Tuesday, April 25, 2023 | 2 a.m.
We know now that Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old man who shot 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, did not act alone.
Oh, he’s the only one responsible for pulling the trigger. Unless of course rap made him do it.
But according to his grandson, Lester had in recent years been “radicalized” by the highly profitable and paranoid fantasies spread by Fox News and its equally imbalanced imitators.
That, Lester’s 28-year-old grandson Klint Ludwig told The Kansas City Star, is how the retired airplane mechanic fell “further down the right-wing rabbit hole as far as doing the election-denying conspiracy stuff and COVID conspiracies and disinformation, fully buying into the Fox News, OAN kind of line’’ while immersed in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia.”
A 24-7 diet of spicy race-baiting and white nationalist talking points is corrosive, not only to your brain on Fox but to our democracy.
If we believe Ludwig, then watching Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham monetize hate night after night contributed to Lester’s sense that a Black kid ringing his doorbell could only mean that an act of violence was about to occur. And so it did.
Lester, who has been charged with first-degree assault and armed criminal action, shot Yarl twice, once in the head. No thanks to the neighbors who refused the help they would surely have offered a wounded animal, he survived anyway, thank God.
But no, we can’t just go back to what we were doing. Because there is a reason that as Lester has come to see it, Ludwig said, “fatherless Black families are the reason why crime exists in this country.”
Pumping that pollution into our atmosphere day after day and year after year is not harmless. But as long as it keeps viewers afraid, upset and tuned in, then why change a winning formula?
Just last week, Ingraham referred to “wildings by kids across the country,” while the chyron declared, “Roving gangs of teens becoming commonplace.” Her guest, former NFL player Jack Brewer, said this was due to the sad shortage of “dads that would whup our butts.”
“This is the result of a fatherless nation,” he said.
Like Tucker Carlson, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson focused less on the crime or its victim than on how terrible it was that the president “politicized” it. But that Parson thinks people are angry about Yarl’s shooting because of anything Joe Biden said just shows how little he knows his own constituents. And that GOP lawmakers in Missouri and elsewhere think the answer to gun violence is more guns, I guess is like counting on ice cream to remedy obesity.
Emails revealed by Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox, which ended in a $787.5 million settlement, showed that the channel’s news hosts don’t necessarily believe what comes out of their own mouths on air: Their private messages showed that Fox hosts knew Donald Trump’s election fraud claims were false. But they didn’t let Andrew Lester or any of their other viewers in on the joke, because they also knew that’s not what their audience was hungry to hear.
That’s only one corner of the damage done to civil society by their propaganda, which is not conservative but reactionary.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, here’s Carlson on April 18: “When you let the mob loot, you are doomed. This is why we used to shoot looters — not because we hated them, it wasn’t personal — but in order to defend the foundation of all that we have, which is private property secured by the law. Without that, we would be living in savagery and chaos.
“In Chicago, they already are. There is no point to that. Nobody is benefiting. What you’re seeing instead is civilization unraveling, unrestrained violence and destruction effectively unchallenged by government authorities, the mindless breaking of things, the rage of stupid children. If you let that continue, there will be nothing left standing.” So shoot away?
Yarl wasn’t there to steal. He was there to pick up his younger brothers and rang the wrong doorbell.
But when up against savagery and chaos, well, you can’t be too careful. With civilization at stake, why hold back? And when Lester shot Yarl, it really wasn’t personal, because he fired before seeing him as a person.
If violent lyrics can inspire murder rather than merely reflecting it, and books about race and gender should be banned to prevent them from “indoctrinating kids to a dangerous ideology,” why wouldn’t watching hour after hour of terrifying stories about urban crime impact behavior? Those whose livelihoods depend on making Andrew Lester fear Ralph Yarl don’t seem to worry about that, though, and in fact show no sign of caring about either one of them.
Melinda Henneberger is a columnist for The Kansas City (Mo.) Star.
