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Both Donald Trump and JD Vance made appearances on Fox News in the past week to enjoy the megaphone that the outlet provides any Republican who wishes to lie to its audience, and it is important to remember that the United States wouldn’t be on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state without the GOP being able to rely on a right-wing propaganda outlet that masquerades as a “news” network.

We try to point this out periodically (although less frequently than reminding Americans that their president is nuts), but it is even more effective when it comes from Fox News employees themselves. 

Therefore, we were delighted when the voting machine company Smartmatic this week filed a new document related to its $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox that reveals internal communications showing how the network’s right-wing agitators worked on behalf of Trump and pushed his election lies that led to the January 6 insurrection.

For example, there is Jeanine Pirro, who was recently confirmed as US Attorney for the District of Columbia, where she is now doing Trump’s bidding in a more official capacity.

“I work so hard for the party across the country. … I’m the # 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend,” Pirro wrote in a September 2020 text message to Ronna McDaniel, who was the head of the Republican National Committee at the time. “I work so hard for the President and party.”

And Sean Hannity, who interviewed Trump following his summit with Vladimir Putin on Friday, melted down because the “news division” (which is what Fox calls the people who are slightly less in the tank for the GOP) dared to fact-check him. 

In a text message to Jay Wallace, the president of Fox News, he said that this “violate[d] his contract” and that not going along with Trump’s election denialism caused “irreparable harm” to the channel’s brand.

Then there is Maria Bartiromo, who privately pleaded with election deniers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to overturn the will of the American voters.

And even a month after Trump’s loss, Jesse Watters, in a text message to Greg Gutfeld, fantasized about “how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.”

Let’s also not forget that these are only the communications we (now) know about. We will never know what Hannity and the others talked about on the phone or in the hallways of Fox News, or what the company is keeping hidden. 

Most importantly, until Pirro took her job in the administration, all of them remained at the network without any apparent repercussions for helping spread lies that not only resulted in a deadly attack on the Capitol but also cost the network nearly $800 million in a settlement with Dominion Voting Systems.

And that’s because, in the eyes of the company’s executives, they did nothing wrong. Their blatant partisanship and their roles in duping Fox’s audience are what they are paid for. 

And that gets to the heart of the matter: Fox isn’t a news network that is trying to inform the public (even with a conservative bias); it is a propaganda channel that creates a fake reality for its viewers so that they vote for Republicans. 

That’s it. And they are doing this 24/7… both on screen and, as we learn because of these defamation lawsuits, behind the cameras. 

In the future, entire books will be written about the role that Fox News played in the demise of US democracy and in duping tens of millions of conservatives to reject reality and become increasingly radicalized until they voted for a mentally ill authoritarian.  

Historians will be fascinated to learn how so many Americans opted to be willfully deceived.

Of course, that isn’t doing us much good right now. 

All we can hope for is that the victims of Fox’s demagoguery, like Dominion and Smartmatic, make the network pay such a heavy price that lying to the American people is simply no longer good business.

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.