I don’t need a smarmy, obnoxious, hate filled asswipe like Bill Maher to tell me Fox News was a major part in the Charlottesville march. Maher loves the sound of his own voice and his thoughts, and tries to shame liberals into believing what he believes in. Like people who practice Islam are evil, and that political correctness is what got Drumph elected.

There are other political satirists on television that do a great job of getting their messages out, and are ACTUALLY funny. Bill Maher is neither of these. Either he wakes the fuck up that his style is of a far greater detriment and that he needs to change his ways, or he should get out of the way and just stick to touring the country as a very unfunny, poor man’s version of Don Rickles.

I’ve been sick so I wasn’t up to my usual habit of watching Bill Maher Friday.

I’ve always said Trump was a Fox News creation. His dog whistle populism was learned during years of weekly Thursday morning “Fox & Friends” softball segments. Now they’re symbiotes.

I’m thinking “I’m just sorry Ailes didn’t live long enough to see just how awful that mistake was and to feel the consequences of it” is off the mark. I don’t think Roger was a huge Trump fan. Ailes was a huge believer in the Republican brand. When Trump appeared to be the inevitable candidate Roger naturally went all in for the Republican candidate including temporarily trying to prep him for debates until he quickly realized that wasn’t going to work and got tossed out of the campaign on his ass.

Still, I can’t imagine a scenario where Roger would turn on Trump unless he saw The Donald destroying the Republican brand. Or more to the point, the Republican Party missing this opportunity of shoving their right-wing agenda down America’s throat. And as things stand even as noxious as Trump has become, he’s still a reliable rubber stamp for a Republican Congress.

Rest assured, America could burn to ashes under Republican rule and Roger would never give up the dream.

It should not be a surprise to anyone that the Right Wing has been stoking hatred and violence for quite a long time. Charlottesville was not the product of a “perfect storm” – it was the inevitable result of what’s been building up in the country and it sadly won’t be the last of these violent events.

Maher would be more correct to say that Fox News is a major part of the reason why we have a Pence White House rather than a Hillary Clinton presidency. They spent 20 years attacking the Clintons to the point that many people gullibly assumed that there must have been some fire behind all the smoke – so the smear campaign did finally work enough to make sure they could tank her candidacy and put something like Donald Trump into the Oval Office. That’s something that pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly had stoked for decades, in the hope that they could achieve this result. (Which is why O’Reilly and Hannity were so smug about the election result.)

But the violence? That’s something we’ve been seeing build up over the course of the Trump campaign, where more and more of these wingnuts were empowered and emboldened by the Trump people to let their inner hater loose. Repeatedly, they were told it was okay to hate other people, and even to physically attack them. We saw more and more assaults and acts of bullying as the campaign dragged on, with Trump never acknowledging that his people were the ones instigating the problem. Instead, he offered to provide legal defense to anyone caught doing it. And after Trump squeaked into the White House, there were over 1000 documented hate crimes committed by Trump supporters against everyone else, and those continue to this day. The response by Right Wing outlets like Fox News has been to ignore the real crimes wherever possible and to focus on either the occasional hoax call or the occasional hate crime committed AGAINST a Trump supporter. But never to acknowledge the very real wave of hatred and violence that the Pence White House has stoked across the country. It doesn’t help that this presidential team doesn’t even believe in discussing facts if they are inconvenient. We are told instead to focus on “alternative facts”.

What happened in Charlottesville is a natural progression from what happened in April in Berkeley. The Far Right came to a town with the purpose of attacking it and terrorizing the locals into submission. In both cases, they succeeded in generating a violent confrontation with everyone else, and in both cases there were injuries. The difference in Charlottesville is that the Far Right is now more actively engaged in homicidal behavior. And the Fox News has been addressing this via Tucker Carlson and Hannity and Watters to say that the violence is just a response to their imaginary Left Wing crime wave – the false premise that because there are principled people standing up to them, the Right is entitled to try to attack and kill them. The horrifying posts on the Fox News page about this are testament to the fact that the Right indeed intends to continue its violence, and will likely ratchet it up farther the next time. We should be prepared for this – protestors dealing with Right Wing crowds should expect to be attacked any time they encounter them at this point, and that they face potential injury. Until another presidential team gets to the White House in 2021, we sadly face a continuing wave of this behavior.

This is the unhappy fruit of 2016, a year in which millions of voters chose not to vote because they didn’t think it would make a difference, or because they felt uneasy about the Clintons or because they just didn’t think Trump could ever be elected anyway, or maybe all of the above. But they didn’t show up when it counted, and we have seen the result. The next time people have a chance to vote, they really do need to show up. Because Trump’s voters will, no matter what. And because these people did not show up when they should have, we must continue to endure the Year of the Bully. We must work hard to make sure that it doesn’t turn into the Decade of the Bully.