PLANO, Texas \u2014 Local veteran and longtime Fox News viewer Ronald Merchant spent most of Tuesday afternoon convinced he was watching live coverage of Manhattan, despite the fact that the \u201cbroadcast\u201d was actually the 1981 John Carpenter film \u201cEscape From New York,\u201d which his grandson had apparently left playing on Syfy after crashing stoned on the couch the night before while visiting from college.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis Snake fella reminds me of a buddy I had in \u2019Nam,\u201d Merchant said, gesturing at the television. \u201cMean so-of-a-bitch. I watched him kill women and children. He had a cool eye patch too. Anyway, he\u2019s doing real good work cleaning up all the lunatic drug addicts and punk trash in Democrat-run New York. I went there once in the \u201970s, and this looks about right. This is what they get for electing a socialist mayor. If this Plissken runs for office, he has my vote. I don\u2019t care if he went to prison, he\u2019s a veteran damn it. My \u2018Nam buddy went to prison too. Tax fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merchant\u2019s grandson said he immediately recognized something was off when his grandfather began yelling at the TV about \u201cwhy the anchors were not saying anything about the Duke and all his thugs running wild in Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s so fucking funny. He hasn\u2019t changed the channel from Fox News in 10 years. I think the last time he switched stations it was to watch a rerun of \u2018Gunsmoke,\u2019 but he turned it back because \u2018the commercials were too homosexual.\u2019 I tried telling him it\u2019s a movie, but he didn\u2019t believe me,\u201d Travis Merchant said. \u201cHe just said this was \u2018Obama\u2019s America.\u2019 I think he forgot who the president is now. I think I\u2019m putting on \u2018Predator 2\u2019 next to give him a taste of LA. Thanks to Tucker Carlson, he already believes in aliens anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
Experts say the 68-year-old Merchant\u2019s confusion is not especially unusual in today\u2019s political climate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see this a lot,\u201d said Dr. Marla Kingsley, a media studies professor at the University of Texas. \u201cFor many older viewers, the line between dystopian fiction and Fox News blurred sometime around 2009. The shock of seeing a Black president caused mass derealization amongst boomers. Honestly, Ronald\u2019s approach to this reality break might be the healthiest outcome. At least when he\u2019s preoccupied watching a pretty solid film, he\u2019s not posting patriotic AI slop on Facebook. And there are fewer commercials selling gold, which is a plus.\u201d<\/p>\n
At press time, the grandson, in an effort to push the limits of what his grandfather would believe, went too far when Merchant lost interest in \u201cRoboCop\u201d after he \u201ckilled that hard-working businessman\u201d and \u201cdidn\u2019t back the blue enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PLANO, Texas \u2014 Local veteran and longtime Fox News viewer Ronald Merchant spent most of Tuesday afternoon convinced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[42444,5342,42445,3870,42446,42447,42448,75,42449,9,11,10,2134,42450,2556],"class_list":{"0":"post-88524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-80s-movies","9":"tag-conservatives","10":"tag-escape-from-new-york","11":"tag-fox-news","12":"tag-htmain","13":"tag-john-carpenter","14":"tag-kurt-russell-movies","15":"tag-manhattan","16":"tag-movies-on-tv","17":"tag-new-york","18":"tag-new-york-headlines","19":"tag-new-york-news","20":"tag-republicans","21":"tag-right-wing","22":"tag-television"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}