Murdoch NewsCorp stablemates Fox News and the New York Post teamed up for an amazing demonstration of how rightwing media feeds on itself to offer its audience a closed loop of “news” that confirms everything they already believe.
Saturday’s New York Post printed the tragic story of Annabella Rockwell, the “heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune” who went to the elite radical lefty (and also “posh”) women’s school Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts back in 2011.
Ms. Rockwell graduated in 2015 with a bachelors degree and a head full of wokeness, and it left her so badly alienated from her family that her mother, Melinda Rockwell, needed to hire a cult deprogrammer to save her from all that indoctrination. Her mother says the deprogrammer charged $300 a day, although neither the Post nor a follow-up Fox News story Sunday specify how long their services were needed. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Annabella said she was warned the entire process could take up to “seven years,” which would get her from graduation until right now, but she didn’t claim the deprogrammers were involved that long.
Oh, also the Post story mentions she got help from her tennis coach, because tennis coaches know all about helping people overcome their faults.
Ms. Rockwell says she overcame a serious drinking problem that began at Mount Holyoke, but doesn’t mention rehab; she simply says she “stopped drinking.” Her real problems, including the drinking, apparently stemmed from going to a “$60,000 a year” private college and being brainwashed by professors. Thank heavens, she and her mom are friends again and she’s back to being a privileged Republican rich person.
Both Fox News and the Post mention that, thanks to her successful recovery from wokeness, Annabella is now able to function as a normal adult, and six months ago, she even got a job as a fundraiser for PragerU, the fake education site that distorts US history and virtually everything else in five-minute YouTube videos.
Her lucky job placement isn’t given too much emphasis in either story, although the Post version notes that Rockwell also appeared in a November 17 video where she tells Prager all about how her mother’s love and deprogramming saved her from being brainwashed into thinking women are oppressed and that the US is evil incarnate.
For the kicker, though, you have to watch Tucker Carlson’s interview with Ms. Rockwell, where she talks about the relentless indoctrination she underwent — she was told she was a “first-year student,” not a “freshman,” for example — and the constant pressure to be woke and feel oppressed and to shave her head and be a lesbian and to see her parents as oppressors too.
We were genuinely filled with emotion when Tucker sadly explained, “We joke about the lunacy on college campuses, but the cost is not that they’ll vote Democrat. The real cost is that they won’t [painful pause] love their parents anymore, and that’s the most upsetting part of it.” We’re sure that hit home for rightwing parents whose kids arrived home for Thanksgiving break and asked why Mom and Dad lied to them about everything.
Or the ones whose kids didn’t come home because they were eating tofurkey and pronouns.
Mostly we were filled with the emotion of remembering Our Dear Sainted Mother, who was absolutely convinced that if only we hadn’t gone to college and read a bunch of books we’d have remained a good Catholic boy. I never had the heart to tell her that ship sailed when I was in high school and still under her roof.
Okay, hope you’re ready for the big reveal: Almost as a footnote, Rockwell mentions at the three-minute mark that she managed to “unlearn my four years of wokeism by watching five-minute PragerU videos online for free” [emphasis added].
Free, online. You could watch them too, Fox Viewer! Much better than going to Mount Holyoke, orCats. You should watch PragerU videos again and again!
Jesus H. Christ on a flaming eBike, we were going to make fun of all the bullshit claims about woke indoctrination and deprogramming, but why bother when the entire set-up is not only silly repetition of rightwing tropes about higher education, it’s a literal sales pitch for PragerU?
We wish Ms. Rockwell and her giant cross pendant well, now that she’s landed on her feet and found a meaningful path in life grift that pays well. Can her own Fox or Newsmax show be far behind?
We can only wonder what her vitamin supplement brand will be called.
[NYP / Fox News / Dennis Prager]
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