Fox News viewers are livid on Twitter after Chris Wallace gets in Stephen Miller’s face

Anyone wondering why 41.8% of Americans still say they approve of President Trump’s performance is underestimating the ignorance of a large segment of the populace and their aversion to hearing facts that contradict the world-view super-glued to their psyches.

Case in point: the reaction of Fox News viewers watching host Chris Wallace grill two of his guests today while employing the age-old journalistic technique of challenging their unsubstantiated statements with actual facts and statistics and forcing them to defend their positions.

Wallace confronted both right-wing talk radio gasbag Rush Limbaugh and white nationalist Trump aide Stephen Miller with tough questions on Fox News Sunday this morning, and Fox News viewers reacted as if their favorite “news” channel had suddenly hired Barrack Obama as their latest talking head.

When Miller presented the fallacious Trump propaganda that an emergency declaration was necessary to build a border wall to protect the nation from an unlimited flow of drugs pouring over an unprotected border, Wallace shot back with facts provided by the administration’s own CBP statistics.

“But 80 to 90 percent of those drugs don’t come across in unfenced areas,” Wallace pointed out. “They come across from ports of entry. Those are your own Customs and Border Patrol numbers.”

The Fox News Sunday host was equally dogged in his interview with Rush Limbaugh, rightly accusing the conservative radio fixture of an obvious case of hypocrisy in his failure to condemn President Trump’s usurpation of congressional authority by his declaration of a non-existent “national emergency” after launching a multiplicity of tirades against President Obama’s use of executive actions during his time in office.

“I understand that you like what President Trump is doing,” Wallace acknowledged. “And you didn’t like what President Obama was doing. But that’s the concern here, is that to the degree that you give the president more and more powers, yes, you are going to get some things — executive powers — from one president you like, but you’re going to get things — executive powers — from another president that you don’t like.”

All this logic, reason, and truth was simply too much for the aged couch potatoes sitting in front of their TVs watching their normally reliably reactionary news source spout something resembling actual reality. Angry die-hard conservative acolytes took to Twitter to express their outrage over the intrusion of the real world into their carefully constructed castle of fantasies.

It’s demonstrative of the deterioration in public discourse to note that this particular viewer not only believes that Fox News is accommodating “both sides of opinion,” but that statistics and facts are a matter of debate not settled reality. The complete brainwashing of these people by Trumpian propaganda and right-wing memes is frightening.

The moral character of these incensed, hyper-partisan bigots is best exemplified by the casual anti-Semitism displayed in at least one commenter’s response.

Only white privilege and racism could produce a comment like that.

It’s good for progressives to realize what we are up against in the battle for the soul of our nation. As the reactions to a real journalist refusing to accept the pre-packaged talking points peddled by Trump’s surrogates without challenging the falsehoods that lie behind them demonstrate, the battle is far from over.

Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.

Original reporting by David Edwards at RawStory.

Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.