![]() ![]() Why the Internet Is Screaming About Golf Balls Oops! The Supreme Court Heard Another Case Built on Shameless Lies. Panera’s “Lemonade That Kills You” Is Really a Story About Our Broken Country One of the Most Audacious Pranks in History Was Hidden in a Hit TV Show for Years. The evidence for the claim, according to my research, rests on a statement Biden made to CNN in August 2020 about Donald Trump’s reluctance to condemn white supremacists, and on a video clip that Biden tweeted on September 30, 2020, which featured audio from the first presidential debate, in which Fox’s Chris Wallace asked Trump if he was “willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence that we’ve seen in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.” An image of Rittenhouse holding a gun appeared briefly on the video as Wallace said “Kenosha.” ![]() ![]() In the middle of the interview, Carlson asked Rittenhouse what he made of “the president of the United States calling you a white supremacist?” Biden never said this, as far as I can tell, but Carlson very much wants his viewers to think that he did. Sometimes, of course, these criticisms and claims don’t even have to have been made in the first place in order for Fox to use them to advance its agenda. For Fox News, any substantive criticism of Rittenhouse qualifies as a tainted partisan smear, and any acknowledgment of the existence of race-based structural inequality in America is in itself enough to discredit the acknowledger. They brought him on the air for an exclusive softball interview in which Rittenhouse’s essential sweetness was confirmed not because of his baby face or his demeanor, but because he took a gun to a protest, used it to kill two “rioters,” and was subsequently prosecuted by the law and, almost as bad, criticized for doing so by meanies on the left. In that sense, Carlson and Fox were using Rittenhouse just as surely as his former lawyers were. Fox also has zero incentive to interrogate the premises by which Rittenhouse, who shot three men and beat the charges, is deemed a “sweet kid,” while other kids who have found themselves on the receiving end of police or vigilante violence get described much less graciously or ignored entirely on the network’s airwaves. (dead) “rioters” binary that the network has established. Fox News and Carlson have absolutely zero incentive to present a complete, contextualized picture of the circumstances surrounding the outrage over Blake’s shooting in Kenosha last year, or the ways in which Rittenhouse may have escalated tensions by bringing a gun to the protest in the first place, or anything else that might complicate the “sweet kid” vs. The right also continues to use this narrative to downplay what happened at the U.S. Carlson and many of his Fox News colleagues helped to create and perpetuate the “ American carnage” narrative that overinflated the extent and intent of the protest-related violence last summer, and Rittenhouse has become a very convenient avatar for that frame. Rittenhouse came across as broadly sympathetic in this portion of the interview: as an exurban teenager who got played by some hustlers who hoped to use him as a pawn in a much, much bigger game.Ĭarlson has his own reasons for wanting you to see Rittenhouse as a “sweet kid,” and it has everything to do with Fox News’ preferred us vs them storyline the network sells its viewers. Rittenhouse criticized them for treating him as a symbol for a cause to which he did not subscribe, spreading false information about his purported involvement with an “unorganized militia,” and leaving him in jail for longer than necessary in order to use his incarceration for fundraising purposes even after they had allegedly raised enough money to pay his bail. Rittenhouse also repeatedly criticized his first attorneys, John Pierce and Lin Wood, for, in his telling, hustling him while being broadly incompetent as defense lawyers. Rittenhouse offered his own detailed version of the sequence of events on and around Augand twice proclaimed his support for Black Lives Matter. Carlson’s dubious framing aside, the interview itself was compelling and at times newsworthy. It wouldn’t be an episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight if the host didn’t engage in some bogus class warfare, and at least he got it out of the way quickly.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |