Damned Catholics

Mostly I try to avoid the awareness of the number of Catholics in prominent positions at Fox News because of a shared heritage. I won't defend them but I will explain. There are two elements to their rise at Fox, a desire for order, authority and hierarchy above all else and an understanding of human weakness and susceptibility.

Catholics understand and believe in human weakness more so than Protestants and especially Evangelicals. It feels improper, presumptuous and like an affront to Catholics to approach God outside of an ecclesiastical, sacramental context. Fundamentalists approach Jesus directly, personally and in a familiar way.

Obedience to authority is natural to Catholics. It resonates with their relationship to God, which occurs in an organizational, hierarchical context, so they are instinctively submissive. And through their indoctrination they understand the irrational side of submission and how to use subliminal tools in order to ensure compliance, degradation and conformity. 

Such tools are racist code-talk and the dog-whistle marketing of ideas. Catholics associate real freedom with chaos and so flee from it. The lesson they learned from their own suppression and persecution, especially the Irish Catholics, is not that it's bad but that you want to be on top. They fail to reject the model of dominance and submission. 

But the rejection of that is what Americanism and Christianity are supposed to be about. These authoritarians are therefore in a hopeless place of hypocrisy and denial. Fear of this compliance with (papal) authority once made Protestants think that Catholics were unfit for democracy, human dignity and even salvation. Some of them clearly are.