Jen Senko said her father “seemed to be addicted to these strong emotions. It seemed as if he just couldn’t wait to shut himself off and  listen to Rush Limbaugh for 3 hours and get all pissed off.”  Anger was his drug, as it is to so much of the American right. It is an irrational but intoxicating anger off of which they get high. And the adherents, like Senko’s father, Frank Senko, were truly addicted to the anger. Addicted to fury.  Sometime are not happy unless they are angry.

As John Montgomery a professor of Psychology at SUNY said,

“If you watch something that makes you very angry, you can get addicted to that because as you get angry that drives stress response, and endorphin is the main pleasure chemical in the brain. The tricky thing is its mostly unconscious. People get tricked like in the case of your (Jen Senko’s) father.”

So Senko was onto something here. The addiction is real. Senko understood that the media has a profound effect on us, particularly of course, those who watch it a lot because they are addicted to it. Like her father, Frank.

Senko was interested in studying whether or not there are specific techniques right-wing media uses to get people to change their belief systems as her father had done. How did they do it?

In his case he was turned “against the very core” of who he was. He was turned so much that he voted against his own interest. This is a phenomenon that others have notice noticed. Like the Appalachian White American I read about  who was in the hospital and so sick he was going to die because he could not afford the treatment just because he didn’t want African Americans to get the benefits! He didn’t want free medical care if it meant African Americans would get it too. He was willing to die instead.