Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.

Kat joined us recently to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.

nathan j. Robinson 

I suppose the first thing I want to do is thank you for your service. Your bio on Twitter says that you watch Fox News so the rest of us don't have to. So, perhaps you could begin by telling our listeners and our readers some of what you do endure this on a regular basis.

kat Abughazaleh 

It's kind of fun if you're the specific brain type that I have—if you're a masochist, that's what it is. It's kind of fun if you're a masochist.

Robinson 

Other people would not have fun doing what you do. 

Abughazaleh 

Yes, when I was at Media Matters, I was on night shift, which was a small team, and we all got along really well. There was never any conflict on night shift. And that's because our brains were all broken in the same way. We knew so many things about Dan Bongino and Brian Kilmeade that the average person, even the pretty fervent Fox viewer, just wouldn't know. I know about Sean Hannity's eclectic blend of martial arts that he does, including “pain day”, which is a regular day on his schedule where he gets his sensei to beat the shit out of him.

Do I wish I knew that? No.

Do I know that? Forever.

Robinson 

It's fascinating, the knowledge that you now have because you have watched so much Fox News. As I understand it, you watch the prime-time schedule of Fox News, look for important or ridiculous things to cover, note it down.

Could you tell us about your process?

Abughazaleh 

My job when I was on night shift was to watch Fox, 4 to 11pm. All of us had different shows that we watched regularly. But, people would get out sick, or just get tired of listening to Hannity's voice. When I started at Media Matters, I watched Laura Ingraham for the first couple months, and then moved to Hannity.

Watching Hannity is its own special type of mind melt. It gets to a point that after a couple of weeks, you can do an entire 20-minute Sean Hannity monologue, just off the cuff. He says the same shit every single night. And then I moved on to Tucker Carlson, who then got fired. Since then, I've been watching The Five a lot.

You build up this knowledge—when you first start, it's kind of hard because you're trying to figure out these inside jokes that others in the field might have, or what the hell someone's talking about. There's a lot of lore in the Fox News and the right-wing mediaverse. There's so much lore, and all of it is useless. But when you do this job, you learn all of it.

Robinson 

You said there that once you've watched enough Sean Hannity monologues you could basically do one. You had a video where you covered The Patriot Awards. You point out that it's "The Patriot Awards" because they can't get into the real award shows. And you observed that Sean Hannity's monologue from one year to the next year was eerily identical. So, you start to notice these bizarre kind of the patterns.

Abughazaleh 

Yes, it was mortifying to realize that I knew that Sean Hannity's monologue this year. I was watching it, and I though, "that's the exact same one he did last year." Because he thought no one would notice. And no one did, except me. Or, like when Jimmy Failla wrote his book The Cancel Culture Dictionary, there were so many one-liners in there that I was like, "Oh my god, he said that on Laura Ingraham last summer."

And that's not something fun to know about yourself. But yes, they just repeat the same shit. Especially Sean Hannity. Oh, my God.

Robinson 

In the kind of world that we want to live in, no one would have the knowledge that you have. 

Abughazaleh 

No one would go to the Patriot Awards either. I'm still devastated I didn't win "most valuable patriot."

Robinson 

You were robbed. Next year. But another thing that I remember from watching some of your videos on conservative comedy are they have the same jokes. You covered Rob Schneider's and Roseanne Barr's comedy specials, and conservative comedy has oftentimes just the same joke told five different ways.

Abughazaleh 

Yes, I identify as “insert something that is not a gender,” or my pronouns are “blank and blank.” It's the same jokes all the time. It's so annoying. It's not that they're offensive, because they're so bad that it's just kind of laughable. Conservative comedy bothers me because it's so low effort. My college stand-up had more time and thought dedicated to my dumbest bits than a single monologue written by Greg Gutfeld's non-unionized writers. And that's just not how it should be. Then they claim that no one's laughing because they're so offended. But it's because they suck. I just think they should have to address their own failures.

Robinson 

What I like about what comes of this total immersion over time is that, as you've been describing, you start to understand how the propaganda machine works. Fox News is very powerful. People might ask, and I'm sure they ask you, why would you do this? Why would you subject yourself to this? Is this really important? These people are so full of shit and their material is so lazy.

But I think it is important because there are studies that show that when Fox News comes into a market, it turns the audience more conservative in that city or town. It's very effective. So, what have you come to understand about how this propaganda is put together?

Abughazaleh 

The thing that I think many people ignore when it comes to this stuff is the danger in Fox News is it's the most watched cable news channel. Sure, the audience skews very much on the older side—you can just look at the ads to know that—but also, the chokehold it has over the GOP.

My old boss, Andrew Lawrence, used to say, Roger Ailes started Fox to help the GOP, and now the GOP is doing everything it can do to get on Fox. It's inverted. It's flipped upside down. When Tucker was on Fox News, every single thing the GOP did was to get two minutes on Tucker's show—everything. And he was dictating policy.

You think about when Kevin McCarthy was running for Speaker, and they did, what, 15 votes? That's because Tucker held the Speakership hostage. He listed demands for the House Speaker, and until McCarthy agreed to meet those demands, the vote didn't go through. That's a cable news host holding the third most powerful position in the country hostage to get the January 6th tapes. That was one thing Tucker really wanted, and Kevin McCarthy gave them to him. He also wanted a Frank Church style committee to investigate how Big Tech is attacking conservatives led by Thomas Massie, and then Massie came on the Friday after Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker, to thank Tucker for getting him that committee.

It's less to that point now. You have things that show up on Fox News that are coming up in the GOP and vice versa: DEI, all these things about drag brunches and banning that. It's less centralized now that Tucker is interviewing Catturd. 

Robinson 

People might not know what that sentence that you've just spoken means.

Abughazaleh 

I hope they don't, but yes, Tucker's irrelevant now. Fox didn't need Tucker, Tucker needed Fox, despite what Alex Jones said last week on a show with Tucker. It's more about how Fox informs the right-wing political apparatus that shows what's being introduced into the mainstream. Because there's stuff from the far right that once you see it on Fox, that's how you know the window is shifted.

Robinson 

Tell us about some of those things then, and about what Fox News is trying to do to its audience. Because there's a Fox News method. You've done this feature where each week, you highlight stories that appear on Fox that don't appear anywhere else. There seems to be a common technique that underlies all of this, which is, "here's a thing that you should be mad about," or some new people for you to hate.

Abughazaleh 

Exactly. And different hosts have different strategies for this. Like I said, when Tucker was there, he was really good at this. He had almost a week-long schedule where he’d slowly introduce a topic, for example, with the theory that 80,000 IRS agents were going to audit you at gunpoint. But now you have different hosts. There's less of that centralization.

But you look at, for example, when Trans Day of Visibility landed on Easter this year. You were being attacked with it every hour, with them saying Joe Biden is "transing" Easter. And that makes no sense. But then, you go to Easter dinner that night and you kind of hear from your grandfather about how Easter is trans now. It's just kind of repetition. I don't want to be like "everything's Orwellian," but when I actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I thought, damn, that's a really good tactic to make people think a certain way.

Robinson 

One of the benefits of having your work out there—having someone like you watching Fox News so that the rest of us don't have to—is that it prepares us. You mentioned encountering a relative at dinner: you can anticipate what people will be saying on the other side. You know the kinds of stories that have gotten big and have blown up in the conservative world. If you don't live in that world and don't watch Fox News, you have no idea that there are millions of people who are mad about this. You might be going about your day, not realizing that millions of people are mad that—what was Tucker's thing?—one of the M&Ms wasn't sexy enough. 

Abughazaleh 

Oh yes, that was a real problem. That's a really bad part of America. I think we can all agree. We're glad that nightmare's over.

Robinson 

You help people understand so they're not blindsided when these things come about because they've bubbling there. 

Abughazaleh 

I always introduce my weekly recaps with, "here are five totally real and definitely not made up stories," sarcastically, so they kind of know what to look for. This wasn't on Fox, but I remember on other conspiracy channels at the time about how the furniture company Wayfair was shipping children in boxes. Do you remember that? 

Robinson 

Shipping children?

Abughazaleh 

Shipping children, QAnon style. You would order a cabinet, or whatever, on Wayfair, and it was actually code to get a child shipped to your doorstep. I remember I was trying on a pair of shoes at the mall when I was visiting my mom, and the guy who was helping me with the shoes said, "so did you hear about that Wayfair thing?" And I was like, "No, that's not real. Honey, that's not real." With some of that shit, you just have to say, that's not a thing that's happening. Squatting is not people coming into your house and taking it. That's not what squatting is. Your house will not be overrun by migrant squatters. That's not real.

So many of these things are just not real. And sometimes it's one of those things where, like if it’s with someone you love who says that, you just have to look at them and say, that's not happening. I'm not trying to gaslight you. You are just literally saying something that is not happening.

Robinson 

It's really very sad, though, because there have been all these news reports about how this poison that is put in people's brains destroys families. People talk about how their relative that they loved, who was a totally normal, loving, wonderful person, but now just watches Fox News all day, and all they do is rant. And the level of paranoia and terror on this network—there was the story about the guy who watched Fox News, and then a teenage Black kid came to his door and rang the doorbell and he just shot him. He's just sitting there in absolute terror that there are people coming for you. It seems to be that one of the core Fox News messages is just "be afraid."

Abughazaleh 

Yes. I don't know if you're caught up on this season of The Boys, but the first three episodes came out last week, but they have really great writing on there. If you haven't watched it, it's basically: what if superheroes were real, but they were all owned by Fox News? Amazing show. And one of the things in this season is they have an almost Infowars type conference. To the girl who's in charge of all of it, they ask, what are you selling? And she says "purpose," because these people don't want to think that they're just going to die and no one's going to remember them—which isn't even true, a lot of these people have loved ones. But everything is so big and scary now that you want to feel like you're the victim, or you're the warrior, or you're fighting against evil, because that seems a lot more exciting or purposeful than the reality.

Robinson 

Which is that there aren't monsters, and a lot of people that you think are "monsters" are just normal people.

Abughazaleh 

Exactly. And a lot of the cabals aren't there to eat children. It's just that evil people kind of gravitate towards each other. Sucky people like to hang out with each other.

Robinson 

Tell us then, for those of us who haven't exposed ourselves to a similar amount of this stuff, if I were to watch Fox News for a week in the prime time, what are the sorts of things that I could expect to see? What's the typical week of stories?

Abughazaleh 

Things have really flared up with a bunch of different big stories between the Trump verdicts and Hunter Biden and all this stuff, but definitely something about Hunter Biden. Doesn't matter what it is, it’s something about Hunter Biden. We all know that's who we're voting for in this election: it’s Donald Trump versus Hunter Biden. Something about DEI, especially if there's anything that happened on a plane—someone's going to blame that on hiring too many Black people.

Robinson 

Really? So, the air traffic control problems are not a labor story. 

Abughazaleh 

No, it's not a labor story about how Reagan fucked up the entire airline industry, even now, 40 years later. It's a story of how DEI, about how diversity and equity initiatives, are making airlines hire unqualified Black people, and therefore, that's why Boeing has all the doors fly off their planes, despite the fact that all pilots have to have the exact same qualifications. The reason that there's a race disparity—sorry, this gets me so pissed off—the reason there are equity initiatives in the first place is because there is a racial disparity that doesn't provide opportunities to people who are qualified. But to Fox, doors are flying off planes because of too many Black people. So, you'll definitely hear something about that. And the trans people are trying to get your kids or whatever.

Robinson 

There's a cartoon that I always liked, which features Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant, and a construction worker, and Rupert Murdoch has a big plate of cookies. The construction worker has one cookie, and the Rupert Murdoch is telling the worker that immigrants are trying to take your cookie. Meanwhile, Murdoch has the giant pile.

by Denis Lushch

What you discussed there indicates something that's really important about a media organization like this, which is the attempt to redirect people's ire away from the actual power elite. Take the Boeing story: we know the Boeing story is a story of corporate malfeasance, a story of the pursuit of profit at the expense of safety. It's actually a pretty clear-cut situation. It's a great parable of how capitalism will kill you because people will cut corners to make more money. And yet, that can be reframed and shifted to point to those who have absolutely no power. Now they are the ones trying to crash your planes, kill your children, and put everything you care about at risk.

Abughazaleh 

Right. And completely ignoring international politics—not even touching that, just the national stuff—the way that Fox treats labor unions and just straight up ignores gigantic labor movements here is disgusting. They love to fetishize the working class and the middle class and how we're all good American boys here, but you're spitting in the face of anything that could help what you hope to be your audience and idealizing as your audience.

That's something that a lot of Boomers do in the first place. I grew up in Texas, where "union" is a bad word. They really do—not just Fox, but all American power structures—as much as they can try to get us to want what's worse for ourselves.

Robinson 

Well, I think that's a really important point. One of the themes that I got from watching a number of your videos is the—

Abughazaleh 

I'm so sorry, by the way. Your brain must have a lot of weird thoughts in it.

Robinson 

I learned about a whole number of things that I didn't know existed. I didn't know there was a right-wing Amazon. I didn't know Mike Huckabee had an online—oh God, I can't even describe what the scam thing is that he has... I bring it up because one of the themes that came out from watching your videos is the amount of cynicism and contempt towards the audience. A lot of this is a big grift. What is Michael Flynn's thing? He has a wild thing that you covered where he says you can get unvaccinated blood or something?

Abughazaleh 

Yes: blood, come, breast milk, and children. I'm doing a follow-up on that video and the script is getting out of control. I'm at like 10,000 words now.

They do have contempt for their audience. That's what it is. The anti-intellectualism movement is so dangerous. I think it is one of the most dangerous things in our country right now, and it's being led by people like Fox News hosts, who all have college educations and degrees. I remember Pete Hegseth talking about Donald Trump with other guests, and all three of those guys went to Ivies. All of them studied history or literature. It's so hypocritical. And by targeting education—what they're doing with charter schools and DEI, taking out CRT, banning books, all of this stuff—they want you to want what's worse for yourself.

So many of our parents, especially if you're a woman or someone of color, have died or uprooted their entire lives to give us education, and Fox News is getting people to turn it away voluntarily, and that's what they want. They want you to be uneducated. 

Robinson 

I remember when Gretchen Carlson was on Fox News. She went to Stanford and Oxford, and yet she would play a moron on Fox News, and pretended that she didn't know what the word ignoramus or czar meant. She'd just play a dummy on purpose.

Abughazaleh 

Tucker used to that too. He used to say, I don't even know what “stochastic” means, that's not even a real word. You know what that means, because you're inspiring it.

Robinson 

You played one of Jesse Watters' monologues where he talks about education, and just the very idea they're trying to educate you—nothing's in those books, don't look at those books. You also had a compilation, it was something about the “girl boss day” on Fox, where you compile the number of the most outright misogynistic quotes on Fox. It was really like 1940s or ‘50s culture. You can certainly see that Roger Ailes built this place.

Abughazaleh 

And they're still doing this shit. Jesse Watters just said, fathers aren't responsible for raising their daughters. And then he said, I just give my daughters whatever they want. But before he made that little fun punchline at the end, he spent two minutes talking about how fathers are responsible for making sure their sons are good men with integrity, education, and intellect and all these things. And with my daughters, I give them whatever they want—just ignoring your daughters. You don't even have to worry about them having integrity. You don't have to worry about anything that they will do to society because their impact is negligible to these people.

Robinson 

I do want to just take a moment to remind people Fox News was built by a serial sexual predator, Roger Ailes. This guy was kind of undiscussed.

Abughazaleh 

Women weren't allowed to wear pants at the network until like 2016.

Robinson 

One of the most evil people in the history of television, just a total and complete monster, although Murdoch manages to slip out of view a little bit. You pointed out earlier that the hosts are kind of interchangeable. Tucker thought he mattered, but he didn't. He's dispensable. He didn't even realize, I don't think, that he was dispensable. Glenn Beck was once huge on Fox News. 

Abughazaleh 

O'Reilly. I think O'Reilly had a bigger cultural impact than Tucker. Tucker is still relevant on the far right. But with O'Reilly, you had people in the center who claim they were liberals that would say, sometimes I just turn on O'Reilly to see what he has to say, he has some ideas—almost like a Bill Maher figure now, except no one had caught on yet. And Tucker didn't really have that appeal to a wider audience, but the appeal he did have was very focused. It was very effective. They're still suffering a bit from firing him, but they still have the numbers. They still have a shit ton of money. All these hosts are dispensable.

Robinson 

And behind it all is this evil Australian billionaire.

Abughazaleh 

I just have to say, one of my least favorite things in the world is when people say the FCC should do something about Fox. Because, guess what? The FCC does not have jurisdiction over Fox News or any cable news channel. And there's one of these almost Boomer type memes, where it has a bunch of text, and it's like a history lesson: in 1980 whatever, Rupert Murdoch came here, and then Reagan eliminated all these laws. I did an entire series debunking this myth. There aren't really any legal measures that the country can take against cable news. There isn't really a classification for cable channels, but CNN is in the same classification as Fox. They're all entertainment, if you want to call them that. And honestly, the government shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating the truth.

Robinson 

Right. That's its own set of dangers.

Abughazaleh 

Even though there are so many issues with Fox News, and I think that there should be consequences for inspiring terrorism, it's not something that the government necessarily [should be] doing.

Robinson 

Bill O'Reilly probably got an abortion doctor killed because he did all those monologues about George Tiller and then someone shot him.

Abughazaleh 

Feels like an Alex Jones Sandy Hook case—which is a really great example of how these things should go. But I wish that didn't happen in the first place.

Robinson 

And the election denial: there finally was some accountability.

Abughazaleh 

Yes, they had to pay a shit ton of money for the Dominion lawsuit.

Robinson 

For people who are on the Left like you and me, but who are not like you and me in that they don't expose themselves to right-wing media, is there anything that they misunderstand or don't really realize about right-wing media? Or something that you've come to understand by watching so much of this stuff that you wish other people who share your politics would understand or appreciate?

Abughazaleh 

Two things: one is from the perspective of a monitor of this type of stuff, and the other is from the perspective of someone who grew up conservative.

Many people that watch this stuff and that are very entrenched in right-wing media, that consume it like the air they need to breathe. They don't care if they're wrong. If you have something to debunk their latest insane theory, they don't care. Their brain will find a way to warp around that and come up with an entirely new reality in just moments. You look at the inauguration, scrolling down on Rumble, there were so many people who were devastated because Joe Biden wasn't executed right before he swore himself into office. And within about 30 minutes—probably less than that, in 10 minutes—those same people would say, "actually, this is just a part of all the plan that Trump has to take over the world again," or take over the country and take it away from Joe Biden.

So, they're able to shift their thoughts. They can keep the cognitive dissonance. And once you get a crack in it, that's one of the best things you can do. Just get one teeny, tiny crack. But unless they're ready to face that, if someone's not going to take all of your well-researched arguments in good faith, you can't make them.

But also, at the same time, I grew up conservative, and I think about how a lot of people want to lecture others or shame them, people that just genuinely don't know better. We do such a great job in this country of brainwashing people who are raised conservative. You're taught an alternate set of truths, and you have to relearn all that when you realize they're not real, and that's hard. It's hard to admit that the things you were taught, the things that you and your loved ones believe or believed, are not real. That's difficult to admit. You feel embarrassed, you feel kind of lonely. It's confusing.

And I think instead of trying to write everyone off, especially like in the South—there are so many progressive and liberal people in the South that are just being repressed by the same people who are creating the brainwashy type material for the well-intentioned people that are on the Right there. Not everything's a lost cause. I think a lot more empathy and realizing that these people are people—there's a whole system that's been created to keep these ideas in place—would help people on the Left a lot. There wouldn't be propaganda if we weren't winning.

Robinson 

On the subject of the failure of fact-checking: I've just been observing debates online between a lot of people on the Right and those who are saying, "but crime is going down." And the reaction is very interesting. The first person says ":ook, the statistics are actually showing that crime goes down." And immediately it's just, "Well, the statistics are fake, and the Left is not reporting all the crimes that are happening." And so, your fact checks with your little charts are just going to produce a new conspiracy about the making of the charts.

I want to ask you about what lessons have come out of your studies about how to fight this stuff. What you're saying is consistent with what I got from an interview I recorded with an ex-Jordan Peterson fan. We talked about the process of leaving Jordan Peterson behind and what it had taken to shatter his faith in this man. He really believed that this man was a brilliant intellectual, and so to not believe that made him feel stupid. He had to think, I was a fool—I believed this man was smart, and I didn't know how to identify a smart man clearly, so I must be a stupid person. That's really not easy to come to terms with.

And so, two of the lessons that came out of what you said there are first, we actually have to have some empathy for people who swallow propaganda, and then second, we need a kind of positive alternative that is more than just fact checks.

Abughazaleh 

Yes, I think, one of my favorite things in the world is when someone messages me to say that I've helped deradicalize them. When I came on for this interview, I didn't realize this was recorded, and so I went to reapply my makeup so it looked good on camera. One of the reasons for that is because I received input from people that were on the far right that contacted me and said, I watched your videos because I had a crush on you and liked writing sexist messages in your replies, but then I was actually listening to the content. They get weirdly obsessive. It's gross. There are a lot of layers here, but at the same time, if that's what got you there, man, we're glad you're here. That's obviously not the only reason I wear makeup. It's one of those instances of how weird things can help deradicalize people and bring them not necessarily to the fold, because that feels too sheepy, but back to reality.

Robinson 

Well, you also use humor, and you're fun in these videos. You're kind of gleeful in your mockery of these things. We on the Left have a reputation for being, I don't know, downers...

Abughazaleh 

As you could probably guess, I was a speech and debate kid, but I also hated speech and debate kids. I thought they were really annoying my entire life. But I still liked competing in it because I was good at it and I like winning things.

So, the first thing that I learned when I started doing the speech circuit, in addition to debate, was that the main thing that kids were doing to try to get their point across was being a huge fucking downer about everything. It was like, this is the most important thing in the world, the thing I'm telling you. That's great—that's one way to communicate, but the judges always had a way better time if you were like, hey, this is really important, but also, let's kind of make light of it. Otherwise, of the six people in your round in competition, if five of them are being a huge downer, you're going to want to laugh a little bit because otherwise you'd want to cry. Also, I'm really bad at taking things seriously, just all the time, constantly. It's rough.

Robinson 

Well, how can you take some of the stuff seriously that you cover? There's not really a different way that you could react to the absurdity. I watched a video of yours where you had a clip of Jesse Watters saying the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue used to mean something in this country. That's just really funny. That's a funny thing to say so seriously.

Abughazaleh 

Just very silly things. These people are serious.

Robinson 

There's nothing more amusing than someone who has a huge ego and is incredibly confident about something stupid and wrong.

Abughazaleh 

Yes, it's very entertaining to watch. If you divorce yourself from the awfulness of knowing that people are watching this and thinking that they're being educated, it becomes really funny.

Robinson 

Now, I wanted to conclude by talking about some of the blowback that you get. Because you are producing videos that are mocking the right and the far-right. They're not nice people. They're really hateful, vicious people. And the worst of the hateful, vicious people like to post on the internet. Could you talk a little bit about the rage and reaction that comes from the kinds of critiques that you do and that Media Matters does?

Abughazaleh 

Yes, it's especially bad if you're a woman in this space. We have a group chat that's just called “bad bitches.” It's a bunch of women who are in this reporting space. We'll all report the same person if there's something like a rape threat that's really egregious—you can't do them all because then you're not going to do anything else all day. But for blowback, they go for sexism. If you're gay, they go for homophobia. Ari Drennan, who's one of the most effective LGBTQ researchers I have ever met and on the internet right now, gets people that try to deadname her, and she takes it all in stride. She makes fun of it, points out how happy she is and how unhappy these people are.

But it can get violent. I know many people who have been swatted. I know people who are currently living in a hotel because someone just showed up at their door. I make a point whenever I post something to make sure that there is nothing that sees out my window. When I'm in Texas, if someone asks what I do, when I visit my family, I just say research or whatever. I don't elaborate because it's easy to say you're being dramatic or this is ridiculous. But looking at so many people in progressive spaces, the threats that we get are not ridiculous. You get threats with people saying, "I saw you at such and such place wearing this outfit."

And that goes for every individual that I know. Institutions like Media Matters took great care of their employees in making sure that their safety was a priority, making sure that if they were being attacked they had the support they needed. I remember when OAN was a big thing. They would put my coworkers faces on the screen, and then they would have to go private on all their accounts because you just get a bunch of OAN watchers flooding their DMs. They thrive on attacking because they don't have anything else.

Robinson

No, and obviously, what we have discussed is the way that this propaganda machine is trying to whip those people into a frenzy of hatred and get them to feel like people like yourself and your colleagues are destroying Western civilization, or whatever it is that they are in a war against. They're told outright that they are fighting evil.

Abughazaleh

And with everything that's going on abroad—I'm Palestinian, so I get a fun little addition on there. I got that before everything, but now it's really bad. But you have people like a certain billionaire who owns a social media company, and Libs of Tiktok—people like that—and they'll tweet about you and say that it wasn't intended to have you targeted or anything, but that's what happens. And they know that. Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok literally posed with a newspaper, pointing out that everywhere she targets faces bomb threats: children's hospitals, libraries, schools. She is delighted by it because they know that when they say something, when they say such and such school is hosting a parent's night for anyone who has two daddies, that place is going to get threats.

It’s just like when Tucker Carlson used to put someone's face on the screen and say their name over and over again, instead of using a pronoun. I remember he did one episode on Nina Jankowicz, and he just kept saying her name over and over and over again because he wanted to get it in your head. This is the target.

Robinson 

I think we should emphasize, therefore, that while your videos are, as I say, gleeful in poking fun at people like this, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Chaya Raichik are psychopaths. They are really twisted, sadistic human beings.

Abughazaleh 

Right. And for anyone who watches my full videos, both long and short form, yes, I catalog all this insane shit and make fun of it—I love making fun of it, it’s so easy—but that's not the reason that I do it. Usually, by the end, I have a point: this is being broadcast into your parents' homes; this is being seen as acceptable by the GOP; this is being treated as an actual narrative that deserves actual credibility, and those things are concerning. To get to that point, I use the humor and the insanity to make it palatable and digestible because otherwise you're just going to want to spit it out. And I don't blame you.

Robinson 

We may see Donald Trump return to the White House next year, and obviously that would fuel even more of this. 

Abughazaleh 

I'm already planning an outfit for the gulag. He's a cool one.

Robinson 

It's really deeply alarming. Just to finish here, the organization that you worked for a long time, Media Matters, the right waged war on it. You and a number of your colleagues, who did excellent work, were recently laid off in part because the organization, as I understand it, is fighting lawsuits from people like Elon Musk who want to destroy it.

Abughazaleh 

You also have Media Matters dealing with the Missouri AG and Ken Paxton, who are basically just taking over a support role for those same lawsuits, just adding on to it. And this is what they love to do. They love to dogpile on organizations, people, or causes. But there's a reason that these information institutions are being attacked.

There is a reason that pundits like to mock the terms like misinformation or disinformation—and Tucker used to love to do that. There is a reason that they try to discredit basic fact checks or discuss alternative facts, or just straight up ignore the reality of it and the research that these people put into it, and that's because it's working. If our work wasn't so effective, if we're such a non-threat, why are you launching a nuclear strike? They're desperate to get us to shut the fuck up.

Robinson 

And you know, certainly it scores a partial victory when they can get you laid off from your job.

The people who appreciate the kind of work that you do need to understand that without support, it can't happen. And so, for those who value that work, I'm constantly encouraging people to support independent media. If you don't support independent media, we see these organizations disappear. We see them go away. It will not last. Current Affairs, for instance, is a nonprofit. If people don't subscribe, there is no magazine. It doesn't come out. And the same with organizations like Media Matters. They need your support, or else they won't exist. The work they do won't happen.

And so, tell our readers, if people want to support your work, how can they do it? 

Abughazaleh 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel and also, my TikTok, which is the same. I have a bunch of social media. There's Twitter, Instagram, and Threads—there's so many of them, and they all have different names. So, you can just find my links on my TikTok, or my YouTube.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.