FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR

If you weren't at the airport in Atlanta yesterday when it suffered an eleven-hour power outage, you probably watched stranded passengers and thought, "Sucks to be you," or you worried about possible disruptions to your own travel plans.

Fox News wanted you to be scared out of your wits.

Here's a headline at Fox News Insider:

'Blueprint for Destruction': Fmr NYPD Detective Says Terrorists Could Take Cues from ATL Airport Outage

The story:

Retired NYPD Detective Pat Brosnan said terrorists are likely watching Sunday's massive power outage at the busiest airport in the world as a "blueprint for destruction."

Brosnan said people should remain alert in the wake of the complete outage at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Georgia, even though it was not terror-related.

"They're studying us like a frog under the glass," Brosnan said, "they're assessing vulnerabilities at all times."

... He called the apparently accidental outage in Atlanta "a blueprint for destruction," noting the "pandemonium" and disorganization that ensued after the terminals went dark.

It was bad, but was it really "pandemonium" ("a wild uproar," "tumult")? That's a word that's showing up in headlines, mostly at right-wing sites: another Fox story, a story at Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au, stories at World Net Daily and Zero Hedge.

And, of course, Fox turns to an ex-New York cop to suggest that the outage (caused by a fire in an underground tunnel) means the apocalypse is nigh:

BROSNAN: They're studying us like a frog under the glass. They're probing us for weaknesses. They're trying to assess and identify vulnerabilities at all times.... They're studying us, Neil. This is really scary business. And the pandemonium that ensued yesterday, I would imagine that they took a lot of notes on that one....

Bad guys have bad ideas. Bad guys pay attention -- there's this endless contest, endless struggle between us and them. We're continually hardening our defenses, we're on our heels defensively, and the whole time they're probing, they're assessing, they're touching, they're exploring, they're trying to figure out what the next most viable conduit to issue, you know, mass carnage across the scope is.

Except that there was no "mass carnage" yesterday in Atlanta. For the most part, there were just frustrated people.

But this is what Fox does all day and all night: it spreads anger, it spreads fear, it persuades white people who'll die peacefully in their beds that they're at risk of being killed at any moment by hate-filled brown people, and -- although it doesn't come up in the segment -- it's all the liberals' fault.

This is why your right-wing uncle agrees with Roy Moore that Muslims shouldn't be allowed in Congress. This is why he's stashed away two years of canned goods. They're coming for him. The only news sources he trusts have assured him of that.