Tezlyn Figaro, one of Fox’s regular, Democrat-attacking “liberals,” did her job last weekend by suggesting that dubious Biden-accuser Tara Reade is a victim on the level of Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed jogger who was shot and killed in Georgia.
Figaro, who served as national racial justice director for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, was fired from the pro-Sanders “Our Revolution” group, founded to help his 2020 run (but with no formal connections to Sanders), over her anti-immigration remarks.
Nevertheless, Figaro has made herself a darling of Fox News producers as a reliable Democrat basher and a Trump-cheerleading African American.
So it wasn’t a huge surprise that she would escalate Reade’s victimhood. But drawing an equivalence with Arbery may have been a new low, even for her.
The excuse for this discussion on Fox & Friends was Reade’s announcement that she’s leaving the Democratic Party.
Figaro began, “I would say to Tara, you know, welcome to what black people have been feeling since the 1950s and 60s and 70s and every decade ever since, feeling politically homeless. … For people like me that come from communities like I do … this is how we’ve been feeling all along, so welcome to the party, Tara.
FACT CHECK: African Americans are a very reliable Democratic-voting bloc.
But really, whatever party Reade belongs to or not is beside the point, given the dizzying array of inconsistencies and questionable details of her story. And that’s not including the outright dubiousness of her claim that Biden sexually assaulted her in a Senate hallway during a workday. Nor the fact that Reade backed out of interviews on Fox News and CNN, citing security concerns, right before doing one with Megyn Kelly. That interview did not clear up any of those questions, but if anything raised more. I wrote a detailed post on Reade and the Kelly interview here but also wrote about it here and here.
Why the other guest, former Biden aide Moe Vela, didn’t immediately call out what Fox was up to here, is a mystery to me. Instead, Vela said, “I do not believe Tara Reade in this case, and the reason why, Pete, is because there have been multiple inconsistencies, discrepancies and suspicions in her story.”
That’s all well and good but also a bit beside the point. Fox obviously doesn’t care whether Reade is telling the truth - otherwise host Pete Hegseth wouldn't have avoided the glaring subject. Clearly, he was only interested in weaponizing her.
Figaro not only got that, she helped Fox play the game.
Tommy Christopher (who has the full video) explained how, after Hegseth moved on to a poll showing that 40% of Democrats under the age of 45 say the party should pick a different nominee, Figaro weaponized Reade, albeit with a ludicrous comparison:
[Figaro] brought the conversation back around to Reade, saying “I wish we had more time so I could go into the presumption of innocence, because right now, as far as black folks are concerned, we have never had the presumption of innocence.”
“Ahmaud Arbery was just shot down in Georgia and did not have an opportunity to talk about whether he was innocent or not, so this pick and choose #metoo, one minute I believe it, the next minute I don’t, I’m just really over it, and it once again shows the hypocrisy within both parties, to be quite honest with you,” Figaro said.
Hegseth did not challenge those over-the-top remarks.
You can see the kind of “political analyst” Fox approves of below, from the May 9, 2020 Fox & Friends.
(H/T reader Eric Jefferson)
Correction: This post originally said Arbery was killed in Atlanta. In fact, he was killed on the outskirts of Brunswick, Georgia, as reader David Dorcas brought to my attention.
Figaro is an embarrassment to intelligence and integrity.