When it comes to marketing culture war red meat, Fox & Friends provides one stop shopping! On Sunday’s Fox & Friends, Rachel Campos-Duffy weaponized an isolated and resolved non-event in order to create bogus "outrage" and attack Planned Parenthood and public education - two groups near the top of the Fox enemies list! Classic Fox propaganda sure to satisfy any culture warrior's red meat cravings!
The pearl clutching incident occurred when a Tacoma, Washington 8th grade teacher mistakenly distributed a flyer which was, reportedly, produced by Planned Parenthood and which detailed teenagers’ reproductive rights, including (OMG) the right to an abortion at any age and without parental consent (consistent with WA law).
In an apology letter to outraged parents, a Tacoma educational official noted that the material had not been approved by the school and “corrective action” had been taken. He explained that it was left over from the time when Planned Parenthood taught sex-ed at the school and was mistakenly inserted into a curriculum binder for a new teacher who assumed that it should be given to students. End of story? No way!
The story, flying around right-wing, Christian websites and the Murdoch owned NY Post, has popped up, not surprisingly, on Fox, a mouth-piece for the anti-choice movement.
Sunday’s Fox & Friends segment started off with a very upset Rachel Campos-Duffy informing us that, gasp, “Parents of 8th grade students at Stewart Middle School in Tacoma, Washington are fuming after they brought home this flyer [shown on screen] from their science teacher suggesting that they can get abortions and Plan B without parental consent.” She noted that the story was broken by Jason Rantz without noting that he is a right-wing radio talk show host.
After reporting that the school apologized, she introduced her guest, Abby Johnson, a former Planned Parenthood clinic director and Fox fave whose story about her departure from Planned Parenthood and subsequent conversion to abortion foe (follow the money?) is very shady.
Campos-Duffy, who has compared abortion to slavery, tossed the propaganda ball when she asked Johnson to respond to the school’s apology.
Johnson asked, “Really, is it a mistake?” She proceeded to denigrate the teacher as either “incompetent” or “intentionally trying to push the boundary.”
“It was passed out during a science class,” Campos-Duffy added. She asked, “What does that information have to do with science, anyway?” (LOL!!! Pregnancy control is scientific – guess Rachel, who has nine kids, doesn’t know about that!)
After Johnson made the argument that the information “had been” previously given to students, Campos-Duffy, who supports laws to force women to give birth to Down Syndrome babies, framed the propaganda message with the question of, “why parents should be worried about Planned Parenthood being in the schools” where, she claimed, they "promote abortion." This provided Johnson with the opportunity to attack Planned Parenthood’s “graphic” sex education and warn parents to “wake up.”
“There’s definitely an over-sexualization of childhood, in general, in the culture and Planned Parenthood is at the forefront,” Campos-Duffy claimed.
While she was at it, Campos-Duffy worked in a gratuitous dose of Fox’s current race-baiting obsession: “Whether we’re talking about critical race theory or this kind of agenda from Planned Parenthood, what I see, as a parent, and what concerns me, Abby, is this desire by these forces on the left to separate, to use our schools, to separate our children from their parents and their parents’ values.”
Johnson claimed that when she worked for Planned Parenthood, she was told to tell children that their parents are “a barrier to service.” She reiterated that parents need to wake up, then stated, categorically, “Planned Parenthood is the enemy.”
Campos-Duffy: “No one knows more about what Planned Parenthood is really about than you.”
Wow. Rachel Campos-Duffy scored a propaganda twofer, hitting two targets of the Christian, conservative right-wing. Maybe, for extra points, the teacher will be fired. As culture war red meat, this thing was dripping red…
Check out the propaganda protein below, from the June 27, 2021 Fox & Friends.