Megyn Kelly may have gotten more than she bargained for when she tried to defend Fox’s attacks on the mainstream media to a reformed white supremacist who said “somebody like me” hears them as a “bullhorn” that shouts, “Jewish media!”
Kelly interviewed reformed white supremacist Christopher Picciolini today on her Megyn Kelly Today show. After he told his story of redemption (caused by kindness and forgiveness from those he had hated), Kelly asked Picciolini, “What are you seeing about what’s happening in our country right now.”
In his ominous reply, Picciolini called this a “very dangerous time.” He sees “a massive growth” in hate groups and hate movements with young people. Many of them feel marginalized and disenchanted, he explained, and the white supremacist movement promises “identity, community and a perceived purpose.”
Picciolini went on to explain how the groups use coded language to camouflage or normalize their intent and purpose:
PICCIOLINI: What we’re calling the “alt-right” or “white nationalism” … I do see them as synonymous, however I also see them as terms that those groups made up themselves, that they actually sat around a table and said, “How can we refer to ourselves to make us seem less hateful?”
We used to do that 30 years ago. We used to call ourselves “white [unintelligible]” or “white pride” when, in reality, it was about white supremacy. So these white nationalist groups and these alt-right groups today are, essentially, a better-packaged version of what we were 30 years ago. Because we recognized even then that our shaved heads and our tattoos were turning away the average American white racist who thought we were too edgy. So we decided then, 30 years ago, to blend in, to start to grow out our hair, to trade in our boots for suits, to go to college campuses to recruit, to even get jobs in the military and in law enforcement. And to look and sound like the people we wanted to recruit.
Probably nobody packages racism and white nationalism better than Fox News. There has been a steady stream of it via Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, a slew of African Americans serving as designated black attackers and, yes, Megyn Kelly, herself.
Not surprisingly, Kelly changed the subject.
KELLY: Do you believe that there were dog whistles by our now-president to white supremacists?
PICCIOLINI: I do believe that there were dog whistles. But to somebody like me, I can tell you that that’s a bullhorn. I heard them loud and clear. When they referred to “globalism” I knew that they were talking about the global Jewish conspiracy. When they used terms like “the liberal media,” those are terms that we used to use but we used to call it “the Jewish media." They’ve learned to massage their language, to make it more palatable.
Kelly interrupted to defend her former employer. But she may have made things worse.
KELLY: Can I just say, Can I just say, I mean, having worked at Fox News for 13 years, we used to criticize the MSM, some would call them the “liberal media” and it didn’t mean that or it meant, you know, “left leaning” - people who were not open minded toward the views of half the country, conservative people.
PICCIOLINI: That’s also the power of their marketing and how they can take words that are hateful and massage them to get them into the lexicon to make it normalized.
KELLY: So you pick something that is okay, a term that has nothing to do with white supremacy and you adopt it. And to your people, it has a very different meaning, like, with a wink and a nod.
PICCIOLINE: Absolutely. … To the people that I was involved with 30 years ago, that is a high five. That is a license to go out and be more violent. And that’s why we’re seeing a rise in hate crimes because they feel as though the administration today – if they’re not supportive of it, are at least turning a blind eye to it.
Fox News is not just turning a blind eye to the dog whistles, they’re helping to normalize and promote them. Remember Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth saying Trump “nailed it” when he failed to denounce Charlottesville white supremacists? Hegseth even called Trump’s remarks a “unifying message.” Hannity went so far as to paint Trump as the real victim of the hideous, violent demonstration in Charlottesville. Mike Huckabee suggested to an agreeable Jeanine Pirro that Trump was being fair, unlike the (too black) Barack Obama who would “jump to a conclusion … like he did in Ferguson, Missouri, which turned out to be totally untrue."
And even before Trump was a candidate, Kelly played the (white) racial victim in the wake of a firestorm over her “assurances” to viewers that Santa Claus and Jesus Christ are/were white. She said, “This would be funny if it were not so telling about our society, in particular the knee-jerk instinct by so many to race bait.”
And that’s not even counting Fox's daily barrage of suggestions that anyone who doesn’t fall in line with Trump is an enemy of America, a terrorist sympathizer - or worse.
Watch this former white supremacist inadvertently explain why Fox News is so dangerous below, from NBC’s January 2, 2018 Megyn Kelly Today, via Raw Story.
Of course these phrases are intended as dog whistles aka bullhorns. The whole point of criticizing the “lamestream media” and any of that is to say “New York media” which is of course a sidestep from “Jewish media”. These guys have been playing these games for over a century. They know that they can’t say that stuff openly, so they cloak it. It’s the same way that they deal with sports – the current hostility toward black football players, the usual dismissal of black basketball players and that sport in general. I’ve actually heard one Right Winger in person be pretty honest about his real feelings about basketball, saying “I don’t feel like watching those monkeys jumping around”. (His preference was to watch the violence in NHL games – where the players are white.) I should also note that there was a sly tip in this direction when Ted Cruz made his little “New York values” comment in the 2016 campaign . He was actually accusing Trump at that moment of being beholden to “Jewish values” and he knew quite well what he was saying at the time.
Kelly’s guest here made a pretty valiant attempt to teach Kelly about the reality of her work at Fox News but she wasn’t able to hear him. He wasn’t saying that racist groups were corrupting terms that she and her friends at Fox News were using in polite discussion, like “mainstream media”. He was saying that she was using terms that were coined by racist groups to cloak their meaning just enough to get them used by the rest of society. There’s a further level to this – in that Kelly must have known this was happening, and where the language was coming from when Roger Ailes would insist they roll it into their lines of the day. So Kelly is either saying that she was deliberately refusing to pay attention (as she appeared to be doing in this clip) or that she was too foolish to know what she was saying. Either result doesn’t speak highly of her work.
Beyond the dismissal of the humanity or accuracy of the people involved in this racism and bigotry, there’s also the key area that Kelly’s guest pointed out, and which we’ve been seeing in earnest for over 14 months now. Namely, there’s a giant wave of emboldened racists and bigots committing hate crimes across this country, and they’ve taken their cue from the Pence White House, from the extremist Right Wingers in Congress, and from AM Radio and Fox News, not to mention all the extreme Right Wing websites that continue to feed the echo chamber. When they see that they can commit utter mayhem in Berkeley or in Charlottesville and have their behavior approved by the Tweeter-in-Chief, not just once but repeatedly, they get the message that it’s open season now. There’s a good reason these guys aren’t wearing the Klan hoods now. As they see it, this is their time to be out and proud – and to attack everyone else to their heart’s content.
This is why many people were truly shocked to see what happened when the Trump campaign in the swing states was able to successfully depress the Democratic Party turnout just enough to get their people across the finish line. It meant that the racists and the deplorables got a huge shot in the arm, and they gleefully went to work. And sadly, this has meant violence in multiple forms being regularly inflicted across this country – and that’s even without dealing with the lesser matter of Trump supporters becoming so emboldened and unhinged that they can no longer conduct a normal conversation without losing their temper and erupting into screaming fury. (I literally just dealt with this over the last weekend, where one Right Winger I spoke to in the neighborhood became so enraged in a normal discussion that he began incoherently shouting and screaming and pounding on the bar in front of us in an embarrassing display.) The hate violence is a much sadder and more dangerous story – it’s the dark side of the notion that “Elections have consequences.” For much of the country, for the people who aren’t the correct race or religion or gender, the consequences here have gone a lot farther than the nastiness of the Pence White House – they’ve gone to the viciousness of the deplorables that Trump regularly inspires to further attacks.