EVEN FOX NEWS HAS A BREAKING POINT

 

It took paying out a settlement for $787 million dollars and a host of damaging private messages, but Fox News finally did the right thing and fired their most popular TV host, Tucker Carlson.  While there are any number of good reasons why Carlson should have been fired in the past few years, from his racist, xenophobic comments (he once said that immigrants make America "dirtier") to his crazy, seemingly contradictory conspiracy theories (he recently edited footage of the January 6th riot to make it look the protestors were peaceful, this after previously implying that the whole thing was a false flag operation by the FBI!), to one of his top writers being fired for posting racist, sexist and homophobic comments  for years online under a pseudonym, Carlson clearly played up to white supremacist ideas without actually endorsing white supremacist groups, who got the message and flocked to his show.

He's not the first Fox News on air personality to be suddenly fired; Bill O'Reilly, who, like Carlson, was the host on the network with the highest ratings, was forced out in 2017 because of a large payment made by the network to women he had sexually harassed.  Glenn Beck, another popular host, was let go in 2015 after he called then President Barack Obama a "racist" and once joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi.  

Still, Carlson's firing was sudden, given that he wasn't even given a chance to say goodbye on his show.  Now I wish that his firing was in reaction to his horrible comments, or the allegedly misogynistic  work environment that fostered on the show, but it really sounds like the breaking point was that, during the recent legal case that Fox was in with the Dominion voting machine company, private messages of Carlson's were revealed to his bosses that showed a lack of respect for Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch and other network leaders.  Carlson clearly thought that, as the number one host on the network, he could express negative views about his bosses to his coworkers without risk.  Obviously, he was wrong.  I think his mistake was assuming that conservative audiences cared more about personalities than content.   Carlson was the number one host on Fox News because he was the one who pushed his hateful rhetoric to the brink of acceptability. (The New York Times ran a heavily researched study of his show in April of 2022 that revealed that many of his stories got their start in white supremacist chat rooms).  Who he was didn't really matter to the viewers, it was what he said.

Now while I would love nothing more than for Fox News to change its tone and do more actual reporting and less crazy commentary about the dangers of "woke" M and M's, I'm not getting my hopes up.  Yes, I'm happy that Carlson got the boot, just as I was happy when O'Reilly and Beck did too, but did those two earlier firings change the nature of Fox News?  No.  The simple truth of right wing media is that there will always be someone who will tell their mostly white, mostly old and mostly male audience what they want to hear along with conspiracy theories and ideas that will make them mad, even when those ideas don't make sense.  (A right wing relative of mine once assured me that the Green New Deal would have banned airplanes!).  In other words, Carlson may be gone, but the sexism, bigotry, homophobia and xenophobia he spewed can always be spewed by somebody else.

Hating the One Percent

“Gender-affirming care is medically-necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people.”-The American Medical Association

 It was one of the more defining moments of Trump's 2016 campaign: during a question and answer period with an audience, one middle aged white man stood up and said that "we have a problem in this country called Muslims", he then accused then President Barack Obama of being one, and then went even further by saying that there are "training camps growing, where they want to kill us."  In typical Trump fashion, he failed to correct the man about his crazed conspiratorial beliefs, and instead remarked  that "A lot of people are saying that."  While his inability to correct this man was deplorable, why was he asking such an extreme question in the first place?  

Because during  Obama's presidency, the right wing media, building on beliefs that the president himself was a Muslim, began spreading lies about how Muslim Americans were going to impose Muslim Sharia law in the US.  These fears were fanned by the conservative think tank the Center for Security Policy, which promoted lies about Muslims "infiltrating" the US government and imposing their beliefs on the rest of us.  

The was, not surprisingly, based on an  argument that clearly misunderstood what  Sharia law is (as New York Times investigative reporter Andrea Elliott put it in a 2011 interview, "One of the key points that is missing in this debate is that for Muslims living in non-Muslim countries like the United States, there is a broad agreement that Shariah requires them to abide by the laws of the land in exchange for the right to worship freely."),  but none of that mattered.  Sharia law was a scary sounding term that could whip up the conservative base into a frenzy when it was repeated on right wing media outlets and that's what happened.

The result of that frenzy was a spate of anti Sharia laws that, by 2014, were passed in Alabama, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota and Tennessee.  Along with that fact that there were no Muslim officials ready to go on the record as saying that America must abide by Sharia law, there was another ridiculous part of this whole thing: Muslims only make up one percent of the country.  The idea that somehow one percent of the country is going to pass laws that the other ninety nine percent don't want is, of course, absurd, but then fear is often irrational.  

Having dealt with that "threat", the right wing media recently turned their gaze to a new enemy: trans people.  It's hard to say exactly when conservatives decided to single out trans people, but demonizing them has become the new animating force on the right. And once again, the fear of trans people "taking over" has been absurdly exaggerated, with trans people only making up around one percent of the population. More importantly, polls have shown that the vast majority of trans people are glad to have transitioned despite all the hatred and discrimination coming their way.  They are, simply, just trying to live their best lives. 

And while things like puberty blockers may be new, the concept of people not falling into societal gender norms is thousands of years old; as rabbi Elliot Kukla pointed out in a recent New York Times editorial, ancient  writings in Judaism spoke of four different genders.  While in the modern world, The American Academy of Family Physicians  states that it "recognizes that diversity in gender identity and expression is a normal part of the human existence and does not represent pathology. The AAFP supports access to gender-affirming care for gender-diverse patients, including children and adolescents."

 While those anti Sharia state laws from the last decade were terrible, they were also purely symbolic; taking a stand against something that didn't even exist as a way to score political points.  The current anti Trans bills however, which have been passed in 10 states recently, are hurting real people.  Often, the same Republicans who cry for parent's rights when it comes to banning books in schools, are all for taking away the rights of parents who support their children's desire to use puberty blockers and other gender affirming care.  Sadly, this is in a community where suicide rates are higher than normal.

The crucial element in the success of this fear mongering is that the right wing media and politicians are spreading fear of groups of people that most Americans have never met.  Put simply, it's easy to demonize people that you don't know.  And most people (especially people  in rural areas) have never met a Muslim or trans person.  So when right wing media figures spread hatred of them, it's sadly easy for them to believe it.

While most polls show most Americans support equal rights for trans people, and that, along with the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association  also support gender affirming care,  but this issue excites the Republican base.   And that goes double for  Fundamentalist Christians who are still smarting from losing on gay marriage 8 years ago, and that  means that it will not go away as a political issue any time soon. Unfortunately , it appears that the spinning wheel of conservative hatred is now set on trans people, and it will stay there until there is another one percent of the population for to spread hatred of.