Fox’s turn to advocating right-wing vigilantism
Amid a quasi-fascist rant Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson responded to murder charges against a pro-Trump teenager who crossed state lines and shot to death two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, by asking, “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?” Several other Fox personalities have similarly downplayed or seemingly excused the deadly Tuesday night confrontation.
Carlson says it:
Fox’s turn toward advocating violent right-wing vigilantism is a horrifying but natural evolution for the network. Its personalities have spent the last several months recklessly issuing dire warnings to their viewers, telling them that their lives are in jeopardy from racial justice protesters and that the Democratic leaders of cities facing civil unrest are refusing to protect them. This fearmongering has repeatedly inspired President Donald Trump, an avid Fox viewer, to dump more fuel on the fires.
Trump is an avid Fox viewer to the exclusion of everything else. Fox is his only source, his only entertainment, his only daily briefing, his only education, his only “information.” His ignorance is infinite, and all there is other than the void, is Fox.
That’s bad.
Throughout this period, Fox has been laser-focused on finding instances of violence, blaming them on the protesters, and castigating Democratic mayors and governors for failing to stop them. The network has bombarded its viewers — including the president — with images of burning buildings and civil unrest. At times using weeks-old footage and other misinformation tactics, Fox personalities have inflated the scope of the damage to depict a nation on the brink, denouncing the supposed threat posed by “antifa” agitators, Black Lives Matter activists, and statue-toppling vigilantes — even demanding that violent protesters be treated as “domestic terrorists.” And they have sought to use that demagoguery to shore up Trump’s faltering campaign, warning that civilization itself will be on the ballot in November.
…
The president, whose administration is heavily influenced by Carlson’s show, has been watching. He has triggered escalating violence by trying to push Fox’s narratives for his own political benefit, first with angry Fox live tweets lashing out at protesters and the Democratic officeholders he claimed were coddling them, then with a speech at Mount Rushmore attacking “the violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats,” and finally with a “law and order” strategy that went around those officeholders by sending heavily armed federal paramilitaries into an American city.
We’re being governed by the corpse of Rupert Murdoch.
A zombieocracy.
What if black vigilantes had shot white teenagers that were rioting in favor of white nationalism? Carlson – and the rest of Fox “News” – would be clamoring for their heads on a spike.
Less than a surprise. Should be expected. Hardly worth the notice at this point. If he hadn’t said it the idea would be correctly attributed to him.
To be fair, Fox isn’t his only source. He also watches One America News Network when Fox is getting too liberal for his tastes.
Curse you for giving me hope that he had died!
Actually I thought he had. WHY HASN’T HE?
Well, its official name is News Corpse. And what you pay for is what you get.
Yep, Tucker’s a partisan, nativist hack.
So that we avoid the appearance of being partisan hacks ourselves …
The national news coverage of the protests has been ideologically skewed from the beginning. It’s so bad that if you called it propaganda, I would have only the most minor of quibbles.
The recent furor around Kyle Rittenhouse is a perfect example of the way people can look at the same event and have access to the same information and nonetheless come to antithetical conclusions. Those who watch Fox know that the kid was in Kenosha doing what he thought was a moral duty in protecting people against violent rioters. Those who watch CNN and MSNBC know that the kid is a bloodthirsty psychopath who traveled a long way to another state for the chance to kill people of color. And yet, the truth is the truth.
Fox and other right-wing outlets search for the worst, omit the good, and edit the rest to make it look worse. They describe everything regarding the protests as an existential threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
CNN and MSNBC do the reverse. They search for the best, omit the bad, and edit the rest to make it look better. They describe everything regarding the protests as positive and any criticism of them as an existential threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Since there are a bunch of right-wing examples linked in the article, here are left-wing ones:
– That story about diners being harassed and bullied to submit and display their solidarity by raising their fists? It’s a no-show on left-leaning news outlets, even though even I’ve seen stories on it in non-English-language sources from other continents.
– ABC wrote: “Protesters in California set fire to a courthouse, damaged a police station and assaulted officers after a peaceful demonstration intensified.”
– CNN, reporting on the mass arson in Kenosha, used a chyron describing “fiery but mostly peaceful protests”. This has become a meme highlighting the absurdity of the “X but mostly not-X” construction. Example.
– This “mostly/largely peaceful protest” thing has been bloody everywhere for months. It’s also an insipid and insidious bit of rhetoric. It introduces a bad thing and immediately minimizes it, capitalizing on people’s inability to quickly process conflicting information. (This sort of thing leads to fridge logic and JJ Abrams’s career.) Humans tend to default to discarding the part that doesn’t jibe with their preconceptions. So tell someone sympathetic to BLM’s nominal cause that the protests were mostly peaceful, and that will overwhelm any other details you give. “Seven people disemboweled in mostly peaceful protests that ALT-RIGHT FASCISTS say are DESTROYING America.”
How did I get stuck in moderation?
Probably thinking of Roger Ailes and his Fox partisan legacy. He’s in the marble orchard.
Nullius, did a dog bellysurf across your lap while you were typing, causing a rogue ‘e’ to be added to your email address? Because that’s how I recently ended up in moderation.
Catwhisperer, not this time. I was actually logged in, so …
Maybe it was the density of Twitter links.
Yep, lotta links usually does that. 1 a.m. my time so…
I’ll remember that about links for future reference.