Yes, you can. For 16 to 20 weeks.
Uh, yes?
H.P. Lovecraft, who was monstrously xenophobic and racist, is one of my favorite authors, and my favorite short story of his, The Street, is also one of the most blatantly anti-foreigner out of all of them. If it were written today it’d be indistinguishable from MAGA propaganda.
I’m unsure how abhorrent “abhorrent media” is, but if we’re counting sources that right-wingers love, then yes, I do. But indirectly.
By “indirectly,” I mean that I occasionally look in at a right-wing message board. There, reliable media sources include Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, the Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, and the Daily Mail, among others. Like here, cites are given with links, and brief quotes are stated. (But not always; it is particularly irritating when one of them posts, “Hey, check this out!” and links to a video, but includes nothing as to what the video is about or the point it/they are making.)
Unreliable sources on that board include, of course, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, and other mainstream media sources. You know, the fake news that’s controlled by George Soros, the Democratic Party, the Deep State, and for all I can tell, Michelle Obama. [Okay, all sarcasm off.]
As a Canadian, I must say that I do find it amusing when they touch on Canadian affairs, which they occasionally do. Did you know that Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro’s son, and that he likes to put on blackface from time to time? Did you know that Canada is socialist, leaning towards communist, so should we [i.e. the US] liberate them? Yes, that was an actual thread. And all the illegals who enter Canada and walk across the northern border. And plenty more untruths, half-truths, and outright lies. At any rate, their Canadian news comes from their usual sources (Fox News, the Daily Mail, et al.). Nothing from reputable Canadian sources.
So like I said, indirectly from abhorrent media.
It has notoriety because it’s considered “the Bible of the racist right” (to quote the FBI) and far more influential than it should be.
At any rate I’ll second Lovecraft. The previously mentioned The Street is so out-there xenophobic that for many years I didn’t even realize it was xenophobic because I didn’t realize he was talking about humans.
Exactly like here.
Just throwing up some link to a random video is very popular on the SDMB. It bugs me to no end. And many of these “posts” don’t even have a “Hey, check this out!” They’re just mindlessly posted with no context. Really annoying and we should be better than that.
So the nearest I’ve come to “abhorrent” media is reading Chris “American Sniper” Kyle’s book “A History of the US in Ten Firearms”. Its not that abhorrent, its an OK history book, just completely one-sided and omitting much anything that could make the US (and its style of gun ownership) seem even slightly bad. Though in that respect its probably more dangerous than more abhorrent media like the Turner Diaries, if someone were to purely rely on media like that to teach them history (which is absolutely the stated aim of GOP policy like bans on teaching “critical race theory”) they would end up with a seriously warped worldview, well like the one currently espoused by the GOP.
As an undergraduate, we watched The Birth of a Nation in my American Cultures class. I joke, but I couldn’t tell what was more off offensive, the racism or the fact that it bored me to tears. As a graduate student, I did a lot of research on lynching and delved into a lot of primary source material that included accounts from individuals whose loved ones had been lynced, those who supported the lynching, and of course many, many photos of mulitlated bodies of those who were lynched. I learned quite a bit though it was very, very depressing.
I’m exposed to abhorrent media as part of my job providing criminal defense - the most extreme were thumbnails of child porn (I didn’t click; I had the written description), but it has also included pictures and videos of dead bodies (the goriest pictures are victims of car accidents).
I’m morbid, though. I follow pages on instagram that will show crazy events captured on video, and I watch those murder mystery type shows on tv.
None of it has left me disturbed, or haunts me. I certainly haven’t been entertained by it, either.
Back in the 90s I read both a Donald Trump book & a Rush Limbaugh book. I read them because I couldn’t understand from what I was seeing/hearing why either man was so popular/successful. I don’t remember much about the books, except they didn’t answer my question – neither man showed any signs of intelligence, insight or originality & I proceeded to ignore them until 2016. I miss those days.
Back in the day, I was a regular on possibly the worst site on the internet at that time, rotten. .com (broken link, good luck if you fix it)
Not sure if it counts as media, though. It was mostly showing horrendous shocking images of many obscene, lewd, and downright horrific pictures. Pretty sure that is where “tubgirl” got famous.
It is, amazingly, still up, though not updated for years.
NSFW. Like really. The “fuck of the month” section is totally full of granny porn. Do not try this at work. This is a seriously deep depth of depravity.
There was indeed a lot of graphic visual content there. But there was also the Rotten Library, which had a lot of really interesting and well-written essays on everything from politics to history to drugs to pop culture to crime and about a hundred other subjects.
A few years ago I started reading a lot about North Korea and Kim Jong Un. While not abhorrent media, the information the books contained about daily life in NK was quite abhorrent.
I probably read 10 books in a row and not much else in that period. It’s fascinating and very troubling. I was hooked on it for a while though.
The current USA political mess takes up a lot of my thoughts these days. But it’s pretty hard to avoid. It’s in our face every day.
When I was about 12, I worked with a landscaping crew. One day they started talking about Nazi atrocities. Even Mengele stuff. I was WAY too young to hear about it. I was really troubled by it.
I occasionally read the National Review. I don’t think that qualifies.
However, you talk like Americans coming to liberate Canada is a bad thing. Perhaps so, but I give them grudging permission to send In-and-Out Burgers, Culvers and Chick-Fil-As.