Joseph Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda, wrote in his diary in 1933: do not argue with facts. Make people feel something. Make them afraid. The truth does not matter. Fear does (summarized for English use).
He was describing the Third Reich. He was also describing right wind media in this country.
This is not an accident. It is a business model. And it works because of how the human brain is built.
The brain is hardwired to react to negative information more intensely than anything else. It is what kept us alive for hundreds of thousands of years. Psychologists call this negativity bias.
In 2024, researchers at the University of Amsterdam scanned the brains of 975 people and found that conservatives have a measurably larger amygdala. That is the part of the brain that processes fear and threat. A larger amygdala means the brain cannot calibrate threat properly. Someone cutting them off in traffic feels like a home invasion. A policy disagreement feels like an attack on their family. They are walking around in a constant state of emergency over things that do not warrant it.
That makes them the easiest audience in America to manipulate.
And right wing media has known this for thirty years. Here are the three tactics they use to keep conservatives in a permanent state of fear.
The threat is always existential.
Immigrants are not just crossing the border. They are invading. They are replacing you. They are coming for your children. Every night the story is not a policy debate. It is the end of your way of life. Your country. Your family. Everything you love.
Here is why that framing works. When the brain believes survival is at stake it stops thinking and starts reacting. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that once fear pathways activate, the brain short circuits rational thought entirely and reacts directly from the amygdala. Once you believe your family is in danger you will follow anyone who promises to protect them.
That is exactly what Fox News sells every single night.
The enemy is always inside the room.
It is not just foreign threats. It is your neighbors. Your teachers. Your doctors. The government. The deep state. Anyone who disagrees with you is not just wrong. They are trying to destroy you.
This is deliberate. External threats end eventually. Wars stop. But your neighbor never goes away. The threat lives next door permanently. And a permanently frightened audience never changes the channel. They cut ties with everyone outside the echo chamber. They stop fact-checking. They stop questioning. The only voices they trust are the ones that told them to be afraid in the first place.
You are the last line of defense.
Fox News does not just scare its audience. It tells them they alone see the truth. Everyone else is blind or complicit. They are the only real Americans. The only thing standing between their family and total destruction.
Psychologist Agnieszka Golec de Zavala at Goldsmiths University of London found that groups who believe they are special, persecuted, and uniquely chosen to see the truth become impossible to reason with. She called it collective narcissism. They are not special. They are delusional.
Collective narcissism combined with manufactured fear creates a worldview where they are the hero, everyone else is the enemy, and any evidence to the contrary is part of the conspiracy. Fox News did not just scare them. It told them they are warriors protecting civilization. And warriors do not question their commanders.
These are also the people who fall for the most Nigerian Prince internet scams. Go figure.
Fox News and Newsmax are not news organizations. They are anti-democratic propaganda machines that have been running every night for thirty years.
In 1945, philosopher Karl Popper watched fascism rise across Europe and issued a warning. He said that if a society extends tolerance to movements that are fundamentally intolerant, those movements will use that tolerance to destroy democracy from the inside.
Fox News and Newsmax use the free press to undermine trust in the free press. They use democratic platforms to spread anti-democratic ideas. They use our decency and our open society against us every single night.
That is not journalism.
That is a propaganda weapon in a war on Democracy. And we need to stop being polite about it.
Because the people destroying this country are counting on your silence.
Sources
Goebbels, J. (1933). Diary entries, November. Translated excerpts published in Lochner, L.P. (Ed.), The Goebbels Diaries. Doubleday, 1948.
Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21(8), 677–680. University of Amsterdam / University College London amygdala research.
Phelps, E.A., & LeDoux, J.E. (2005). Contributions of the amygdala to emotion processing. Neuron, 48(2), 175–187. University of Minnesota fear pathway research.
Golec de Zavala, A., Cichocka, A., Eidelson, R., & Jayawickreme, N. (2009). Collective narcissism and its social consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(6), 1074–1096. Goldsmiths University of London.
Popper, K. (1945). The Open Society and Its Enemies. Routledge.
