Under the Dumb

Fox News says The Walking Dead is brainwashing Americans, without irony by Sean O'Neal

Always out to decry brainwashing in any form that doesn’t directly serve it, Fox News has exposed yet more TV making viewers witless and single-minded in the wrong way by arguing that The Walking Dead is “seriously hurting American society”—that bumbling assemblage of oafs who are always but one unsavory pop culture moment away from killing each other and having sex with the skulls. Fortunately, the more healthily paranoid Fox News audience have received early warning to don their protective anti-skull-sex helmets from Fox Health News senior managing editor Dr. Manny Alvarez, whose years of experience as an OB-GYN has made him expertly qualified to handle babies.

“Hate me all you want, or call me paranoid and misinformed,” says “Dr. Manny,” instantly predicting and therefore negating all criticism, “but there is one common theme that is pervasive in American pop culture today: violence. Even more specifically, zombie violence. The idea of a zombie-infested world inspires fantasies of monsters possessed by an uncontrollable rage to kill, and viewers get a thrill imagining what it would be like to participate in this new world order.” And, he argues, those daydreams of an ominous, monster-filled “new world order” only serve as distractions from the other, slightly less monstrous new world order Fox News would prefer you focus on.

“With this country heading towards a socialized system of government, in which officials don’t want you to think or focus on what is important for your own personal growth, I’m sure they’re more than happy to let you obsess over something as stupid as zombies. And in turn you ultimately become the zombie,” said Alvarez of this nefarious attempt to cloud a dulled and impressionable public’s thinking with nightmares of imaginary bogeymen coming for their very lives, which only draws attention away from worrying about how Obamacare will end freedom.

Alvarez implicates everything from zombie video games to "Zombie Runs" to the National Institute of Health’s “how-to guide on dealing with a zombie outbreak”—a guide that was actually created by the Center for Disease Control, as a successfully publicity-grabbing way of getting otherwise-disinterested Americans to learn about disaster preparedness—as part of this system shamelessly indoctrinating the public with imagination and useful information. 

“Give me a break. As a doctor and scientist, I know one thing for sure: When you’re dead, you’re dead,” writes Dr. Manny, providing the kind of blunt, tell-it-like-it-is truth Fox is known for, and which can only be achieved after a career of studying vaginas, then correctly identifying which one belongs to a dead person. “Our brains should be less focused on imaginary zombie hordes and more focused on harnessing the tools that we need in order to enhance our lives, whether it be music, education, science or the classics. Entertainment should help us soothe our brains so that we can ease our minds of some of the stress from our daily lives,” he concludes.

Alvarez then returned to work at the one channel entirely devoted to stoking panic about faceless groups of enemies, in between spreading fear and disaste for culture, education, and science.