Tag: bigotry
Dropping Pandemic Denial, Far Right Shifts To Racist  Xenophobia

Dropping Pandemic Denial, Far Right Shifts To Racist Xenophobia

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

With Americans settling into social distancing and self-quarantines and the economy grinding to a halt, right-wing media can no longer deny concerns about the coronavirus pandemic as a “hoax” pushed by critics of President Donald Trump. Coverage of the crisis from Fox News and other right-wing media outlets is now settling into familiar territory: racism, xenophobia, and nationalism. We can expect more of it all as the pandemic worsens.

This pivot first manifested with right-wing media (and Trump) insisting on calling the novel coronavirus COVID-19 by racist names such as the “Chinese virus” or the “Wuhan virus.”

According to some right-wing media figures, anyone who pointed out what was going on were actually the ones obsessed with semantics in the middle of public health crisis:

Soon, it was too passive to just call it the “China virus.” The next tactic, a step removed from conspiracy theories about a supposed bioweapons lab, was claiming that China “unleashed” it upon the world.

As more reporting laid bare the failures of the Trump administration to adequately respond to this crisis, it was soon time to escalate even more: Soon, Trump critics were the ones allegedly doing the bidding of China:

Trump himself also repeated this talking point on March 19, with encouragement from pro-Trump cable news network OAN.

While this is all going on, right-wing media were also taking a victory lap to claim that their racist border and immigration policies were wise all along. From Fox’s Tomi Lahren: “[We] have long been criticized and labeled everything from xenophobic to racist and bigoted, but now, a few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, turns out we may have been on to something. You think?”

In addition to claiming a perverse policy victory from emergency travel restrictions, right-wing media are also using the pandemic to warn against “resettling refugees in your neighborhood” and “dropping outsiders, foreign nationals into their communities.”

As awful as this is, it’s not going to stop without outside pressure. Bigotry is what binds the Trump coalition together, and anyone who has a problem with it jumped ship a long time ago. The ones that are left — particularly on Fox News, right up to Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch themselves — know that bigotry is always the go-to play, even when there’s a body count.

We’re already seeing anti-Asian violence on the rise. And like an iceberg, the worst impacts of bigotry from right-wing media are below the surface.

At the same time, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer points out, what conservative media figures want most of all is to distract from the colossal failings of the Trump administration and to make the national conversation about accusations of racism and a supposed backlash to political correctness.

So mainstream media should be aggressive calling this strategy out for what it is: Rank bigotry which disregards anti-Asian violence and seeks to support anti-immigrant policies. But it is also a transparent attempt to ignore how right-wing media’s hero grossly botched the response to a pandemic — and how many people will now die because of it.

Danziger: Their ‘Hispanics’

Danziger: Their ‘Hispanics’

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.

Fox News Promotes White Nationalism With Murdoch Backing

Fox News Promotes White Nationalism With Murdoch Backing

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters

Fox News has traditionally treated bigotry as a core part of its business model. But since the political rise of President Donald Trump, the network’s commentators have adopted talking points that had previously been the province of hardcore white supremacists. The reported manifesto of the gunman who murdered 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, TX, on Saturday is all but indistinguishable from transcripts ripped from its prime-time shows. This shift is not an accident but a programming decision, one the network has pursued even as its hosts’ racist rhetoric has triggered costly ad boycotts.

Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch are ultimately responsible for this toxic programming. Rupert, chairman of parent company Fox Corp., laid the foundation for the shift. He then ceded much of the day-to-day authority to Lachlan, who maintained that heading as the Fox Corp.’s executive chairman and CEO.

Fox is feeding its audience a poisonous stew of bigoted, xenophobic conspiracy theories because that is what the Murdochs want the network to do.

A New York Times Magazine investigation found that in recent years, the Murdochs’ media empire has been “instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet,” with their outlets fueling xenophobia and ethnonationalism to achieve political aims in the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia.

In the United States, that meant taking advantage of a rare opportunity to reshape Fox News following the removal of network co-founder Roger Ailes and the swift departures of longtime network hosts Bill O’ReillyGreta Van Susteren, and Megyn Kelly.

Stepping in as acting CEO to replace Ailes, Rupert responded to the vacancies by giving Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham their own prime-time shows.

Carlson, a Rupert favorite, had already amassed a staunch following among white nationalists for his denunciations of diversity and fervent airing of white grievances.

Ingraham had also fixated on the perils of immigration and multiculturalism, using her platforms as a talk radio host and Fox contributor to push the Republican Party to the right on those issues.

As prime-time hosts, Carlson and Ingraham turned their shows into clearinghouses for white supremacist talking points about an “invasion” of migrants, screeds about the systematic “replacement” of white Americans by people of color through immigration, and dire warnings that if something wasn’t done soon, the nation would be imperiled.

In short, Rupert thrust two of the network’s most anti-immigrant personalities into its biggest spotlight and they’ve performed as expected, moving the network closer to Lachlan’s reported goal of solidifying the family’s empire as “an unabashedly nationalist, far-right and hugely profitable political propaganda machine.”

The result has been programming that courts high viewership from Fox’s core audience but also repeatedly led major companies to pull their ads rather than risk associating their brands with bigotry.

Lachlan has been the public face of the company, defending Fox amid criticism from other journalists and advertiser boycotts.

Ingraham’s show drew controversy and bled advertisers throughout 2018, particularly after she tweetedan attack on Parkland, FL, school shooting survivor David Hogg, compared detention centers for immigrant children to “summer camps,” and warned that thanks to immigration, “massive demographic changes have been foisted upon the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don’t like.”

Asked about the criticism the network was taking during a November appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook conference, Lachlan claimed that the “biggest critics of Fox News are not watching Fox News” and argued that people should be more tolerant of the opinions of the networks’ hosts.

Just a month later, Carlson embroiled the network in a firestorm after he argued that immigration makes the United States “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided.” When the dust had settled, two dozen companies had pulled future spots on his show and its ad load was slashed.

The cycle repeated itself earlier this year.

In March, as Fox prepared for an unprecedented early sit-down with ad buyers, controversies involving bigoted comments by Carlson and fellow Fox host Jeanine Pirro brought more devastating headlines and fleeing advertisers.

Two months later, Lachlan again defended the company, telling Wall Street analysts that the ad boycotts were having no effect and that even if they did, “it wouldn’t affect the way we program that channel.”

And now there’s a national debate over how Fox’s inflammatory programming was echoed in a white supremacist terrorist’s manifesto — one that has triggered not internal reflection at the network, but a circling of the wagons. Earlier this week, Carlson delivered another defensive rant on his show, asserting that the idea that white supremacy is a problem in America is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy theory used to divide the country.”  The Murdochs stayed silent.

The Murdochs appear to have been every bit as supportive of their hosts’ bigoted commentary in private as they are in public. After Carlson drew criticism for claiming that immigrants make this country “dirtier,” Lachlan reportedly sent him “personal text messages of support.” Rupert reportedly criticized Ingraham last year — for apologizing for her comments about Hogg, which he thought made her appear “weak in the face of negative public sentiment.”

So the Murdochs are the reason Fox’s weeknight prime-time block features segments that are distinguishable from white supremacist YouTube videos only in their production values. The harder question to answer is why. The family has built an international media empire that wields substantial political power on three continents.

Are they actual nationalists who truly agree with Carlson and Ingraham that an invading force of minorities is putting the nation at risk? Or are they simply motivated by instrumentalism, happy to have their employees make those arguments because it bolsters their influence over right-wing governments which then support policies that bolster their own economic standing?

In the end, it hardly matters: Fox has spent the last few years diving ever deeper into a cesspool, and there’s no sign the network plans to change course.

The Irish Were Once Despised Refugees On These Shores, Too

The Irish Were Once Despised Refugees On These Shores, Too

Long ago and far away, I sometimes joked that I only look white: actually, I’m Irish. These days, people have no idea what you’re talking about. Courtesy of Ancestry.com, I’ve since learned that all the family stories are true: all eight of my great-grandparents were born in Ireland. Mayo and Cork, for the most part, counties where rebellion against centuries of English oppression ran strong.

As a lad, I was taught that being Irish took precedence over being American. There was a mandatory “Irish” view on damn near everything—although family members argued fiercely about what it was.

Often it was the women against the men. My father had friends of every ethnicity that he’d made in the Army and playing ball. “You’re no better than anybody else,” he’d often say. “And nobody’s better than you.”

My mother mistrusted anybody who wasn’t blood kin.

I thought that was nuts by third grade.

Anyway, what with Irish-surnamed lunkheads helping Trump spread his bigotry far and wide, it seems appropriate to remind people that from the 17th century onward, every racial slur that was ever used to describe black slaves was first applied to the native Irish.

Micks were routinely described as donkey strong, but stupid. They were good at music, dancing and prizefighting, but congenitally lazy and unreliable. The Irish were sexually promiscuous, dirty, foul-smelling drunks.

Irish satirist Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Proposal” remains a searing indictment of the colonialist mentality—as shocking now as then. Might impoverished asylum-seekers whose children are caged along the U.S.-Mexican border, for example, not turn a nice profit by offering them as a delicacy for rich men’s tables? “I rather recommend buying the children alive,” Swift wrote with savage irony “and dressing them hot from the knife, as we do roasting pigs.”

During the Irish Potato Famine from 1845 to 1850, more than a million of the native Irish died of starvation even as the island exported food to England. A million more emigrated, many on the aptly named “coffin ships” vividly described in Joseph O’Connor’s brilliant novel “Star of the Sea.” (The author is singer Sinead O’Connor’s older brother.) Not long ago, Canadian authorities recovered the bones of half-starved Irish children who died in an 1847 shipwreck on the Gaspe Peninsula.

And how did Americans react to the Irish diaspora? Pretty much the same way Trump supporters are reacting to Spanish-speaking asylum seekers on our southern border. The anti-immigrant party of the 1850s called itself the “Know-Nothings.” In 1855, Abraham Lincoln wrote a friend about them:

“I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

He could have written it last week.

Alas, we can’t urge Trump to go back where his family came from, because his big flapping mouth might land him in prison. Having had their fill of it under Adolph Hitler, the Germans have criminalized what they call “Volksverhetzung,” or “incitement of the people.”

In Germany, it’s illegal to urge “hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups…or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them.”

The penalty is three months to five years.

I much prefer First Amendment free speech protections, but you can’t say the Germans don’t know where these things can lead. The law has mainly been used to prosecute Holocaust deniers. Several European countries (Ireland included) have similar laws, although they are rarely invoked.

So anyway, that’s where I’m coming from as a direct descendant of refugees. What we have here is a perfect storm of Trumpism, equal parts ignorance and bigotry. Only Trump, (born in Queens) could tell Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (born in The Bronx) to go back where she came from.

Sure, Ocasio-Cortez asked for trouble with her childish “women of color” gibe at Nancy Pelosi, of all people.

But if he has no idea what he’s talking about, Trump absolutely knows what he’s doing. No more pussy-footing. The 2020 presidential campaign is going to be the ugliest race-based, free-for-all any of us has ever seen.

And if it works, you can bend over and kiss America goodbye.