Lou Dobbs, rest in pig shit forever
Now good and dead at 78, Lou Dobbs was a pioneer of the popular trend of the media persona with a perpetual scowl, endlessly spewing rage, and thus helped to plunge public discourse in the US into the pool of sewage and rat poison that it continues to be in. And, note well, it wasn't Fox News, but CNN that first gave him a platform for this noxious bile and profited from it.
And it was thanks to people like Dobbs, along with Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who discovered how much political mileage could be gained from anti-immigrant fearmongering, that conservative politicians all over the US climbed onto this same bandwagon virtually overnight. Though in Orwellian fashion many conservatives acted as if such a stance had always been an integral part of their philosophy and agendas, it was actually a notable departure from the Reagan era's conception of conservatism, as emblematic figures of that era like Jack Kemp and Jean Kirkpatrick (odious people in their own right, and with no shortage of innocent blood on their hands due to their support for murderous US foreign interventions like the Contra war in Nicaragua) pointed out in an open letter in which they critiqued and lamented the anti-immigrant craze.
Dobbs' pioneering work thus showed the world how careers and corporate profits can be made by peddling hateful narratives that provoke violence and harms against some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Unfortunately, many learned and applied this lesson from him, so that our society is now swimming in this toxic swamp.
As with the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy and Spain, it is frightfully possible (though we must reject fatalism and struggle with all our might to prevent this possibility from being realized) that the current cycle of hateful madness won't reach its peak and decline before it has unleashed unthinkable levels of chaos and destruction on the world beyond even what is already in progress.
Of course the raw materials that combust to produce such cataclysms are found not just in the actions of particular personalities, but in the structural contradictions of the world-system. Nevertheless, when the worst harms have been wrought, and historians try to figure out what the hell happened, the role that people like Dobbs played, as precursors, as catalysts, should not be forgotten.