Hmm…. I need to cogitate on this one. https://t.co/BGHbJThCz4
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) August 1, 2021
Kevin Drum, worthy wonk that he is, lays out a complete history of the post-WWII paranoid strain in American politics, and concludes:
… As we all know, Donald Trump isn’t the cause of the Republican Party’s descent into madness. He’s merely the result of decades of evolution that started when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, Rush Limbaugh picked up a microphone, and Newt Gingrich reinvented modern conservatism. But these were just warm-up acts. It wasn’t until Fox News was up and running that we started to see permanent changes in the electorate.
Trump took explicit advantage of that by offering the simplest possible fix. The federal government, he said, was full of idiots. It was that simple. He’d appoint smart people who would make commonsense policy and repair everything in a jiffy.
At the same time, he defended Christianity with the power and intensity of a tent revival preacher. Never mind that Trump showed about as much interest in attending church as he did in reading a book. Finally, here was a man who promised that he could revive religion in the public square. White evangelicals almost literally swooned.
And there’s one more thing: As we saw earlier, the past couple of decades have seen a steady increase in the belief among white people—particularly Republicans—that anti-white bias is a serious problem. Fox News has stoked this fear almost since the beginning, culminating this year in Tucker’s full-throated embrace of the white supremacist “replacement theory” and the seemingly 24/7 campaign against critical race theory and its alleged impact on white schoolkids. This is certainly not all that Fox News does, but it’s a big part of its pitch, and it fits hand in glove with Trump’s appeal to white racism.
This, along with the Fox-inspired decline of trust in government, helped Trump produce a winning message, and his appeal to a dispirited evangelical movement produced a highly motivated legion of shock troops to help him spread the word. Remember what Richard Hofstadter said about what conspiracy theorists want? “Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.” Who better to fill that role than white evangelicals? They’re already conservative and well organized, and they believe that liberals are behind the decay of traditional American morals. From there, is it such a leap to believe that prominent Democrats lead an international gang of deep-state pedophiles?…
What’s more, as Uscinski and Parent remind us, “conspiracy theories are for losers.” When Trump lost in 2020 and put the conservative movement yet again into crisis, it was the kindling that set off everything else. We think they’re fighting against democracy, but many rank-and-file Republicans think they’re fighting for the literal soul of America. Put more bluntly, their claim that Democrats engaged in mass voter fraud doesn’t mean they’ve given up on democracy. It means they think they’re restoring democracy. This is what turned “Stop the Steal” into a nationwide movement. It’s what prompted Republicans in the House to introduce the Save Democracy Act. And it’s why more than half of all Republicans believe the 2020 election was rigged…
What makes this even worse is that many Republican politicians no longer respond to ordinary political incentives. As former Republican House Speaker John Boehner put it, it’s now all about appealing to Fox News and fending off primary challenges from right-wing fanatics. Referring to the first-term House class of 2010, he wrote in his recent memoir that “they didn’t really want legislative victories. They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.” Modern Republicans, raised on a diet of Fox News, “were just thinking of how to fundraise off of outrage or how they could get on Hannity that night.”…
For the past 20 years the fight between liberals and conservatives has been razor close, with neither side making more than minor and temporary progress in what’s been essentially trench warfare. We can only break free of this by staying clear-eyed about what really sustains this war. It is Fox News that has torched the American political system over the past two decades, and it is Fox News that we have to continue to fight.
Baud
I remember when it was fashionable to treat MSNBC and Fox as two sides of the same coin.
zhena gogolia
I divested my cable of Fox News and I feel better. I know it’s ridiculous, but sue me.
trollhattan
Am plowing, slowly and out of sequence, through Perlstein’s tetrology of the modern Republican Party (current read is “Reaganland”) and he makes it very, very clear and in minute detail that the battle began in the 1950s, was contested throughout the ’60s and made permanent following Ford’s loss in 1976. The folks who orchestrated Goldwater’s nomination started the dominoes falling. (Ike was a squishy liberal, donchano.)
Frank Wilhoit
Kevin (like so many) does not get that it is bottom-up, not top-down. Thought experiment: shut Fox down. Does the noise stop, for even one day? No, it does not. Other, worse providers immediately step into the gap. The problem is the demand.
Today’s Fox audience were the hippies. The fact that they were, coincidentally, right about Vietnam blinded us all to the fact that they were otherwise merely paranoid. And they are still paranoid today.
Suzanne
I read this the other day and I don’t think it’s a deep enough analysis. Fox News exists to tell a bunch of dumb people what Arlie Russell Hothschild calls their “deep story”, the narrative they feel to be true. That deep story would exist without Fox News, even if they didn’t have a single media outlet so intent on packaging it tidily for constant consumption.
debbie
@trollhattan:
The fanaticism became entrenched after Roe v Wade.
Lapassionara
@trollhattan: made permanent being the operative words. When I was in college, we laughed at those sorts of people. Now they are pretty close to being completely victorious,
trollhattan
Yeesh.
Heard in a discussion of Covid among medical experts yesterday that somebody with Covid in the ICU can lose up to 1 kilogram of muscle mass/day. Boggling.
cope
@trollhattan: I read all of them in the depths of quarantine. As put forth by Perlstein, it all seems very clear and deliberate, our path to now.
Chetan Murthy
@Frank Wilhoit:
Someone once wrote that there were a ton of “normies” during the Vietnam War, who didn’t support the protests, and spent their time drinking, smoking good weed, and trying to rape girls. That, in short, a lot of hippies weren’t progressive at all, just growing their hair out b/c it was the fashion. And lots didn’t even do that. Maybe that’s who ended up as Fox News viewers. I mean, I came of age with RaYgUn, and it was traumatizing, led to me being progressive my entire life. But clearly that’s not a life-arc shared with most of my generation.
Baud
@trollhattan:
Waste of a good liver.
brendancalling
Don’t get me started on angry.
The delta variant practically guarantees that the August 9 border opening isn’t happening, and I won’t see my kid for another year.
I just signed on for another year in wretched Vermont because the border was coming down. I can’t do another year like this here. I will have to break my lease, because this place is so depressing, lonesome, and awful during the winter.
Im so fucking angry—and yes, especially at FOX because they have promoted covid denial and anti-vaccine disinformation. Frankly, I want to see Jeanine Pirro, Fucker Shitstain, and Klannity entubated.
brendancalling
@trollhattan: that guy is also a pedophile, who assaulted girls when he was a HS basketball coach. He doesn’t deserve to even be alive.
Professor Bigfoot
Somehow there’s never a connection between these spikes of white paranoia and any gains by Black people… but it’s there, every time.
CaseyL
It isn’t that another entity will fill Fox’s slot if Fox goes away. Fox has perfected and weaponized agitprop. I’ve heard so many stories of people, usually middle aged or older, who were normal, happy people until they started watching Fox all the time. It turned them into angry paranoid hateful monsters.
Possibly the theoretical other entity would simply hire the Foxlings who hammer and hone how the message is propagated, but even a few months of No-Fox might bring a lot of people back from the shadowlands they currently inhabit.
Chetan Murthy
@CaseyL: I think Kevin knows all this. He’s not pointing at the literal corporate entity that is Fox News, but rather the people, methods, and contracts/relationships, that constitute Fox News. It is -that-, that needs to be destroyed, for us to survive as a country.
JaySinWa
@Baud: We can a least hope that his new liver will sustain him in trying to save other’s lives and help prevent some of the collateral damage anti-vaxxers are strewing in their wake.
bbleh
@trollhattan: @Suzanne: Having made this same point many times at KD’s site, I absolutely concur that Fox exploited a long-developed and already very ripe market, and that others would at least TRY to pick up the pieces if somehow they vanished from the Earth, but there is a feedback effect: Fox exploits the resentments and beliefs and narratives of its audience, but it also feeds and reinforces them.
I think KD’s point is that if Fox were weakened or destroyed, that loop also would be weakened, and so would the firmness and energy of the underlying beliefs. IOW, it’s not just a “believe” or “don’t believe”; it’s a matter of degree, and Fox is THE main amplifier. Weaken it, and the whole structure is weakened.
All of which is very nice diagnosis and prescription, but HOW exactly this is to be accomplished is still an open question…
billcinsd
For the past 20 years the fight between liberals and conservatives has been razor close
Has it been razor close? Maybe electorally since the Dems have to win by like 3% to achieve electoral victory, but by total votes the Dems are the usual relatively easy choice
Suzanne
@CaseyL:
I kinda think of it like I think of soap. Washing your hands with (regular, not antibacterial) soap doesn’t actually kill bacteria, but the friction from rubbing your hands together and the soap lipids break up the bacterial colony so it can’t spread. It’s more dangerous when it’s organized. Fox News “organized” a lot of existing bad feelings of hostility, fear, and unfairness into a political story.
trollhattan
@bbleh:
A read through the list of Newscorp properties is a sobering experience. Rupert own so very, very, very many papers, stations, networks…more than even he could name.
Breaking that thing up would be helpful, regardless of who ended up with the various bits.
TeezySkeezy
@bbleh:
This was very insightful. Marketing and propaganda exist for reason, and have for a long time. Weird not to give them any credit for present circumstances.
PaulB
For me, my dislike of the Republican Party’s direction really began with the 1992 George H. W. Bush nominating convention. Specifically, I was profoundly disturbed by the speeches from Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson. And even more disturbed that nobody from the Republican Party was disavowing those speeches. It’s been downhill ever since and I have seen no sign that they have reached, or will reach, the bottom.
You can trace this back even further to Barry Goldwater, to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” to George Wallace, to the Moral Majority, to Rush Limbaugh, to Newt Gingrich, and to quite a few other touchpoints along the way.
In other words, I don’t really buy Kevin’s thesis.
Gvg
@bbleh: breaking that cable special deal for fox so that it is always in your package and we always pay fox would probably help.
Cable cutting may break that cycle. YouTube and Facebook would be the follow up problem.
Another Scott
(Haven’t read the Drum piece.)
Fox News is a corporation (owned by Fox Corporation which claimed nearly $1B in losses in 2020). Corporate laws are human constructs and can be changed. “Corporations are People” and “Money is Speech” are not laws of physics, either. We can change the emphasis away from accumulated capital to “promoting the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity”…
We’re not doomed.
Politics has gone in cycles in the past, and the fascists often gain more power after economic upheavals. But we can fight them off.
Corporate governance can be made accountable. The Murdoch’s family trust owns 39.6% of the voting shares in Fox Corp. What about the other 60%? Where are the owners demanding changes in the management and operations? When other bad actors have as much power as Fox News, we can go after them too.
As Asimov’s famous quote reminds us, Americans have always had a streak of wanting to stick it to people who actually know what they’re talking about. What’s different now is that a major political party realizes that their core beliefs are never going to be popular with the majority again, so they can only retain power by easily and cheaply riling up the modern know-nothings via Fox News and the other Murdoch properties and by breaking our democracy. We can and should fight back by looking at the systems that they’ve built to get where they are today, and reforming or dismantling them as appropriate.
How?
Beats me.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@TeezySkeezy: It’s not about “not giving them credit”, it’s more about acknowledging that the racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, etc that underlies the “deep story” that Fox’s viewers continue to swim in existed before Fox and will continue after.
I agree that Fox News sucks and that if it went into the dustbin of history, that would be a good thing. I just think Drum was a bit facile here.
I mean, I’m more pissed at the right wing than I was in, say, 2004, and I wasn’t reading Balloon Juice in 2004, but Balloon Juice didn’t make me angrier. The right wing being even worse made me angrier.
Geminid
There has always been a strain of intolerant know-nothingism in the Republican party. In 1860, the American (“Know Nothing”) Party dissolved, and it’s large northern component joined the new Republican Party. Anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-labor, and isolationist, this side of the party has retarded American progress since 1876. In the 1950’s, they called themselves Taft Republicans. Dean Acheson, Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, called them “The Primitives.”
This wing achieved dominance over the Eisenhower/Ford side of the Republican party through the Southern political realignment of the 1970’s and 80’s, precipitated by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The Primitives locked arms with the Klan, and now this unholy alliance calls the shots in the party.
Martin
So, I linked to this the other day, and will do so again.
It’s a youtube video, an hour long, but very good. Don’t let the title put you off, watch it through – it’s not really about what the title says.
The general thesis is that people are scared and overwhelmed with the changes to society and the challenges we face. So much so that some people (not always conservatives) try to ‘unlearn’ the complexity of the world and substitute a simpler version. QAnon might seem bewilderingly complex, but it’s actually quite simple – everything is the fault of liberals. Covid, Trump losing the election, transgender rights, climate change, cops shooting innocent people, the decline of faith in the US – all of it. And so the things that people are most afraid of, most overwhelmed with manifest in specific conspiracy theories. The reason why Democrats aren’t succumbing to this in the same way is that we are facing fewer problems. We’re winning the culture war. We’re winning the policy war. We have more emotional bandwidth to deal with Covid and climate change and systemic racism.
It’s not that they don’t believe in science, it’s that they don’t have the emotional capacity to face up to what science is telling us. And I get that. I *really* get that. Now, the fact that the GOP and conservative media are exploiting that is what drives it up to a crisis point.
dr. bloor
@Baud: I’d be interested in seeing the written protocols they use for organ assignment.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Think about the KKK. It was strong without TV. Did it build that because of radio? Did it build that because of word of mouth? Were you questioning the scenes in The Blues Brothers (which came out 41 yrs ago) of the Illinois Nazi’s?
Faux news dressed up the concepts of very conservative politics, which has been around way before the founding of this country. The constant broadcasting of those concepts is intended to structuralize the mental gymnastics required to be a massive racist in modern society. It has given a modern outlet to the concept that life would be better if only…….. something, something, somebody is robbing you of what you think you deserve – IOW modernizing centuries old racism.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Absolutely this.
The nuts and bolts were already there, faux news is the dressed up power tool to replace the previous hand tools used for the job prior.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Overwhelm them?
Gvg above you has one of the answers. How many are paying for something they specifically do not want – faux news. Take that buying power away from them and see how those loses mount up.
Suzanne
@Ruckus: It underscores for me how important narratives are to our understanding of the world. And in some ways, they’re totally false. One likely pretty accurate way of looking at life is that stuff happens, then some other stuff happens, then more stuff happens, then we die, which is just more stuff happening. And most of it isn’t linked together. It just happens, and the most accurate accounting of it would be a catalog, but that’s not how we conceive of things.
You can work hard and not get rich, but that’s not the narrative. You can eat healthful food and exercise and still die young, but that isn’t the narrative. I haven’t yet watched the video Martin linked to, but I suspect that it notes that we simple humans cling to narrative/causation because it is simple and understandable, and because it appeals to a sense of justice to want to see good outcomes for good inputs.
The Fox masterminds are really good at exploiting this.
Kay
@Martin:
I agree. The grasping for control – control of something, anything- is pathetic to me sometimes. “I WILL NOT allow my child to wear a mask in school”. Okay, you won that (dumb) round- feel better? No, of course not, because it wasn’t really what you were worried about.
My youngest thinks some of the covid insanity is being driven by people recognizing – seeing– the effects of climate change and just slotting covid into that “I’m terrified” slot. Like a proxy fear for the Fear That is So Big it Cannot be Mentioned.
The best single word description of the Trump supporters that I encounter (and I encounter a lot of them) is “brittle”. They are people who cannot acclimate or adjust and they are going to have to. They’ll break.
frosty
@Frank Wilhoit:
Sorry, no, today’s Fox viewers aren’t the hippies. They’re the hardhats and their sons and daughters. Looking at my HS classmates I know who the hippies were and who the Fox viewers are now and there’s no overlap.
lashonharangue
@Suzanne: Narratives (especially conspiracy narratives) mean events are explainable. Randomness is scary in part because it implies powerlessness. Even if things are bad, people will be less anxious if there is an explanation of why they are are bad (hardly matters if the explanation is bs).
Suzanne
@Kay:
Darwin said something about those who could not adapt to change.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Yes.
Like any good propaganda outlet, one has to be good at propagandizing the “company line” in order to sell the concept at hand. As the (controlling) owners of faux news are massive racists, it would seem that they might be good at selling racism. Murdoch and family has a lot of practice at selling all the conservative bullshit in many parts of the world. They have made a lot of money doing exactly that. May we wish that their visit to bankruptcy court happens soon and doesn’t end well for them.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: I think your youngest is pretty astute.
Ruckus
@Kay:
A very good point, that they will break. They can’t understand a world that doesn’t meet their expectations. Because their expectations are unrealistic and exclude a large part of the population, and that is pretty unacceptable to an ever increasing segment of the population. That they are being told that the only way to fix things is to revolt against all that they perceive to be an antithesis of them and their beliefs.
Redshift
@frosty: Yeah, it doesn’t map so easily for younger people, but at the time I got involved in politics (meaning early 2000s, not eighties), Vietnam was still frequently referenced, and the easiest predictor of whether someone was liberal or conservative was whether they thought the heroes of that era were the antiwar protesters or the cops.
CaseyL
@Kay: I agree with your youngest. I think climate change is one of those things the RW cannot talk about at all, but it lurks in the backs of their minds.
I also believe (and have said) that one reason the MOTU are frantically accumulating money is in preparation for being able to construct strongholds for themselves against climate change – and against the masses of people outside of their strongholds.
Redshift
@debbie:
Yeah, but that’s not cause and effect. Evangelicals didn’t really care about abortion before Roe v. Wade or spontaneously react against it, Falwell and his ilk wanted political power and seized on it as an issue they could use to manufacture outrage.
Kay
@Ruckus:
I think their expectations are inchoate and they would be less fearful if they put some thought into what, exactly, they are afraid of or what they except to lose. That’s why we get this transfer- the screaming about masks or the imaginary CRT indoctrination in the 4th grade social studies textbook – everything feels out of control to them. At least then we’d have the commonality of worrying about the same big things.
Kay
@CaseyL:
I like to look at property and I subscribe to this Canadian property company- they send me alerts on parcels I supposedly am going to buy- and someone is driving up prices. Wouldn’t it be wild if Canada was just perfectly positioned to Rule The World? :)
soapdish
@trollhattan: Hard to feel bad for the guy; it wasn’t an issue until he got sick. Fuck him.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Martin: add the jocks who resent Triumph of the Nerds with the Information Age were being a mindless jock went from hero to luzer and the Evangelicals need for god being their personal best friend and, hey that’s were we are today.
Kent
I have a couple of uncles who fit this description exactly. Went through the late 60s and early 70s with long hair, lots of motorcycles, lots of drugs and rock and roll and screwing around. Probably did some dealing. Went redneck and right wing as they got older and turned into gun nuts. Any progressive-ism they had when young was most likely only about getting laid.
Kent
The Southern Baptist Church was actually officially pro choice up until the mid-1970s. Seriously. For real.
Suzanne
@Kay: They’re worried about the end of their lifestyle. They’re worried that, if climate change is real, they won’t be able to drive their dick-substitute trucks anymore. Or eat three hamburgers a day. Or live in some tacky-ass exurban McMansion with a giant, water-sucking lawn forty miles outside a city. They’re also not thrilled about being wrong, and nerds who drive Priuses (Pri-i?) being right.
joel hanes
Today’s Fox audience were the hippies
With the respect due to a far more insightful commenter than I have ever been: *some* of the hippies became today’s Fox audience. I know some of them, and you’re correct about them.
Other hippies became died-in-the-wool Democratic voters and organizers, liberals, though they’re getting old enough that they’re less active. I know some of them, too: Tuesday I’m having dinner with two of them — old Berkeley veterans, now restoring prairie in northern Iowa, working climate change politics, and dandling grandchildren.
joel hanes
@Suzanne:
Washing your hands with (regular, not antibacterial) soap doesn’t actually kill bacteria
Um.
The cell membrane of many pathogenic bacteria is simply a lipid bilayer.
Soap disrupts lipid bilayers. A good soaping literally dissolves the barrier between the inside of these bacteria and the rest of the world, and their cell contents merge into the general lather.
JoyceH
@CaseyL:
I agree with you. I think if Fox News suddenly vanished, or became a CNN clone, it would make a real difference. It’s not that there are no other outlets singing the same tune, but Fox is the easiest. It’s the one a retiree might channel surf across one day when a debate is going on about a topic of interest to him, start watching and get sucked in. Remove Fox, and some of those viewers will be motivated to seek out Newsmax or OAN or whatever – but some will not.
An analogy is what happened with suicide and gas ovens. There was a time when the most common method to commit suicide was simple to stick your head in the oven. You could turn on the gas and not light the burner, and the gas would just fill the room, you’d fall asleep peacefully and never wake up.
So that method was regulated away. Pilot lights ensured that you couldn’t turn the gas on without lighting the burner. Well, the critics might say, there are plenty of other ways to kill yourself, so this regulation won’t make any difference.
But it did. Not only did suicide by gas become eliminated as the new ovens replaced the old ones, but the overall suicide rate went down. There were still other methods – drugs and knives and guns and leaping from a height. But all the other methods were either painful or difficult or scary. And quite a few people who might have stuck their head in the oven put off the decision until they decided they might as well live.
So – eliminate the easiest path to the toxic outcome, and plenty of people won’t seek out the harder paths.
Suzanne
@joel hanes: I am by no means an expert here, and I was trying to make an analong, but many sources tell me that soap doesn’t kill anything…. It just un sticks the bacteria from your hands and rinses it down the drain.
the pollyanna from hell
@Suzanne: You are both right for certain numbers of bacteria. Time and repeated soaping can substitute for a certain amount of designed germicidal action.
Lye was one of the components in the first invention of soap.
joel hanes
@Suzanne:
Your sources are not microbiologists.
Neither am I, but I lived with one for a time.
The NYT is not authoritative on science matters, but its piece on this agrees with what I have been told by actual scientists:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/health/soap-coronavirus-handwashing-germs.html
There are many pathogens that soap does not disrupt in this way, but IIRC both staph and strep are killed by ordinary soap. Coronavirus _certainly_ is a pathogen that soap kills; not all viruses have a fatty shell, but coronaviruses do.
Early in the pandemic, a microbiologist posted this song to sing while handwashing [to the tune of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer]
Sing it twice while soaped to ensure you’re killing the virus.
satby
@Suzanne: You’re incorrect. All soaps act as antibacterials, you don’t need “antibacterial soap” to kill bacteria. And some of the chemicals used have estrogenic effects in water, which is has a cascading bad effect on wildlife.*
Also, I read the Drum piece when it came out, and many of the commenters here assumed that AL’s excerpt is the entire article. He traces a lot of the history of right wing evolution in the article that you criticize him as missing.
*I have to repeat this at least twice a year. And there is no lye remaining in properly made finished soap.
satby
@joel hanes: FYI, I linked to guidance from the FDA from 2019, which they also always repeat every few years.
Don Quijote
@debbie:
Nope, it became entrenched after the Civil rights law of 1965.
A substantial part of the white population would rather eat sh*t than give a nickel to an African American. The sh*t sandwich has gotten pretty thick and the bread very thin.
AM in NC
@Frank Wilhoit: I disagree. I’ve seen my college-educated, once-liberal father get completely co-opted by AM talk radio and then Fox News. It was his daily habit to listen to WSB in Atlanta back when it was quiz shows, general info and consumer reporting. As it was bought out and started running Rush and Neil Boortz he just kept listening because it was his habit. Listening to that stream of propaganda every day turned him from someone who voted for Jesse Jackson to someone who voted for Donald Trump. And I have another friend who grew up in a different state who had the exact same thing happen to her father. There’s even a documentary on this phenomenon done by a woman whose father made the same journey. Propaganda works. Did my father have some of this white grievance in him ready to be stoked? Sure. Would he have changed so radically if not for a vast rightwing propaganda machine aimed at him stoking that grievance 24-7? Doubtful. And his story is the story of millions of other fellow citizens. Murdoch has been a cancer on the body politic of every English-speaking country where he has been able to spread his lies and anger-stoking garbage. Rightwing propaganda is a real problem. It makes latent tendencies come to the fore and radicalizes people who otherwise would be regular, mainstream citizens. At least, that’s been my experience, and the experience of other people I personally know.
Bobby Thomson
Back when the doors were about to shut because they had zero advertisers, who was the guy who tossed them a lifeline by agreeing to have them host his town hall?