There is no daylight between the violent rhetoric of racist mass killers and the Fox News propaganda network. In 2019, a white supremacist spewed “invasion” rhetoric three times throughout a so-called manifesto before driving hours to El Paso, Texas to target Latinos; 23 were killed, and another 23 were injured. The Fox propaganda network spewed this same rhetoric at an even greater pace than a racist mass murderer, airing false claims “that Texas is facing an ‘invasion’ 20 times in 3 days,” Media Matters for America reports.
“Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s July 5 interview on Fox News’ The Story exemplifies the absurdity of this Fox-supported campaign to legally define people seeking asylum (an authorized form of immigration) as invaders,” the report said. “During the interview, he portrayed immigrant border crossings, and the drug overdose deaths he erroneously linked to them, as if ‘we’re being attacked just as we were on Pearl Harbor.’ (Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack by a foreign military on a military installation, and not remotely comparable.)”
Dan Patrick has pretended to care about the victims of the El Paso mass shooting, but even after knowing that the racist killer used this rhetoric, he’s continued to borrow it. “We are being invaded,” he lied last June, The Texas Tribune reported at the time.
“A Media Matters review of Fox from July 5 through July 7 found 20 claims on the network that Texas was facing an ‘invasion’ of migrants,” this new report said. “Fox & Friends and its early-morning edition, Fox & Friends First, each aired 4 such claims—more than any other show.” Media Matters said that a number of the Fox shows that think of themselves as legitimate news allowed invasion claims from right-wing guests, including the vice president of the Border Patrol’s union.
It was on Fox News programming that the union’s president, active border agent Brandon Judd, spewed racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. In that clip, both Fox News host Bill Hemmer and Judd fumed over the Biden administration’s decision to terminate the Stephen Miller-authored Title 42 order that for more than two years now has effectively stomped on U.S. asylum law. “Sir, why do you think this administration has allowed virtually an open border?” Hemmer asked Judd. If this were remotely true, 53 souls that suffocated in a truck last month would still be here today.
Yet knowing all of the above good and well, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott just issued an illegal order that claims to give state law enforcement the power to detain and return recently crossed migrants to the border. In it is, once again, the “invasion” wording. While a swath of Texas sheriffs have been drooling for Abbott to issue such an order, at least one is calling out Abbott’s order for what it really is. Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar called the right-wing governor’s words “political rhetoric,” and “dead wrong,” the San Antonio Express-News reported. “Characterizing it as an enemy invasion is fearmongering.”
Fox News is also trying to get others killed by targeting the physician who treated a 10-year-old child who was raped. “Doctor-targeting Fox News host Jesse Watters cut his network teeth as a faux-correspondent on Bill O’Reilly’s now-cancelled prime time show; O’Reilly’s most famous contribution to the discourse in all his rancid years was a disinformation campaign against a Kansas abortion provider, repeatedly calling him a “baby killer,” that ended only after an anti-abortion zealot executed that doctor at his church,” Daily Kos’ Hunter notes.