When a clip from Fox News floats across my feed, I sometimes have to remind myself that this isn’t just the background noise of a broken culture. Millions of people are tuned in, nodding along, believing what they hear. And what they hear is often absurd, and more than absurd—dangerous.
Take Jillian Michaels, the fitness trainer whose abs-and-buns VHS tapes cluttered living room shelves in the nineties.
These days, she resurfaces on television not to teach people how to stretch but to tell them what to think about the history of slavery.
On a recent segment, she insisted that almost no white people owned slaves in the years before the Civil War.
In one breath she managed to defend white fragility and distort the history of bondage. Then she doubled down on social media, as if sheer repetition could rescue a falsehood.
It’s a claim as old as the Confederacy itself, where leaders said the war was about tariffs or states’ rights or anything but slavery.
That lie metastasized into the “Lost…
