Following up on my post below I thought I’d share some excerpts of this piece by Peter Maas at the Intercept from a year ago. It’s about the Murdoch heir Lachlan Murdoch and it’s fascinating. I think it’s his influence that’s being felt in the sharp, openly fascist turn of the network:
In 1994, a philosophy student at Princeton University submitted a senior thesis that began with a famous passage from Lord Byron, the Romantic poet. The passage reflected the student’s apparent uncertainty about who he was and what he would become after college.
Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!
The thesis was written by Lachlan Murdoch, the eldest son of Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch. In the 57-page thesis, Lachlan tried to develop a system, rooted in German philosophy, for leading a life guided by morality and love. His thesis was titled, “A Study of Freedom and Morality in Kant’s Practical Philosophy,” and he salted it with spiritual inquiries. It even concluded with a striking Sanskrit line about yearning for the purity of infinity.
A quarter-century later, this document is strangely relevant because its author has become one of the most important yet least-known purveyors of white nationalism.
Until recently, the Murdoch who most dominated Fox News was Rupert, the craggy billionaire who created the network in 1996. But with Rupert nearing his 90th year, the Murdoch who now oversees the network — who in the past year has presided over some of the most racist and conspiratorial programming it has ever broadcast — is Lachlan. The tattoo-flecked chair and chief executive of the parent company of Fox News is now 47 years old and lives in a mansion in Los Angeles with his wife and children.
Lachlan Murdoch represents an archetype of extremism that often escapes scrutiny, because he is not an on-the-barricades provocateur. Instead, he is a behind-the-scenes proprietor. He doesn’t publicize his views — there is even a polite guessing game about them. At a recent conference, he had to be asked whether he agreed with the ideas on Fox News. “I’m not embarrassed by what they do at all,” Lachlan replied. His general practice of gilded silence stretches across the decades and has been the opposite of the foot-in-mouth bluntness of his infamous father.
Lachlan’s emergence as the Murdoch in charge of Fox offers an opportunity to assess the family for what it truly is. In America, the Murdochs are usually treated as a financial success, not as a political plague. Rupert and his sons, Lachlan and James, regularly attend exclusive business conferences where they are celebrated like royalty; media coverage tends to be congenial. The anger that exists toward Fox News is mostly directed at the network’s on-air barkers, notably Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Lou Dobbs, and Jeanine Pirro. But these far-right shouters wouldn’t be on our screens without the approval of the Murdochs. Just as the Sackler family owns the pharmaceutical firm that created and marketed OxyContin, at the center of the opioid epidemic, the Murdoch family is behind Fox News and the far-right sludge that has been injected into America’s political bloodstream.
[…]
Lachlan Murdoch has become the new boss of this far-right node. As with most tales about men in power, there is an interesting twist to his life. Unlike Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, Lachlan does not appear to be an upstanding citizen hiding a terrible secret in a sordid past. His trajectory has been the opposite of the usual corruption arc — the decency was in his early years, before he slid into dishonor as a loyal son laboring for the approval of an imperious and reactionary father. The tale is so ripe with intrigue and pathology that it seems stolen from Shakespeare.
He was a good student, modest and unassuming, who did seem to have a sense of decency. How did he become a white nationalist?
The article shows that he always had a strong libertarian streak that just grew exponentially. And the story goes on to explore the family succession drama (The Showtime show “Succession” is much closer to reality than I realized) which had Lachlan out of the family for a decade. When he returned he was more right wing than ever. Did he do it to please Rupert, to ensure that he would inherit the mantle? Who knows? Who cares, really?
The Murdoch empire is a malign influence on this world and especially the US, UK and Australia which remain its base. But that’s all they need. And Lachlan Murdoch is taking them to the next level of wingnutiness: straight up fascism.
Read the whole Intercept piece when you get a chance. It’s very illuminating.