Alexis Bloom‘s Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes is a frightshow. It leaves you with a shudder and a realization that Ailes, drooling fiend that he may well have been, really was a Luciferian visionary and a dark genius who turned Red America into a Nation of Crazy.
He was the reigning Machiavellian author of big-lie rightwing media for 20 years, the Pied Piper of Rural Dumbshit-ism, the pugnacious fat man who primed the country for the arrival of Donald Trump…a hustler who dipped his paintbrush into an apothecary jar of his own fears and paranoia (and perhaps some festering resentment toward his mother for infecting him with hemophilia as a young child) and embraced anger and aggression as primal fuel and sticking it to the liberal media machine as his guiding mission.
How engrossing is Divide and Conquer? Very. How detailed, probing and well-organized? Same. How depressing is it? Oddly, it’s strangely engrossing because Ailes was a real surface-to-air missile and a deranged motherfucker whose generator was always humming. He was never a dull man, and neither is this documentary. How much does it tell you that you didn’t know? Not that much but I didn’t care. What a demonic and diseased reptile Ailes was…a cookie filled with arsenic.
“Roger Ailes Dies, Goes To Hell,” posted on 5.18.17: Roger Ailes, the founder and chairman of Fox News from the mid ’90s to his resignation over sexual harassment allegations last July, has passed at age 77. I’m not sorry. If I was still drinking I’d be popping a magnum of champagne right now. I’m sure he was regarded as a jovial fellow by some, but what is that in the greater scheme?
When I heard the news my reaction was “good…a fundamentally evil guy is no more.”
As the architect and maestro behind Fox News, Ailes promoted a daily dose of distorted rightwing talking points and malicious ignorance across the land, which struck a chord among millions of dumb-as-a-fencepost rurals and old white guys and their wives. He made rightwing bullshit into a highly profitable brand, and energized the dumbshits like nobody before or since.
Right now he’s roasting on a spit in the hottest cavern in hell. For Ailes was a liar and the father of America’s political toxicity for 20 years. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on, but cheers to the gallant steed that carried him out.
