Original subtitles

Once upon a time,

there was an average American family,

living in an average American town.

After the family moved,

the father left his familiar carpool,

and began a long, solo commute to work,

and, gradually, he began to change.

He looked the same he dressed the same,

but something was very different.

But this isn't the story about just one man,

it's the story about a media phenomenon

that changed a father,

and divided a nation.

Here's my dad with me when I was a baby.

He really loved me.

This was in Arizona, where I was born.

He was goofy,

like a lot of other dads, I guess.

My dad was a really fun dad.

All the kids in the neighborhood really liked him

because he was funny, and told jokes,

and would play with us.

He was a really good dad.

He loved animals.

He could always be counted on to help persuade my mom

if we wanted another pet.

For vacations, my dad took us on camping trips.

It was a lot of fun.

My mom didn't like it so much.

She didn't really like roughing it.

But we all still had a really great time.

He came from humble roots.

He never had any bad words about any race,

people, or person.

I remember this one time when we all went to New York,

and we got outside port authority,

and there was an African-American, homeless man,

and he asked my dad for some money.

My father gave him

what was at that time a decent amount of money,

and called him "sir."

That made such an impression on me,

and taught me

you treat everybody with respect.

We weren't really a political family.

My dad was a non-political Kennedy democrat.

But then, when he started listening to talk radio,

I saw him change.

A lot.

You used to consider yourself a democrat, right?

Yeah, before I... Before I knew anything,

or had any sense, I was stupid then.

I would listen to people with their bullshit,

and they didn't know what they were talking about.

Until then, I was fat, dumb, and happy.

I think I first noticed something different about him

when I came down to visit.

I was working in New York at the time.

He picked me up at the bus station,

and was driving me back to the house.

On the ride home, we passed a Hooters.

He mentioned that he was really pissed off

that some feminazis

did not want women with their breasts hanging out

to be working at Hooters.

I said something like, "well, maybe the feminists have a point."

He was so mad,

he threatened to pull the car over

and let me hitchhike home.

I was very surprised, because I was thinking,

"I bet he never even walked into a Hooters before."

He became really angry about stuff,

stuff that I didn't know

he ever even gave a thought to,

like, you know, Hooters.

Whether they are in jail or not,

they are procreating their own kind.

That's why we should

go in there and stop them

before they destroy our country.

When we moved,

and he had a very long commute by car,

he would listen to the radio

on the long drive.

Then he started to change.

The feminazis began their quest

to make women more like men.

Dress like us,

acquire power like us,

have careers like us, all that...

Rush Limbaugh’s one of my heroes.

I agree with him in, in politics.

And then his Rush Limbaugh-loving buddy

told him he could listen to more talk-radio at night

with a tiny, portable radio and ear buds.

But it would still disturb my mother.

So he decided to move into the other bedroom,

and then it got worse after he discovered Fox News.

His new beliefs came first.

It was almost like he joined a cult,

or had a new religion.

Frank is the family pest.

He has to force his political views on all of us.

I did it Frank's way.

It was his way, or the highway

when it came to politics.

I was not aware that Frank

had strong political leanings,

one way or the other.

It was just pretty much food and family

was what he was interested in.

After e-mailing came in,

yeah, then you get all kinds.

I would get political e-mails too,

but they were factual,

bringing things up-to-date,

where dad's e-mails were hateful against democrats.

And he would forward them to me

and the children.

And I asked him, please, don't send these e-mails

or I'll block you.

He started getting fanatical.

Oh, he would send some nasty e-mail back,

like, "f-you."

Or "you guys are full of S, blank, blank, T."

I... I started getting his e-mails

when I got 394 e-mails.

I originally thought it was somebody else,

other than Frank Senko sending me things.

And, in fact, he didn't author any of these.

They were just, you know, recycled things

that he received from his other, uh...

Right wing cronies.

I was you know,

wondering what happened to Frank

since the time I saw him.

I'd always thought that he was capable of, uh...

Deeply thinking about issues.

But it was apparent at that point that...

It's not that he wasn't capable of it,

he wasn't interested in it.

And that, to me, was a dangerous signal.

Brain has not only been washed,

as they say, it has been dry-cleaned.

So, what did happen to dad?

Was he brainwashed?

I didn't know.

This went on for years.

So I finally decided to make a film

to figure it out.

Jennifer, is this your book?

Yes.

He's my hero.

Why is he your hero?

Politically, I agree with him.

Beautifully. I always agree with him.

We knew better than to discuss politics together.

Because it would just end in arguments and bitterness.

I had a kickstarter campaign to raise some money,

and before I knew it, people were coming out of the woodwork,

contacting me from all over the country

telling me similar stories.

And I thought,

"wow, this is a real phenomenon."

They just drummed into her,

what they wanted her to hear.

She's a completely different person.

My brother became very fact-resistant.

My reaction was,

"who are you, and what have you done with my stepfather?

Disjointed existence.

And he was completely changed.

He was... He was bitter and angry.

At one point, he threatened to get a bus.

Because I was challenging...

He became obsessed.

And she had never been like that.

He was carrying a small pistol.

- She was not hateful. - Shot twice...

It broke my heart to see my parents this way.

Used to be very loving, caring, patient...

I don't really know these people anymore.

He just goes on these tirades that never make sense.

Fundamentally repulsive.

I spoke with each one,

and found we all had one thing in common.

Someone close to us became enraged and unreachable

after excessively listening to,

or watching right-wing media.

How did this happen?

The great story here,

for anybody willing to find it,

and write about it and explain it,

is this vast ring-wing conspiracy.

Decades ago, I was a junior hippie.

My big brother was the real thing,

with hair down to his waist.

I witnessed and felt part of the social revolution

happening at that time,

and I believed our country was going in a more...

Open direction.

Years later, when Reagan came in,

I could feel the country was shifting

to a more hardened place.

And that's around the time my dad started to change.

It wouldn't have necessarily thought

to go all the way back to the sixties,

but author Claire Conner,

who wrote "wrapped in the flag,"

contacted me after she saw my trailer.

Her personal experience with the John Birch society

helped put into place a major piece of the puzzle.

The John Birch society came out of the McCarthy era,

and was built on this concept

that the communist menace was right around the corner.

Very quickly,

the John Birch society moved from "those bad guys,"

over in the Soviet Union, China, or in Cuba,

to the idea that we had those bad guys

right in our own government.

In 1964, republican candidate

Barry Goldwater, had many Birch supporters.

But this damaged him because years earlier,

word had leaked out that their founder, Robert Welch,

had written a secret book

branding sitting republican president

and world war ii hero,

Dwight D. Eisenhower a communist.

The Birchers were labeled as, "nutty extremists."

Goldwater and his platform were hammered by Lyndon Johnson.

The right wing was declared dead.

So, they started to hit back.

One of the most powerful ways,

was through creating their own media.

I first spotted David Brock

in a documentary called

"the hunting of the president."

He had been a conservative operative

involved in the organized effort

of trying to take president Clinton down.

But he came to regret it,

and wrote about what he learned from an insider's view.

When I read his book,

"the republican noise machine,"

I knew I had to talk to him.

It took me a year and half to get him,

but I finally got to interview David Brock.

One of the very first things

that the conservative movement did

in trying to get control of the debate in the country

was to do that through the media,

and, uh, they established

a couple of different organizations

that market the notion of liberal media bias

to the public.

And so, one of them is called accuracy media

by someone named Reed Irvine,

who had worked in the Nixon administration.

And basically, the idea behind this group

was to counter their feeling

that the media was opposed to Nixon's policies in Vietnam.

...more certain than ever

that the bloody experience of Vietnam,

is to end in a stalemate.

You could see how the campaign to discredit the media

would lay the groundwork for a vast alternative media that would come later.

There are a number of reasons,

one provides him with the...

One night,

I was watching Bill Moyers, on channel 13.

And I learned about the role of Roger Ailes.

And, I went back to the Nixon administration,

and Roger Ailes in the... Who is the chairman of Fox News,

was in the Nixon administration.

He was Nixon's television advisor.

- Absolutely. - -Then I found Gabriel Sherman.

He was the guy to talk to

about Roger Ailes, for sure.

Roger Ailes understood that TV is about one thing.

It's about emotion.

And you need to communicate to the audience,

and hook into them on an emotional level.

And Richard Nixon, who by all accounts

was a very smart, a brilliant man,

who had command of the issues,

he couldn't connect with the audience,

you know, he came off as stiff, as shifty-eyed.

Famously, in the 1960 presidential debate

against John Kennedy,

he was sweating.

It was a terrible performance.

Then he meets Roger Ailes in 1968,

at the time Roger ales was a young producer

the wunderkind of television at the age of 26.

And, so, Roger Ailes coached Richard Nixon

on how to communicate those ideas

to the average American who is watching television

every night at dinner table.

Richard Nixon, whose political career almost blew up

because of television,

was able to win the presidency.

Because he mastered it.

At the time, in the late 1960s,

TV had finally become a mass medium.

And yet, there really weren't people

who had decoded the medium.

Roger ales told Nixon that to appeal to the audience,

he needed to use short, snappy, one-liners.

That can stick in the audience's mind.

A great philosophy is never one without defeat.

It is always one without fear.

And, so, really, Roger Ailes was a pioneer

in the whole art of the sound bite.

He told Nixon that America is dumb,

so give them something simple,

boil it down, and they'll get it.

Ailes was so involved with advising the administration,

he even outlined Nixon's role

in the lighting of the white house Christmas tree.

But his designs for the GOP went much deeper.

Ailes was outlining a way to avoid,

"the censorship, the priorities,

"and the prejudices of network news selectors

and disseminators."

Written in 1970, this memo talks about

how television had become the most powerful news source

because, "people are lazy,"

and want their thinking done for them.

It became the blueprint for Fox News.

And although it's authorship is unclear,

Roger Ailes' handwritten notes

are seen throughout the document.

There are simple things

that the American people believe in.

It's the reason John Wayne is still the top...

One of the top five movie stars of all time.

He's been dead for 40 years.

Uh...

But you always knew about him.

"Don't touch my woman, don't steal my horse,

and don't ever draw a gun on me."

- Otherwise... -we can friends.

We're gonna get along, we're gonna get along fine.

It offers ya a little action.

Roger Ailes was fired from the White House

for seeming like he could go too rogue.

Basically, he was caught

talking behind Richard Nixon's back

to author Joe McGinniss.

After that, Ailes started working for TVN,

a television news network owned by the Coors family.

Their goal was to be like a tugboat

to the queen Mary.

They were just going to be going along,

and pushing the boat a little further to the right,

and a little further to the right,

and their goal is, ultimately,

to put the great ship over as far right as they could.

And Ailes was working for them at the time,

and he...

He didn't know much about news,

I'm not even sure...

I know that he knows much about news now

but he sure does know television.

He's as good at television as anyone in the country,

and he's a great propagandist.

By the way,

the motto they came up with,

was "fair and balanced."

My father and my step-mother

used to be very loving, and caring, patient,

very kind-hearted, Christian-based

pe... individuals,

and we noticed that,

they became more hostile towards people

that were not believing the way that they did.

Their conversation became very hateful.

The brilliance of Nixon was to bend a politics

that was based on, uh... deference,

to money and plutocracy,

and frame it in terms

of a kind of cultural populism.

The idea that

the real snobs are not the people

who hire and fire,

but the people who kind of decide cultural trends.

When Nixon was running for president,

he had a problem.

In 1964, Bill Porter lost,

conservative was a dirty word,

everybody wanted to be a liberal.

Nixon comes along in '67,

and he says, we gotta get working people

to vote for Nixon, how do we do this?

Before 1964 and '67,

the anti-war movement felt like a betrayal to many veterans,

who saw it as unpatriotic.

Nixon seized on this

and was openly hostile to the protestors.

At the same time,

woman were pushing the boundaries

of societal norms,

which dictated they stay at home,

raise children, and dress like ladies.

Nixon came out for traditional family values,

thus capturing the vote of the working men,

who felt threatened and didn't like what they saw

as "radical feminism."

In 1964, the civil rights act was passed.

Nixon capitalized on both racist,

and economic fears of whites,

and ran against school busing,

and for law and order.

The Republicans could change the party labels in the south

by appealing to the racism and the strong opposition

to the civil rights legislation

and making that there stand.

In the spring of 1970,

after Nixon orders the invasion of Cambodia,

which was the... The instigation

for the same protest at Kent State University

that led to the deaths of the four students.

One of the protests was at federal hall,

in lower Manhattan.

And right in the middle of this anti-war rally,

this almost, marauding army of construction workers

came marching in, in their hard-hats,

and, started beating the protestors

with their hard-hats.

It was all captured on film. It was on the evening news.

Rather than, um, excoriating these, basically, vigilantes,

Richard Nixon invites the head

of construction trades in New York,

Peter Brennan,

and Peter Brennan presents the commander in chief

with a ceremonial hardhat

so he's almost, kind of, throwing his lot

with the people

who are beating the protestors.

He created conservative populism.

We're gonna bring them together

and... and, have them vote

on the basis of their morality,

against their self-interest.

It's not vote on their economics,

but vote on the moral issues.

So that was Nixon's contribution

in pushing the country a little further to the right.

In the meantime, my little brother and I

had both got into the hippie culture,

even my dad kind of did.

In the '60s, you had the voters

and rights act, and the civil rights act.

All this happened in about a 10, 11-year period.

You know, by '71, you had cities burning

because people were saying

the change is not happening fast enough.

Virtually every group in America

other than wealthy white guys

was in open revolt,

and calling for change.

Now, it wasn't tear down the government change.

I mean, this is being covered by the CBS evening news

and Walter Cronkite.

I was so lucky

to be introduced to Jeff Cohen.

Aside from being a first-rate journalist

and author,

he was a former commentator at Fox News,

and an all-around mensch.

As a result of these movements for social change,

especially among young people,

there was a real backlash

in the elite centers of conservative power,

and corporate power.

And one of the symbols of this backlash

was a memo written by the general council,

whose name was Lewis Powell.

It was starting to get really interesting.

This confidential Lewis Powell memo

was from August 1971,

just a year after the Roger Ailes memo.

And so, Lewis Powell wrote a memo

to the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,

saying Americans view businesses

as the big, bad guys,

and people like Ralph Nader as the heroes.

What he claimed is,

that the whole country is being taken over

by the radical left.

The government, the media,

the universities, of course.

He said basically the following,

"we have a problem.

Our best and brightest of our students

do not want to become conservative businessmen.

We have to change this.

We have to get wealthy conservatives

to put their money together

to appoint professors in major universities

to teach our principles.

We have to set-up, and support organizations

in major universities to do this."

They said, we can't trust the universities.

We have to set-up our own research establishments

which became the think-tanks.

We have to make sure that they get published.

Start journals,

start publishing houses

so they can publish their books,

and we have to buy media so their ideas can get out.

These were right wing think tanks

putting forward stuff

that basically wasn't academically sound,

or intellectually sound,

but had good propaganda value.

Powell, after writing the memo,

was appointed by Nixon to be on the supreme court.

So, they set up this infrastructure,

and then, ultimately,

it led to the right wing media

itself.

Where they were setting up

their own channels of communication

and that was the big boom in right wing talk radio

nationally and across the country

in every locale.

And ultimately, Fox News channel.

This Lewis Powell memo, was extremely influential.

It impacted the realms of politics,

judicial law, media, and education.

They have regular meetings of various kinds.

The best known are the Grover Norquist

Wednesday morning meetings.

Now, this has been going on for a good 20 years.

Norquist was so proud of his meetings,

he invited my students

to attend them for three months.

There were people there from groups that represented

the full gamut of political issues

on the right.

From fur trade commissions,

to Evangelicals.

The real genius of the meeting

is that you can get these dozens of people

who might not otherwise agree,

into the same room, every seven days.

Talking, and sort of ironing out

their differences.

As long as they're on board with pro-life, pro-gun,

and an anti-tax agenda, you're with us.

Writing up talking points which then gets sent out

to all the people who are around the country,

who are gonna be booked on radio and TV,

and by 5 o'clock tonight, everybody saying that,

the same thing.

We'll take on Obamacare regulations,

that threaten the 40-hour workweek.

Let's put on his desk, things like

restore the 40-hour workweek.

The loss of the 40-hour workweek.

Big, big mistake, that ought to be restored.

We must take action,

and restore the traditional 40-hour workweek.

And by 10 o'clock, it's on the daily show.

Obamacare will destroy all that we once held dear

in this country, by requiring health insurance

from employers.

For the 15% of Americans who don't currently get that.

The law only applies to full-time workers,

people who work 30, or more hours a week.

And guess what?

A lot of employers are saying,

"we don't want to pay for these healthcare benefits,

so we're gonna move full-time workers,

to part-time workers."

The Powell memorandum was written in 1971,

and the Heritage Foundation started in 1973.

The effect of having the conservative think tanks

clearly, outgunning and outnumbering

and outfunding the think tanks of the left,

has been much more effective

in dominating policy discussions.

There was a universal agreement,

that the goal of journalism

was objectivity,

and to discern the truth of conflicting claims.

The conservatives moved the argument from objectivity

to one of balance.

Under the rubric of balance, the conservatives do better.

Because the way the media now treats balance

is there's 99% of scientific consensus

on global warming,

and 1% of scientists funded by the coal industry

to say, "that's not true."

But they're presented in a balanced way,

giving credit to both sides,

and so, the conservatives were able to infiltrate

the op-ed pages of the country

on the same notion,

that, "well you have liberal columnists,

so you need conservative columnists."

So, when Hilary Clinton referred to the vast

right wing conspiracy,

I believe she had in mind

the full gamut of conservative organizations,

from legal foundations to media organizations,

to think tanks, to advocacy groups.

And including Wednesday meeting,

as... as it's lynchpin.

After that, people called the Norquist meeting,

the stage was now set for Ronald Reagan

to give the greatest performance

of his career,

selling the American people

on supply-side, trickle-down economics.

The economic ills we suffer

have come upon us over several decades.

In this present crisis,

government is not the solution to our problem.

Government is the problem.

You know, we keep hearing about

trickle-down economics, and Reaganomics,

and how if you help the people at the top,

the wealth and income will trickle down.

And studs Terkel said, "the only thing I've seen trickle down in the 1980's

is meanness,"

and what he meant was,

you know, the kind of country club,

looking down on people less fortunate than you

had sort of gone, and... Thanks to Limbaugh,

and Bob Grant, and people like that,

sort of, like, they were aiming

at making white males, middle-class males,

to be as angry and looking down on people

and being angry at... At these social movements.

As... as anyone who used to be in a country club

in the 1950's,

that was what was disseminated,

was this mean, angry streak.

That's what the 1980's did, according to studs Terkel,

you know, the Reagan revolution

- pulled people... was your dad ever a democrat? - -Oh, yeah.

Yeah, okay, right, it pulled a lot

of working-class democrats, the Reagan revolution,

they started voting republican.

They were called, Reagan democrats.

There are two things that made democrats willing

to vote for Ronald Reagan.

Reagan developed this political vocabulary

that made traditional, conservative economic ideas

sound really positive and really good

to ordinary people,

and, what Ronald Reagan was promising these voters,

was a return to a simpler time.

America, they want to take us back

to is, uh, mythic.

So, you might want to say the place they want to take us

back to is like Brigadoon.

You know, it's this kind of, you know, shimmering vision

that you know, kind of exists

in the space of the imagination.

They saw 1900 in America, as like,

the apex of when we were great as a nation.

1900.

Before the income tax,

before the federal reserve,

before any progressive legislation

was considered or passed.

Before child labor laws,

before women had any rights,

before women even had the right to vote.

Robert Welch, who was the founder of the John Birch society,

talked a lot about 1900,

as this glorious time in American history.

And he said,

he said, "there were pockets of poverty,

but it was a healthy kind of poverty.

Poverty free from government interference.

Where every man understood that relief from dire want

was entirely his own responsibility,

thus the blessings of Liberty outweighed the poverty."

When during the great depression,

when people would come to our house,

and go around to the backdoor,

and ask my mother if they could have a meal.

And she'd cook them bacon and eggs or something,

they ate it out in the back.

So, that's how people had to survive,

maybe he wants to go back to that,

I don't know.

We had like, a one room school.

You know, and, we would...

We'd walk to school in our bare feet, you know.

And that's how we lived.

Looking back,

I know that we lived in poverty,

or pretty close to it all the time.

But we didn't know that at the time,

because the government didn't come around

and tell us we were poor.

One of the brilliant innovations

was a new theory about how taxation worked,

about how the economy worked.

It used to be the conservatives,

that republications,

we all about balanced budgets.

They're all about kind of making the people

eat their spinach.

But they came up with this new theory

called supply-side economics.

And supply-side basically means,

you give money to... To business,

and that way they'll basically produce more plenty,

that will trickle down to ordinary people.

And that was what George Bush in 1980, referred to as

"voodoo economics,"

because it almost did sound like magic.

It was kind of like

he was promising you the candy store.

He said he could lower everybody's taxes,

and by doing so, everyone would benefit.

It was like the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

In actual fact,

how it ended up turning out was,

you know, hurting the very working class voters,

who trusted Ronald Reagan with their economic future.

Of course, inequality just skyrocketed.

The rich got richer,

and ordinary peoples' wages ended up stagnate.

And my dad thought Reagan was the best guy in the world.

And he was a democrat.

And somewhere in this Reagan-Bush change,

he told me, "well, I'm a republican now.

I realize how wrong I was all those years ago,"

and the only thing

I could attribute the change to

was his change in taste

about the news stories he watched.

We used to watch Cronkite, and Brinkley and Brokaw,

and what I consider sort of middle America,

middle ground views.

And... later on, all he watched was Fox.

And the fairness doctrine actually said

that you have to program in the public interest.

And so, as a result of that,

radio and television stations,

had real news.

It operated for 50 years.

In 1949, it was actually voted in as law

by the U.S. Congress.

It said,

"if you are watching, or listening

to your local television, or radio station,

and there are points of view

that are not being included in the discussion,

and you wish for them to be in there,

go complain to your station.

If they don't give you satisfaction,

then send a complaint to the FCC."

It didn't guarantee equal time,

it reminded broadcasters that they had a public trust,

they should include some views

that might go against their own,

or that might not be popular,

or favorable to them.

It was dropped in the 80's,

by The Reagan administration.

The repeal of the fairness doctrine,

ended up resulting in an explosion of talk radio.

In 1987,

I couldn't believe what I heard.

I'd hear overt, gutter racism.

And this was coming from different talk show hosts.

But the main one was Bob Grant.

I'd hear black people referred to as, "savages."

The savage mind,

the primitive, primordial mentality,

of being immature

anything they think they can get away with,

they will press and press and press,

which, of course, is what they've been doing

all over the United States of America.

- Not in just... - The allure of the Limbaughs,

and the grants,

is that they tap into a kind of resentment,

a kind of insecurity,

on the part of mostly white men,

and the large part middle-aged,

and aging white men, a kind of injured pride

that the world is passing them by.

It's... it's typical of demagoguery

to say that your problems

really aren't problems caused by you,

they're caused by these other people

that aren't like us.

He found out that I was dating somebody who wasn't white,

and just was like,

"I can't... You just don't agree

with any of my values."

You don't believe any of the conservative things

that I do."

And, "you're so far left,

that you're willing to date people

outside of your race.

And, I just... I love you,

but I just can't talk to you ever again."

Talk radio was always in the hands

of right wing backlash artists.

A bunch of white guys on the right,

railing against the women's movement,

the civil rights movement.

So, that's the beginning of talk radio

that people forget about.

It was all local then. There was no national.

It never went national until Rush Limbaugh

you know really made it national beginning in 1988.

I learned that Fox, god love them,

is televising this speech on the Fox News channel.

- Which means, ladies and gentlemen,

- this is my first ever address to the nation.

Ah, Rush Limbaugh, my dad's hero.

I heard him say it so many times.

The way my dad spoke of Rush

is like he found a new religion.

Quoting him constantly

as if he were the word of god.

Talk radio was so influential,

and Rush Limbaugh is especially good.

That me, a walking encyclopedia,

that basically could debunk things

on the spot.

In many cases with talk radio hosts,

Limbaugh sounded so confident,

that they actually sent me back to the books.

You know, I would be right, in the end,

but I wasn't sure I was right

because of the absolute confidence

that this guy exudes.

And it's very affecting.

I'll never forget,

my dad sent me something in the mail.

He had put a PETA label on it,

and he had taken a black magic marker,

and kept... And rubbed out "peta."

Like just scribbled it,

and scribbled it, and scribbled it,

until he almost ruined the envelope,

and the PETA thing was out.

It was just crazy.

He was an animal lover,

he always was an animal lover.

It just filled up all of him.

It became all of who he was.

Like, really, as if he were a cult member.

And that's why I use the term "brainwashing."

And he said to me,

"I don't care what your facts are.

My beliefs matter more, and I believe Rush."

Limbaugh. Every day when he works.

When I became involved with Occupy Wall Street,

my parents were furious,

and when my parents heard bits and pieces

about my involvement, they cut me off completely,

didn't speak to me.

My dad has been a trucker for the last 40 years.

Now, who does he listen to?

Rush Limbaugh.

And, he's...

He's pretty much become unbearable.

President Obama had just come into office

the first time.

The economy was in the toilet,

so, I felt it was safe to discuss the economy

because, clearly, president Obama

couldn't have had anything to do with it,

it was too soon.

And my uncle got very upset.

He says, "you get out of my house.

You can't stay here,

and talk to me about that guy."

He walked towards me,

and was carrying a small pistol.

And I saw the gun pointing at me,

and he dropped his hand to the floor...

- and shot twice into the ground.

Most people don't think about this,

but talk radio is something...

Unlike a lot of other media,

that's done alone.

People listen to it alone.

And they're listening to this one other person.

And there's sort of a personal thing there

and a connection.

People who, on the radio and TV,

are there for one reason only,

and that's to make you mad.

And the formula for making you,

the viewer, or the listener mad,

hasn't changed a bit

yet people keep falling for it.

If you embellish the opinion with confidence and cockiness,

then you're getting into generating hatred.

The law of averages indicates

that half the people who listen to you

are not gonna like you, you still gotta find a way

to make those who don't like you

enjoy listening to your program.

A lot of people say,

"you really mean the stuff you say?"

I don't know. That's for you to figure out.

Excuse me?

A lot of people say, "do you really mean the stuff you say?"

I don't know. That's for you to figure out.

Limbaugh was telling people for years,

"you're right to be prejudice.

You're right to be angry."

Let's listen to what the feminazis

are telling you now.

Or these environmental wackos,

who say that cigarette's second-hand smoke.

You know, and then he'll make up some study.

One day, years ago,

when my dad was at the height of his Limbaugh lunch days,

I went down to visit my parents

and my mom and dad and I

went to our favorite restaurant,

old time tavern.

As we were walking towards the restaurant door,

there was a bench outside

where several people were seated smoking.

As we passed them,

my dad stopped to talk to them.

He inhaled the smoke, and said,

"mm! I love the smell of cigarette smoke,

it reminds me of the time I used to smoke."

I was stunned,

because the only thing I ever remember my dad smoking

was the occasional pipe.

He also hated wearing seatbelts,

and would absolutely refuse to wear one,

even after he got a ticket.

Something told me it had to do with Rush Limbaugh.

He wasn't just wrong factually,

he would take like reality upside down.

He became what we call,

"a champion of the overdog."

Any powerful group,

that was being criticized by scientists,

or medical people, was the victim.

So, the tobacco industry was a victim.

And that's where he came up with his concoction

that, you know, no one's ever proved

that nicotine is addictive,

or is linked to these horrible diseases.

There's no science involved.

And, you know, cigarette second-hand smoke

making you go outside of the restaurant to smoke.

It's not true. Here's the real facts.

And then he comes up with his false facts.

You don't like seatbelts?

It's Ralph Nader, he made up this stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, the top 10 Limbaugh lies.

How can all these people

believe such outlandish statements?

But it wasn't just like my dad

or Barbara's brother

or Marie's uncle, who believe Rush Limbaugh

that troubled me.

Clarence Thomas,

one of our supreme court justices,

who officiated at the third wedding

of Rush Limbaugh.

I think it was in Clarence Thomas' house.

And, Clarence Thomas, you know,

will tell anyone that asks him,

"no, I don't listen to mainstream media.

I don't trust it.

But he taped Rush Limbaugh’s radio show

all three hours,

and he tried to always listen to that.

Now, imagine this here supreme court justice,

deciding on things like war and peace,

and civil liberties, and gay marriage

and your window to the real news world

is Rush Limbaugh’s three-hour monologue.

That's pretty damn scary.

There was a sense of seamless argumentation

that this guy is giving me the complete explanation.

And he's got facts and studies to back it up.

And I'm listening to him three and a half hours a day.

When he put out our study in 1994,

debunking dozens of these lies

or distortions or exaggerations

from Rush Limbaugh,

we encountered thousands of dittoheads.

Now, the cult-like nature is, you know, is obvious,

when a guy is preaching for hours at a time,

and people come on, instead of saying "amen,"

but just like saying, "amen,"

they say, "dittos, Rush.

Mega dittos, Rush."

That's their contribution.

It's like, here's the preacher,

and I'm part of the cult,

the congregation, and I'm just amening,

with this phrase, "dittos," or "mega dittos, Rush."

"You're the greatest, Rush."

- Do they actually say that, themselves? - Oh, they go on the air.

And they say, "mega dittos, Rush."

Oh, that's why they call them "dittoheads."

Yes. In other words,

everything you say, I'm ditto-ing.

Hey, Rush, how are you? Mega dittos.

Thank you, and mega dittos, Rush.

Oh, mega and constitutionous dittos

from Southern California, Rush.

So, I watched 30 minutes of Rush Limbaugh.

I... I didn't like him at first,

cause he was kind of

just being critical of Clinton.

Well, I had about an hour and 15-minute commute

to a factory,

two towns over where I worked.

And I drove, I worked second shift,

and I drove midday to that factory,

and I'd catch the last hour of his show.

And I... I just immersed myself.

Boom. I spoke down straight republican to you.

And I had been convinced that Clinton was more corrupt

than Nixon ever could have been.

Clinton was part of this global initiative,

to get the U.N. To control our country.

Clinton was gonna bring in U.N. Troops

to take our guns,

and put in concentration camps.

And then, Bill Clinton gets elected.

There's this backlash against Clinton,

spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh.

And Limbaugh becomes almost the leader

of the opposition.

Several times he said on the air,

that Vince foster, the white house aide

for Bill Clinton had actually been murdered,

and that his body was found in Hilary Clinton's apartment.

He said that once on the air.

You know, so these weird conspiracy theories,

and talk radio is really peaking

at that point.

He's incredibly rich.

Well, that's because he signed a contract

that gives him approximately $34 million a year.

One of those funders, we know for a fact,

in 2011, was the Heritage Foundation,

because it was listed

as a line item on their budget.

I remember when Clinton was president,

and I came to visit my parents one time.

My dad was hunched over in the living room chair,

reading one of the books against president Clinton.

I believe "slick Willy" was in the title.

You couldn't mention president Clinton,

without him yelling about how he was a murderer,

and going to destroy the country.

It made me think again of what Hilary Clinton said

during that interview

when her husband was in office.

This vast, right wing conspiracy

that was been conspiring against my husband

since the day he announced for president.

I was actually watching it when she said that.

And I knew that what she was saying was true.

I was involved with and knew very much firsthand,

that people who

I was working with, in places like

the "American Spectator" magazine,

back in 1993

shortly after Clinton was elected,

were trying to figure out

how to get him thrown out of office.

How to impeach him.

On the strength of the backlash

against Bill Clinton in his first two years,

for the first time in decades,

the Republicans took over

a very low turn out, November 1994 election,

they made Rush Limbaugh

an honorary member of Congress.

So, the role that Limbaugh and talk radio played,

in the ascendancy of the right wing in Congress,

is crucial.

Most of us liked Clinton.

At one point, almost 66% of us.

But some of my more liberal friends

were mad at him

for some pro-big business things

he did, like signing NAFTA into law

and signing legislation

that repealed the Glass–Steagall Act

in 1999.

The Glass–Steagall Act had been enacted after the great depression.

Basically, it separated and protected

your checkings and savings from investment banks.

And that worked for 60 years.

One of the biggest steps forward

to handing our whole media system

to a handful of corporations,

was completely bipartisan.

It was the 1996 telecommunications reform act,

and I put "reform" in quotes,

consumer rights' advocates were calling it,

"the time Warner enrichment act."

But president Bill Clinton and the democrats

were getting huge soft money donations

from the big media

and telecommunications companies.

So was the republican speaker of the house,

Newt Gingrich.

And together, behind closed doors,

they developed this telecommunications act,

which gave away the media to these few big companies,

these... these few fat companies

got even fatter.

Mainstream media didn't scrutinize it,

because they were getting rich,

at the top.

And when you have that kind of bipartisan corruption,

corrupting our media system,

it explains why we ended up with the media system we have.

Signing the telecommunications act,

helped set the stage for something even bigger,

something that would change the media landscape forever.

Remember a young Roger Ailes in the Nixon days

and that memo called,

"a plan for putting the GOP on TV news"?

In 1996, 25 years later,

Fox News was launched

with the backing of Rupert Murdoch.

Thanks in part to the telecommunications act,

Rupert Murdoch's news corp conglomerate

grew even larger.

And guess whom he hired to help create Fox News?

Fox News grew to be

the dominating cable news network,

and it's effect

on the other major news stations

was profound.

Rupert Murdoch is a media giant.

He owns news organizations all over the world.

These include TV, the Internet,

newspapers, and books.

That's a lot of influence for one man.

In terms of you having a global media enterprise,

I mean, have you shaked that agenda at all?

Obviously, if you're in media,

and you're concerned with what's going on in the world,

you'd like to make a difference,

by putting forward your opinions.

Excuse me?

If you're in media, and you're concerned with what's going on in the world,

you'd like to make a difference,

by putting forward your opinions.

Murdoch may have his empire,

but it's Roger Ailes who has the talent.

Fox News is really Roger Ailes' megaphone.

And when he comes into work every day,

there's morning meeting that takes place

in his office, at 8:00 am,

and his control over Fox News

is so absolute, that when he says something,

it happens.

What happens in 1998?

Bill Clinton has an affair with an intern.

Well, for an entire year, they do wall-to-wall coverage.

What happens in 2000?

Another year when Fox News exploded in the ratings.

The Bush-Gore recount.

How did Ailes cover that story?

He covered it as,

not that it's too close to call,

and we need to do a recount,

he covered it as,

"al Gore and the democrats are sore losers,

and they're trying to steal the election."

Fast-forward to 2001 and 9/11,

how did he cover that story?

As a second Pearl Harbor,

not that this is a... A terrorist attack,

that there are other ways of dealing with terrorism,

law enforcement targeted strike.

Fox News, more than any other media outlet,

sold the war as this grand struggle

and America was gonna

go in there and... and, kick ass.

And George Bush was this John Wayne figure.

I mean all of this... This symbolism.

The patriotism,

the anchors wearing the flag pins,

you know, Roger Ailes knew that these stories,

these big stories could be boiled down

to very simple plotlines.

He says things like,

"if we can convince the audience

that we are fair and balanced,

we can actually,

move the audience to the right,

by introducing kind of right wing themes

surreptitiously.

This is it.

Thank you.

Move in fast, it's damn cold.

Fox News is the real... Fairly important development.

What it does is bring out explicit right wing views

right into the heart of the media,

making no... Hardly any pretense

and objectivity.

And it makes, sometimes,

statements suggesting that it's being fair,

but it's... It's blatantly biased,

and it has republican politicians on.

They hardly mince their words

that it... it has a political agenda.

And it's also very important

in that it's had an effect on the rest of the media.

It was already pretty nice to the right wing

but it has to go even farther

being nice to the right wing.

The most dangerous thing about Fox News

is not the fact that it exists,

and speaks to it's audience

of a few million people.

It's the effect that Fox can have

on the rest of the media.

Time and again,

you'll see a false and wrong story

that is aired,

and starts moving through the Fox News channel

on a given day,

and it, bleeding over, or spilling over,

into mainstream intuitions of journalism.

Media critics coined this term, "Fox effect,"

to mean, media is an ecosystem,

and all media affects other media,

and so, the existence of Fox News,

and having that wrong approach to journalism out there,

has a toxic effect on the rest of journalism.

These are areas, which even the government officials

have said, these are no-go zones,

you don't go in 'em if you're not a Muslim.

There's no law enforcement

other than what's enforced by the Muslim communities there.

The French government created environment

in these certain neighborhoods where

they don't allow local law enforcement to come in,

these no-go zones in, uh, in France.

And they become, then, recruiting grounds,

they become a sort of festering region

where Islamic extremism can thrive.

All right, so, now this extremism

could grow in that environment.

So, they air the stories,

then they start to bang the drums

that the mainstream media is censoring

and won't report,

to try to pressure and guilt the mainstream media

into following their lead.

When I was in Fox News,

I can remember sitting in the greenroom

before a show was taped,

and a particularly biased segment comes on,

and, uh, and then someone in the greenroom,

where we're all waiting these include

Fox News producers, Fox News staff,

Fox News contributors.

Someone'll say,

"wow, that was really fair and balanced,"

and the whole place erupts in laughter.

There's actually almost no journalism involved.

And I mean, when the Tsunami hit,

Fox News literally couldn't cover it.

They just, they didn't have anyone with a camera with them.

For a week, for days, and weeks,

they just didn't care.

So, it's a very cheap way to run a quote.

News organizations,

you just sort of sit around,

and talk about how awful democrats are.

Most of Fox's audiences is older.

However, we were surprised to find out

that there were parents and grandparents

who introduced their children,

and grandchildren to it.

And we were more surprised to find out

that some teenagers were watching Fox.

I had my granddaughter with me the other day,

she's 19.

She has taxes taken out of her check.

And she just came up with this comment,

"you know, gram,

"I don't really like my taxes paying for lazy people

who do nothing,"

and... I just was so shocked,

I calmly gathered myself,

and said, "hey, do you know why

the library's closed on Fridays now?"

It's because there's no taxes to keep it open.

After reading an article by a 24-year-old

ex-Fox devotee, we decided to interview him.

The name of his article was...

We had one computer

with a dial-up modem that was really slow,

so it was just faster to get the news off TV back in the day.

And so, I turn on the TV,

and that's what started making me political.

And, you know, I turned the TV on,

and I put on CNN or MSNBC, and my father would walk by,

and he'd go, "oh, that's liberal propaganda,

you gotta watch this."

And he would change the channel to Fox News,

and then "a" led to "b," and so on.

Years ago, I was dating

this nice, lovable, sweet lady,

and we broke up.

That happens. Not a big deal.

We stayed in contact, good friends.

Very sweet, 'cause, you know, she's likeable.

However, right around the 2004 election,

she started watching Fox News,

and that sweet, lovable, likeable person was gone.

And was replaced... Corrupted by Fox

into this intolerant, willfully ignorant...

Compassionless individual.

I tried to steer her away from Fox,

into listening to every... Anything else but Fox,

but she got more and more sucked into that fox hole,

and now, that sweet, lovable person

I once knew is gone.

And I miss my friend.

I wish she'd come back. I wish she'd stop watching...

I just basically believed

that Bill O'Reilly was sort of like the champion

of the rights for the common people, right?

Which is totally ridiculous.

But at the time, I believed it. Right?

I remember, he was arguing that

the ALCU was a terrorist organization.

Yeah. Because they're trying to take away all our rights,

which is totally... I mean, patently false,

as big of a lie as you could possibly propagate,

but he was saying it as if it was true.

And I was there in the gym,

or wherever I was, listening to it,

and be like, "oh my god.

This guy gets it."

You know, this guy gets

that if they take away our right

to say, "Merry Christmas,"

we're no better than the terrorists!

And that's the kind of insane bullshit

that Fox News gets people to believe.

I never knew there was war on Christmas

until my dad started sending us,

the whole family, e-mails about dreaded,

horrible, terrible, evil liberals,

who wanted to kill Christmas,

and... Liberals who didn't even

want Christmas trees in schools,

or red, or green allowed anywhere,

and... whether it was Christmas day or not.

In fact, it usually wasn't Christmas day.

He would just say adamantly, "merry Christmas!"

Wherever he went, to...

If... if he saw somebody in front of a synagogue,

let's say, he would say, "Merry Christmas."

'Cause those damn liberals,

they weren't gonna take away Christmas from him,

there was no, "Happy Holidays,"

for Frank Senko, my dad.

So, I learned how the country

was pushed to the right,

and a whole new media

was created to help that along.

My dad, and many others, got swept up in that tide.

I didn't think he was actually brainwashed.

Didn't you need brainwashing camps?

Like, where someone is locked away,

with constant words, and images coming at them,

in their every waking hour?

But I wanted to explore that notion.

I found neuroscientist,

Kathleen Taylor, from London,

who is an expert on brainwashing.

I interviewed her via Skype.

There are kind of two ways

you can think about brainwashing.

You can either think of it as this very coercive,

forced, psychological torture,

where people are put into situations,

put through horrors, and, you know,

actually browbeaten into believing,

or pretending to believe, something new.

So, that's brainwashing by force, if you like.

Then there's brainwashing by stealth,

which is where,

it's not so much that they are forced

to believe stuff,

it's just that all the information

that comes at them, is pushing a line.

And so, there is no alternative

in terms of information.

And if you control the information

that goes into the brain,

to a great degree,

you control what that brain is gonna do

in terms of what the person's gonna believe.

You're not forcing anybody to believe it,

but you're making it difficult for them

to think of anything else

because the horizons are narrowed.

What's happening is that,

there's a kind of filtration process

whereby, information comes in

and it's checked, to see how easily it fits into what's already there.

That brought me back to George Lakoff.

You can only understand

what the neurocircuits of your brain

allow you to understand.

Any fact that doesn't fit that

will be ignored,

or rejected as ridiculous and so on.

They don't know their brains have been changed.

They don't know this mechanism.

It's just there. They listen to it.

It slides in, and you barely notice,

because the information's familiar,

you don't have to think about it.

If those beliefs are very strongly and passionately held,

then you may find

that any belief that threatens them,

is just rejected out of hand.

You can't win, because it doesn't make any difference

how many facts you put out there.

It's all about the emotion of...

Of anger, and hate, and fear.

When I think about brainwashing,

I tend to think about

kind of five important factors that are involved

in creating this kind of belief change.

So, those are...

...and then there’s also the use of strong emotions.

It often seemed that my dad was actually addicted

to these angry emotions.

He just couldn't wait to shut himself off,

and listen to Rush Limbaugh for three hours

and get all pissed off.

If you watch something that makes you very angry,

you can start getting addicted to that,

because you get angry...

You get angry, that drives stress response.

Endorphin is released

as part of the stress response.

And endorphin is the main pleasure chemical in the brain.

The tricky thing is, it's mostly unconscious.

People are sort of tricked, like in the case of your... of your father.

Okay, so clearly, the media has a very powerful

and profound effect on all of us.

So, I wondered if there were certain techniques

right wing media especially,

uses to create that belief change,

that Kathleen Taylor talks about,

which, quite often, results in people voting against their own interests,

or even going against the very core of who they are.

And I came across

several scientists and doctors

who identified some of these tactics.

We know he's got tons of weapons in his own country,

and we're not gonna ever locate them until he's gone.

At the time was we thought

he had weapons of mass destruction.

It turns out, he didn't.

He followed the rules,

Bush did,

and we lost that, we lost the weapons.

They never found weapons of mass destruction.

They had 'em, but they moved them.

They were moving everything into Syria.

U-gov found that 63% of Republicans still believe

that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

when the U.S. invaded in 2003.

What news shows often do,

is they'll... They'll cite a statistic

or they'll cite a finding,

but they won't really tell you where it's from.

They won't tell you much about the study,

they won't tell you

who's compiling that statistic,

they just kind of cite it out of thin air.

Who's put the statistic out?

Is this scientifically proven?

Was it peer reviewed? Who paid for it?

Fairleigh Dickinson University's

public mind survey,

asked 1,185 nationwide respondents

what their news sources were,

and then asked them about the events,

in the U.S. and abroad.

Fox viewers got less right

than people who watched no news, at all.

They'll say something that's just blatantly,

obviously false.

I'll say, "find me any legit source,

that backs you up,

and fine, I'll believe it."

They're like, "oh, well,

every single newspaper in America

is run by liberal elites with an agenda."

Well, okay, if the only news source

that you can trust is Fox News,

that sounds really paranoid.

The noise machine is really designed

to create confusion,

create misinformation, create fear.

And so, the republican noise machine

is one of the republican party's

sort of works in concert with Fox News,

with Rush Limbaugh, with am talk radio,

and it's really designed just to distract people,

to attack, and smear people.

The absolute base of it is the deliberate

dissemination of misinformation.

In order to confuse the viewers,

and news consumers and get them all riled up.

I asked Eric to give me some examples

of Deliberate misinformation.

During the 2008 campaign,

there was sort of this right wing crusade

about voter fraud and voter registration.

There's very little voter fraud, meaning

someone shows up to the voting place

and pretends to be somebody else to vote.

Some of the worst things,

remember the massive attempt

to create the climate change denial

with huge programs.

The American chamber of commerce,

the drilling industry, they have announced publicly

that they're carrying out propaganda.

They probably go to educational programs

to explain to people

that humans don't have anything to do with

climate change, and so on.

But, you gotta make profit tomorrow.

And if the species goes down the tube,

that's somebody else's problem.

And the arctic ice cap

at the north pole.

It's in it's so-called normal range,

not only is the ice not melting,

more polar bears are alive and happy today

than we've had in 100 years.

Life is good, miss, uh, miss Kelly.

I gotta tell ya, life is good.

The goal is to get people so mad

at each other, that they...

Bob Haldeman,

Nixon's famous chief of staff

went on to "the today show,"

and said, "all politics is the politics of division."

The team that manages to divide the country

and end up with the bigger side, wins.

On one side, president Obama and the Democratic party,

want America to become an entitlement state

versus a self-reliant one.

With... with African-Americans,

is that we're all on welfare.

The assumption is, is that,

is that we can't get that

without taking it from somebody else,

and that's simply not true.

Welfare is very, very generous.

You're not motivated to succeed,

because you are getting free stuff

from the government.

You are surrounded by goodies that are put onto you.

Well, as long as he's...

As long as the government is supplying him

the... the money,

just that, he needs to live on,

he's not interested in getting a job.

So, he could,

he'll go on year after year,

after year,

you know, on the government dole

and not bother getting a job.

"Branding," is about creating an image

that will stick in the mind.

Whether that image created is accurate or not,

doesn't matter.

Democrats, liberals, and progressives

are branded as big government spenders,

dishonest, America-hating elitists

who are all atheists, who hate Christmas,

and are soft on crime, and weak on defense.

They've branded the media as liberal,

so much so, that it's taken for granted

that it's true.

- One, catchphrase... -mm-hmm.

...that I... I hear over and over again,

-is "liberal media." - Mm-hmm.

- Did you hear your dad... -all the time.

I heard him use the term, "liberal media" all the time.

He'd be like, "oh, you can't listen

to liberal media."

As if there was no such thing as the conservative media.

If you analyze news coverage, as fair has done,

you find that the news tilts

a little bit to the right.

It's sort of centre-right.

Republicans usually outnumber democrats.

It's just pure math.

And then people say, "well, why do so many people believe

the liberal media myth?"

If you keep handing opinion-shaping power

to right wingers, who don't have evidence

to yell about, "oh, liberals, the liberals,

the liberals, the liberals who done..."

well, it's gonna have some traction.

The liberal media.

Liberal media?

Liberal bias.

Liberal media folk.

- Liberal press. - It is the liberal media.

And so, he watches Fox News,

and he says to me, "Fox News tells the stories

that the liberal media does not want to air.

And I think,

"yeah. But Fox News makes stuff up."

You know?

So, no wonder you can hear things there

that you won't hear in the so-called,

"liberal media."

Language is not neutral.

And in politics, it's anything but neutral.

This became professionalized in 1994.

When Newt Gingrich hired Frank Luntz.

Frank is the genius right wing wordsmith

who taught Republicans to,

instead of saying, "estate tax,"

say "death tax."

So, you have managed to shift popular

opinion on a lot of unpopular, everyday concepts,

like inherited wealth,

by labeling it, the "death tax."

I have fought over the validity

of the "death tax"

since I started working in this space.

And I went out and tested it.

And my god,

it changed the dynamic

of how people looked at policy.

Instead of saying, "poor people,"

say, "the takers."

Did I say, "don't tax rich people"?

I meant, encourage the job creators.

What's the difference between drilling for oil,

and energy exploration?

Nothing, except one sounds like something assholes do,

and one sounds like Indiana Jones.

Did I say, "don't let black people vote"?

I meant, clamp down on voter fraud.

Healthcare reform, everyone likes that.

So I asked him, which frightens you more,

government control or government takeover?

Oh, clearly, government takeover.

Oh, I think it was 27 out of 30.

That's it.

Once the word is decided on,

every single republican,

from the presidential contenders,

on down to the feces throwers

on hate radio.

All chant it like "rain man"

over and over

until it's beaten into our skulls.

"...and when they can't think rationally,

they'll believe anything."

Fox News is built on this formula,

of just getting people really, really angry.

It's this phony, outrage machine.

Particularly on Fox News,

I mean, they really are actors.

Acting about how outraged they are.

Give me one damn program...

Is anybody else a little pissed off by that?

Obama attacks America.

I'm more angry about it than you are.

I told you that you need to be afraid

because they are coming for you.

Isis coming into America.

I would bet my life on the fact.

They're already here.

And I have caught these people before,

and I've seen qurans prayer rugs, you name it.

They're already here.

"A self-styled militia patrolling

the Mexican-U.S. border,

contacted Breitbart.com, and relayed the discovery

of the 'rug' Monday night,

just south of the Sierra Vista

in Coronado National Forest."

You wanna know what it turned out to be?

An Adidas Jersey.

Isis, I mean, you know, they're here.

- They're here. - You think they're here?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I think they're waiting for the whistle to blow.

They're gonna come out, and take over.

I think they will. I really think they do.

I'm scared for the country.

The effect of bullying is simple.

It operates on two levels.

One, is it shuts the guest up if they're making a point

that the bullier doesn't want the audience to hear.

Is Hamas... What part of this

-can't you get through your thick head? - I think...

-is Hamas a terrorist organization? - Excuse me?

- An orbital eye socket fracture... -well, that... okay.

And eyewitnesses say that Michael brown charged at him.

- You weren't there. - Oh, I'm sorry, I...

I believe you cut my mic off.

And two, the fake outrage

makes the bullier look justified,

as they try to shame

their frustrated guest into silence.

...understand, you've got an agenda here. We just think...

- We don't have an agenda. - ...that the American people ought to know...

I understand you don't like it,

and sometimes your candidate has complained about it. - Okay, go ahead.

...but Fox News reports it straight,

fair and balanced, as always.

Bill Burton. Thanks so much for being here.

And he listens to Rush Limbaugh.

They have on Fox News in almost every room.

Fox News, 24-7.

I guess we're just watching

talking heads all day on Fox News.

All the homes in their neighborhood,

are tuned into Fox News, all the time.

Fox News is on 24-7.

Rush Limbaugh is on five days a week.

There's Michael Savage, Alex Jones,

"The Mark Levin Show",

the "New York Post",

"The Wall Street Journal" op-ed,

the "Drudge Report", "The Weekly Standard",

"Newsmax", "Breitbart",

"American spectator",

"Tea Party Express," and then there's

the avalanche of conservative e-mails.

Fox News can be found in hospitals,

bus stations, gyms, airports,

even bars and restaurants.

The primary TV outlet for the right is Fox,

and their audience is loyal.

How loyal?

Consistent liberals have an array of news sources

according to pew research.

Whereas, 47% of consistent conservatives

tightly cluster around Fox News.

As far as talk radio goes,

roughly 97% of talk radio stations

are conservative,

while only 3% are progressive.

Carol Wallin told me that Rush Limbaugh

is being played on military bases.

I wanted to know how that happened.

In 1993,

representative Robert Dornan,

gathered up 70

of his closest representative friends.

He thought it was really important

that Rush Limbaugh be played

on the armed forces network.

That this was absolutely a necessity.

But Robert Dornan himself, is famous for the fact

that he grabbed another representative's tie,

on the floor of the house,

and threatened him with bodily harm.

It's not just language,

it's also visuals.

In his book,

"state of confusion," doctor Bryant Welch says...

"...and a seemingly constant state

of news crises created by 'Fox News alerts.'"

then, there are the more graphic images,

that strongly suggest a point they want to make.

That image looks like it's saying

that Hamas and Hollywood are one in the same.

Ouch.

Sometimes, a camera movement

is used to distract.

On Fox, the colors are vivid,

and the graphics are overwhelming.

It is more stimulating than most other news shows.

It creates a mood that mesmerizes it's audience

and holds them captive.

Then, while they're captive,

and overwhelmed, and maybe a bit confused,

they have someone like Bill O'Reilly,

or Sean Hannity,

with their confidence and passion and certitude,

telling them who they should blame

for their confusion and uncertainty.

Each one of these gestures that I have,

helps communicate an idea or a principle,

a thought, a fact, an emotion.

If you start with one hand first,

and then you get the two,

you count off with your finger,

one, two, three.

The audience that you're speaking to

is actually counting with you.

My dad started changing

when, you know, this guy called Glenn Beck

came on the air.

And now he... he expects there's supposed to be

some sort of civil war next year.

- He buys a lot of ammo, a lot of guns... - Why?

What does he expect Obama to do?

I don't know, take over the world.

He believes Obama and his administration

is buying up all the ammo.

And so, that's why they had me buy the ammo,

before the government gets it all.

Black lives matter.

The savage mind,

will respond to, uh, to authority,

if they are convinced

that that authority is serious.

This is important for all of us.

And we are tired,

we want to come out of the shadows.

You have other people at the border

who are here illegally,

who are crossing over the border,

and they're very much out of the shadows.

A long time ago, the feminazis

began their quest to make women more like men.

Acquire power like us,

have careers like us, all that...

Believe scientists? No!

All flights from west Africa

should immediately be discontinued

these guns don't fire themselves.

Don't we have to deal with mental health...

...parenting.

Well, how did you start turning away

from Rush Limbaugh?

In the late 90's,

just playing around with the radio dial,

I found a, uh,

I was driving to work one week,

I had to work on a Saturday, had to be there about noon.

And, playing around with the radio dial,

I found a very, very, funny show.

They sound like this is a lot of fun

to listen to.

It was "wait, wait, don't tell me," on NPR.

Never really listened to it before.

And I discovered

they had great shows on the weekends.

And then, through the week,

I stopped listening to Hannity at 3:00,

to switch over to "all things considered."

I... I'm not gonna sit here and say NPR

has a left slant or... or a liberal bias,

but I think their journalism is solid

and I started basically comparing the quality

of what... of how the information is presented

and what I was being told, as opposed to,

well, I guess I could start seeing

the right wing talk radio

as what it is, sheer propaganda.

We went about trying to deprogram these people.

I mean there's one thing

that you didn't have to worry about at dittohead

is knowing about the study at Tufts University

saying a woman's bra size,

you know, the bigger her bra size,

the lower her I.Q.

You know, they'd heard all these stories,

so, it was in some sense, easy to open them up

when you say, "well, you wanna know something?"

There was no study at Tufts University.

You know that story about Chelsea Clinton,

Hilary and Bill Clinton's daughter,

being forced to write an essay

"why I feel guilty being white"?

There was no such essay.

There was no such CBS News report

saying there was an essay.

So, this begins to,

you know the deprogramming begins

when they realize

that so much of what they believed, was not true.

What the book does,

is it basically goes after Rush Limbaugh.

Looking at the things that he has stated as facts

on his radio show.

And basically, debunking them.

And, many of the pages have the format, where,

it says, "Limbaugh:" And then a quote,

and then, "reality:" And then, our research.

Where it was a highly technical

or scientific issue,

we'd go to experts and get them

and we'd quote them, debunking Limbaugh

and, it had a... It had a tremendous effect.

The name of our group is Flush Rush.

We listen to radio stations all over the country,

to monitor advertisers of Rush Limbaugh,

and there's usually hundreds of us,

from all over the country.

Over 3,000 advertisers.

Are no longer aired on Rush Limbaugh's station.

What we call for, is we what reform,

and restructuring.

So, where it can be done,

we would like to see more progressive shows,

more balance, more working people.

The voices of working people

in our commercial and our public broadcasting.

I mean, it's just amazing that public broadcasting

has almost no voices

of disenfranchised people in it.

That's one of the beauties of wikileaks.

Wikileaks is really a form of journalism

that's desperately needed in the existing system.

Because the mainstream media won't collect and report data

such as wiki-leaks will collect.

You have to have masses of people

organizing and... and... Putting pressure on

really, what it amounts to is a revolution.

I mean, you know, some kind of,

political, economic, social revolution

because you have a powerfully embedded system

to change it significantly,

changing the media significantly.

You have to have people organized,

and... and force a change.

There was so much misinformation

that you had to Wade through.

That, we felt like, it was really important

to... to finally take that on directly,

so much of the work that we do around different issues,

is around putting out fires, responding to this attack,

or this bad Bill motivated by

far-right ideologues.

This is a problem that a whole lot of people

are dealing with in different states,

in different cities, in different communities.

So, you know, we're working at the grassroots,

we're working one-on-one with people,

around their specific issues and situations

to help them deal with that,

because, you know,

these kind of changes have to happen

person by person, family by family,

interaction by interaction.

What they say about deprogramming,

specifically, I think, you know, with cult folks

who get involved in cults...

The bubble of conspiracy, or misinformation,

with one fact, right,

that that helps the entire artifice,

ultimately crumble.

If you're wondering what happened with my dad,

here's the story.

My parents moved to a senior community,

and apparently during the move,

my dad's kitchen radio broke.

He never got around to fixing it,

so it sat in the garage, with the other broken radios.

My parents started eating lunch together again.

But he still watched Fox,

and still got the right wing e-mails

and snail mail.

When the TV in the kitchen broke,

they got a new one,

and mom programmed the remotes.

He didn't want to bother to figure out

how how my mother programmed them,

so he just watched whatever my mother watched.

One time, when he went in the hospital

for a kidney stone,

she asked me to weed out his e-mails

to save some computer space.

When I told her they just keep coming,

she decided to unsubscribe him

from some of the more extreme political e-mails.

But then she got the idea

of subscribing him to liberal and Democratic ones,

but much to her surprise, when he got back,

he started reading them.

What does he read now?

- "Truth out, RSN News." - Oh.

- You know, all that stuff. - Yeah.

I've been... I've been listening

to Rush Limbaugh for... quite a few years,

and of course, after I... For some reason or another,

I don't know what happened,

I just somehow got away from it,

and, then...

But before that, I was...

I was... I had it on all the time,

the political chatter, you know.

But, then I stopped.

He doesn't listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore

and he doesn't listen to Fox News.

Do you think your political views

-have changed? - Halfway between republican

and... and democrat.

Oh.

I'm not all democrat, I'm not all republican.

Do you believe in the minimum wage?

Minimum wage, yes.

Do you believe in personal freedoms?

Well, some people believe that gay people

don't have the right to get married,

and other people say, "I couldn't care less,

let them get married if they want to."

Well... I want to guess if they want to do that,

then go ahead and do it, yeah.

Yeah, that's the way I figure.

I spoke to uncle Frank the other day.

It's hard to explain, but just a...

A kindness in his voice.

Thank you.

Thank you.

- Oh, happy birthday. - Is that Gene?

- Yes. - I haven't seen you in so long.

- I know. How you been? - I didn't recognize you.

The other day, he surprised me.

President Obama was on, and he said to me,

"you know, I... I kinda like him."

And then later, he said again,

at a different time, "I like Obama."

I thought, "glory, be."

- He's a pretty good guy, Obama. - Yeah, he's, you know...

He... he's doing all right.

He's forgetting all that other stuff

that he learned,

and I guess, whatever...

Mom would shut down his computer at night,

and she started subscribing him

to "truthout," and "alternet,"

and "Reader Supported News".

Oh, and he would just read whatever ended up

in his inbox? - He just read everything.

He's an avid reader, he sits at that computer,

and he reads whatever's in front of him.

Well, that... That's very interesting,

and... and see? His thinking changed.

His policies have totally changed.

- He voted for Obama. - What?

He voted for Obama?

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 sort of a bittersweet pill,

because I know these are his last years,

but I'm happy that he's happy.

He's my pal, and I'm his.

So, that is the story of Jen and her father.

Her father had changed into a person none of them recognized or even liked.

A persistent wife,

who continued to challenge her husband.

It eventually made a difference.

It's a mixture or Polish and Ukrainian.

I mix them a lot.

You used to be very fanatical.

- Yes. - Yeah.

I listened to him for a long time, huh?

Yeah.

But you're not as...

You're not as fanatical as that anymore.

So, that's what the movie is about.

Is about how you used to be very fanatical,

and now you're much better.

I... I think I'd like to see that.

- Yeah, you'll... you'll see it, dad. - Yeah?

♪ well, they learned about Santa a long time ago ♪

♪ little bunnies at Easter and pink unicorns ♪

♪ tiny tooth fairies have lost their appeal ♪

♪ but they still think Fox News is real ♪

♪ my parents think Fox News is real ♪

♪ I tried to explain

♪ but they just won't sit still ♪

♪ all that jumping and shouting ♪

♪ has put them off-keel

♪ and my parents think Fox News is real ♪

♪ well, now, Bill's not your buddy ♪

♪ and the five aren't your friends ♪

♪ they're in it for money

♪ they're just talking heads ♪

♪ once was a time when I was amused ♪

♪ but now someone needs to give them the news ♪

♪ my parents think Fox News is real ♪

♪ I tried to explain

♪ but they just won't sit still ♪

♪ all that jumping and shouting ♪

♪ has put them off-keel

♪ and my parents think Fox News is real ♪

♪ well, now, if I could change things ♪

♪ you know that I would

♪ but banging your head on a rock can't be good ♪

♪ maybe just singing this song is a start ♪

♪ so, for now, I'll just say, "Bless their heart." ♪