution.  

Moreover, the lie diverts us from real solutions as it did Inta because we are directed to look in the wrong place. By taking a population predisposed to fear and paranoia and revving up that fear and paranoia, we get what has happened just this week: the shooting of a child who rang the wrong doorbell, the murder of a passenger in a car that turned into the wrong driveway, shooting two cheerleaders who mistakenly climbed into the wrong car in a parking lot, and the shooting of a 6-year-old and her parents when her basketball bounced into the wrong yard. Fox News tells its viewers there is a violent crime wave, that innocent people are helpless, that liberals are taking the side of criminals, and that terror reigns. All of that is false, as is the solution of guns and more guns, but nothing, apparently nothing, will convince many of that fact. Evidence doesn’t matter, and reason doesn’t count. Put differently, no fact could occur, not even at the shooting of a 6-year-old retrieving a basketball in someone else’s front yard or a passenger turning around in a driveway or cheerleaders jumping into the wrong car, or a young man ringing the wrong doorbell that will change peoples’ minds.

We might examine the connection in a straightforward statement by Ludwig, the grandson of the 84-year-old defendant accused of shooting the 16-year-old who rang the wrong doorbell, Ralph Yarl. Ludwig described his grandfather as the typical victim of the anti-falsifiability culture:

But in the last five or six years, we’ve lost touch. I’ve gotten older and gained my political views. (My grandfather) has become staunchly right-wing, further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff, COVID conspiracies, and disinformation, entirely buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line. I feel like it’s further radicalized him in a lot of ways. And then the NRA pushing the ‘stand your ground’ stuff and that you have to defend your home.  

He added that his grandfather’s paranoia accelerated in the past several years. Of course, this belief – there is a violent crime wave at your door, and no one will do anything to help you unless you take a gun and shoot anyone in sight – come from somewhere. It is carefully created, cultivated, promoted, and spread.

The anti-falsifiability on the right has been there since perhaps the dawn of civilization, giving rise to many of the prejudices and superstitions, pogroms and slaughters, atrocities and enslavements, and wars and subjugations that so characterize every history text outside of Florida. However, in recent years, the linchpin in the country after country, with politician after politician, advocate after advocate, we can observe a group mentality devoted to the celebration of free market capitalism. While this has meant different things to different people and had disparate impacts in various times and places, the view is that things are better in that the market is left alone, while things are worse if the market is regulated and social engineering is introduced. Much of this view’s content is due to the Austrian School of Economics. Still, it is best known in the United States by its twin theoretical and political advocates, Prof. Milton Friedman and President Ronald Reagan. (The same might be said for the U.K. with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). 

Friedman ridiculed any attempts to engineer improvement in people’s lives or to restrict the gains, however, acquired, of the wealthy: If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years, there would be a shortage of sand. Or: I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances, and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible. Or: Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Reagan is much the same: The most terrifying words in English are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help. Or: Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

The evidence condemning and contradicting, and debunking this view is legion. There is little space to recount it. That said, we might notice two things that are hallmarks of the market sovereignty non-falsifiability belief:  

First, gaps in the market belief system are ignored and treated as though they don’t exist. Market celebration is expressed without mention of the numerous and significant anti-market changes, non-market institutions, and outright market-sabotaging programs that are part of everyday life. For example, the employment picture is scrutinized without consideration of unions; the poverty rate is analyzed without mention of Social Security and Medicare, and market growth commentary does not include any credit for protection from fraud and deceit due to the efforts of the SEC and FINRA, banks’ clean bills of health ignore the FDIC and the ORC. The observed increased life expectancy rates analysis fails to mention the protections of the FDA, the NIH, the EPA, and the CDC, let alone local health and sanitation regulations. Workplace safety linked to OSHA and pension protection tied to ERISA are not part of the equation. Still, markets are analyzed as though the absence of deeply embedded facts evident in the actual marketplace can be excluded. Such willful blindness put in service of voodoo economics (to use the apt term that Reagan’s Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, employed when looking at Reagan’s economic policy) is just that: voodoo.

Second, no event ever changes the belief. Nothing seemingly dislodges worship of the market: not recessions and depressions, not poverty and starvation, not institutional failures and corruptions, not monopolistic practice and corporate collusion, not international federations and trade agreements, not even the need to recover from natural disasters or governmental bankruptcy. Everything is confirming, just as it is for religions, Marxism, Freudianism, and ideologies generally. No event is ever set forth for disapproval in the way that, for example, Mike Lindell, Mr. Pillow, offered a reward for disproof of his election conspiracy theories and, with more than a bit of reluctance now than then, must now pay a $5 million award against him when just such disproof of his beliefs was established. What would count to Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan (or their living successors) as evidence that any of their beliefs were wrong? Quite simply, nothing. 

This line of thought is often labeled today as “neoliberalism,” as opposed to the liberalism that would allow severe restrictions on and regulation of government to achieve a fairer and more decent society found in the writing of the well-known liberal Adam Smith. Neo-liberalism says that one should always cut taxes, balance the government budget, give businesses a free hand, and never directly attempt to achieve equality. Suppose market loyalty means that people starve, the homeless litter the streets, and the sick and impoverished suffer and shiver untreated. In that case, unsafe drugs and dangerous machines control the market, and bridges collapse. Planes collide, publicly offered securities are worthless, and bank savings are always in danger: So what! would be the response of Friedman and Reagan? In the long run, all will be well because of the market. How do we know this, or in the terms we have been using, how can we falsify this proposition? Simply, we can’t. The right has long been conditioned to non-falsifiable and non-empirical (not reality-based; that is, not taking account of observable facts) belief systems. Quite predictably, Fox, Trump, and QAnon can’t be far behind.

We might consider the words of Karl Popper here: In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality. The Dominion lawsuit proved beyond doubt that Fox understands Popper very well. Fox, like Trump and like so many other demagogues, wants to make sure that the opportunity to judge matters accurately is disguised or obscured or defamed, that the ability to correct mistakes is removed, and that the belief system must deny Popper’s project of being more conscious, specific, and articulate in our knowledge of what we know and don’t know. 

There is no guarantee the demagogues won’t be successful.