January 8, 2021

At Fox News, It’s Always About Scary Threats to White People

Isn't this sweet?SMG via ZUMA

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So here’s how things work on Fox News. This is from Laura Ingraham’s show a few minutes ago.

First, she invites New York state senator George Borello to discuss a bill in the state Assembly that would allow the governor to detain anyone who is “or may be” a public health risk. They both agree this is outrageous. Where’s the due process? If you’re out in the woods and someone reports you for not wearing a mask, can you be unilaterally detained? Where’s the ACLU on all this?

Quick cut, and next up is Chris Rufo, a Fox regular who’s made a name for himself by inveighing against critical race theory. Ingraham feigns an ah-hah moment: you know, she says, New York governor Andrew Cuomo has called systemic racism a public health crisis. So does this mean he could detain anyone he thinks is a racist? Rufo enthusiastically agrees. This is yet another example of liberals inventing a crisis (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic) in order to control the movements and words of ordinary Americans.

Scary stuff, says Ingraham. Please keep on it. We’ll be back after a few words from the MyPillow guy.

Check out what’s going on here. First, there’s no bill in any serious sense of the word. This is something that was introduced years ago during the Ebola scare and has been reintroduced every year since, never even getting out of committee. Cuomo’s spox says he’s never even heard of it.

Ingraham then takes this nonexistent bill and makes it into a race thing. How? It hardly seems possible, but Ingraham manages the pretzel bending by taking something Cuomo once said—namely that high rates of COVID-19 in the Black community show that “racism is a public health crisis”—and absurdly twisting it into the scary possibility that Cuomo might start locking up anyone who tells an off-color joke. In a nutshell, it goes like this:

  1. Introduce scary story about minor state legislation regarding public health that has no chance of ever going anywhere.
  2. Invent out of whole cloth a segue into racism as a public health issue.
  3. Conclude that liberals want to lock up white people they disapprove of.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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