Three days after a massacre in El Paso by a white nationalist gunning for Hispanics, Brian Kilmeade tried to sanitize the white nationalist rhetoric so often heard on Fox News and from Donald Trump.
During the same discussion in which Fox & Friends’ cohost Ainsley Earhardt hypocritically whined about Trump’s rhetoric being blamed for inciting the El Paso shooter, cohost Kilmeade presented Trump’s nativist rhetoric as truth:
KILMEADE: What the president has during his two and a half years is a major problem at the border, which was not his doing. Unless you want to blame President Obama for the unaccompanied minors that streamed through here in 2014. When you have over 110,000 people coming a month, over a million last year, and then well over a million this year -- if you use the term an "invasion," that's not anti-Hispanic. It's a fact.
If the Russians were coming through Alaska, through Canada, the president would be using the same language.
Oh, come on. If anybody thinks that Trump would treat the Russians like Hispanics, I’ve got a great education opportunity for you at Trump University. In fact, Russian mothers are flocking to Florida to give birth to babies in the U.S., where their children will automatically have citizenship. Can you guess where they’re staying? Yep, Trump properties. Have you heard anything about that on Fox? I haven't.
Predictably, neither of the two cohosts challenged Kilmeade’s B.S. Instead, he went on to try to validate Trump’s use of the word “infested”:
KILMEADE: But it's the fact it's happening at the border. If you talk to people who are apolitical at the border, people want to look at the words "infested" and look at what the president's saying, and then they say, "well, how could he use this rhetoric," when it turns out Elijah Cummings is using the same exact rhetoric 10 years before the president was even hosting The Apprentice.
FACT CHECK: Cummings was referring to a “drug-infested” part of Baltimore during a Congressional hearing, presumably looking for solutions. Trump, on the other hand, used Baltimore’s problems as a racial weapon against Cummings.
Media Matters crunched the numbers of Fox’s “invasion” rhetoric and the results are disturbing: In 2019, the organization found 70 on-air references to an invasion of migrants; 55 clips have been played of Trump calling the surge of migrants an “invasion;” 24 uses of that term on Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First and Fox & Friends Weekend; and 21 uses of "invasion" rhetoric by hosts Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Kilmeade.
So when Kilmeade tries to defend Trump, he’s defending himself and Fox News at least as much.
Now that the El Paso tragedy has cast a glaring spotlight on Donald Trump’s hate-filled, white nationalist rhetoric, the same spotlight should be trained just as harshly on Fox News which has amplified the rhetoric.
Watch Kilmeade try to justify the unjustifiable below, from the August 6, 2019 Fox & Friends, via Media Matters.
That Trump, Fox and his Republican cronies are racist sons of bitches at heart is beside the point – they coldly and deliberately CHOSE to make scapegoats of immigrants and non-Christians as an electoral ploy.
https://www.salon.com/2019/08/06/sean-hannity-calls-for-armed-occupation-of-every-school-and-mall-in-america-in-response-to-shootings_partner/
The curvy couch (brainless) bobble-heads are justifiably upset by O’Rourke and Ryan saying naughty words. Because their overseer Donald ‘I say motherf—ker’ Trump would never, for example, call someone a “son of a bitch”. But wait…
No need for detailed analysis of Fox News’ idiotic false of equivalencies between school shootings under Obama and white supremacist mass shooting under Trump.
NOTE TO KILMEADE
If the ‘invasion’ involved Irish or Italian people, you would not defend the Racist-in-Chief, you third-rate fraud.
