The Shadow War On Religion Is Over.

And we were so close, too.

For the last few decades or so, we've waged our war against the religious institutions of the United States of America.  We have struck from the shadows.  We have meticulously chipped away at the foundations of Christianity at every level of the government.  Victory was all but assured.

But then we slipped up.  President Obama - our figurehead, our face - tried to force religious institutions to offer free contraception to women under their health insurance plans.  And now... now those institutions are on to us.  They now know about the war that we have waged for so long.

My friends.  It is over.

We cannot stand tall and fight back against the journalistic integrity and research that the Fox News machine has to offer.  We cannot fight against honest men like Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, the Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and Roger Ailes.  The former even called us out, saying:

"And I frankly don't care what kind of deal he tries to cut.  This is a man who is deeply committed - if he wins reelection, he will wage war on the Catholic Church the morning after he's reelected."

Roger Ailes And His Propaganda Machine.

There is an art to persuading people these days.  In a time when technology is advancing with each passing hour, only one man has been able to reach into millions of homes and turn fiction into fact with the same ease as he freezes water into ice: Roger Ailes.

While most know him as the creator and "Chairman" of Fox News, Ailes has a disturbing history of right-wing extremism and paranoia.  He was always drawn to television, even as a little boy, and rose quickly to the rank of executive producer on The Mike Douglas Show by the age of 25.  His big break came in 1967 when he met former Vice-President Richard Nixon backstage of the show, telling Nixon that "the camera doesn't like you."  Nixon responded, "It's a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected."  Ailes was passionate about TV, and shot back, "Television is not a gimmick.  And if you think it is, you'll lose again."  It was at that moment that Roger Ailes became Nixon's executive producer of television, in charge of recreating the man's image in order to appeal to voters.

During Nixon's campaign, Ailes began to blur the line between journalism and politics.  Ailes knew that Nixon was a disaster on television.  He also believed that the media was anti-Republican.  So, he decided to go for the throat, as it were, and circumvent the press - go straight to the people.  By forcing reporters to watch the events of, say, a "town hall meeting" backstage, Ailes had found a way to subtly reduce the freedom of the press to a mere privilege.  Nixon was able to answer to voters with staged questions instead of on-the-fly "gotcha" questions from the media.